Some Mongolians nostalgic for communism

GACHUURT, Mongolia – For most of her 53 years, she has lived as a nomadic herder under Mongolia’s wide blue skies, raising nine children, surviving snowstorms and drought, and hauling the family’s white felt tent to a new site each season in search of grass for their sheep.

But never did Tsahiriin Daariimaa think life would be as hard as it is now, on the eve of today’s presidential elections.

With the end of communism in Mongolia 15 years ago, Daariimaa said she and her husband are no longer guaranteed monthly wages from a government farm, but must sell their wool in a market of fluctuating prices and nervy Chinese traders.

Under communism, “everyone worked for the collective farm,” Daariimaa said. Today, none of her children has a steady job.

“Communism was much better,” she said.

Nostalgia for the old ways might stun the founders of democratic Mongolia, who defied police and took to the streets in 1990 to bring down one-party rule. But polls indicate that today many Mongolians plan to vote for the candidate of their former communist rulers – the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party.

Voters began lining up even before polls opened this morning. Voter turnout is typically very high in Mongolia – in the last presidential vote it was 83 percent – a legacy of communist rule before 1990 when voting was compulsory.

The MPRP says it is committed to democracy. Its candidate, Nambariin Enkbayar, leads a four-way race in this impoverished country of 2.5 million people wedged between Russia and China.

Free-market economics has brought poverty, Daariimaa said, as she served bowls of milk tea and yogurt in her tidy ger, a traditional round tent with wooden poles painted orange to symbolize the sun.

Her husband, Sharaviin Baatar, nodded in agreement.

“We are loyal friends of the MPRP,” he said.

That talk infuriates Sambuu Ganbaator, a member of the Democratic Party, who was building himself a simple Russian-style dacha, or summer house, just over the next hill.

“Too many people forget what the MPRP did to Mongolia,” he said. “They kept Mongolia under a brutal dictatorship. You weren’t allowed to speak your mind.”

Now, he said, “you can say anything you want to say and do what you want to live a happy life.”

Ganbaator, a retired driller for a geology company, said he supports the Democratic Party’s Mendsaikhanin Enkhsaikhan for president.