Why I Miss Communism
A perspective of a Mongolian who was born into it
I was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia in 1984. It means I’ve caught the tail end of the communist era in Mongolia and the fall of the USSR. I don’t remember the regime. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Soviet soldier, not even when the USSR occupied Mongolia. And I don’t recall them leaving when Mongolia decided to transition into capitalist democracy. But I remember the era of utter chaos, despair, and cruelty that followed the promised freedom.
Everything was rationed and the lines long were long. My grandmother would leave at dawn to get her place in the bread line. There were queues everywhere, and if a line was particularly long, others compiled onto it without knowing what they waited for. They’d assumed it was for something rare, something precious.
People bartered items. My grandfather who was a university professor, a rather prestigious occupation at the time as very few were allowed higher education, hoarded his monthly allowance of two bottles of vodka. As a man who understood men, I think he knew in his gut what would follow once the pretense of social order collapsed.
Incredible inflation overnight, a hundredfold, not a hundred percent but a hundred times brought on chaos. The devaluation of the currency would continue, and in a span of a few years, it’d settle at a thousandfold. People’s lifetime savings were turned into literal nothings. A row of old women selling treasured items from their homes displayed out on the street on a scrap of cloth appeared.
A designated street of drunks, men who’d lost hope, appeared: Uvguntiin Hundii, the Valley of the Old Man, nicknamed after the cheapest alcohol available sold in a small plastic encasing of a smiling Buddha. Those who sought such a valley never returned home. Abandoned by such parents, a slew of homeless children emerged. Organizing themselves into groups, they’d commit petty crimes.
I would run into such children as they threw rocks and harassed kids walking to school. Eight years old at the time, I didn’t understand why there was so much anger. But as an adult and a mother of two, the memory breaks my heart. No one knows what happened to those children. They should be adults my age now, in their late thirties, but none exist. Perhaps some had found a way home, but surely, not all.
In the early 1990s, called the ‘Trench Kids’, an army of homeless children lived underneath the city, seeking warmth in the sewage system during the cold Mongolian winters. But there are no trench adults now, so where are they? When you pose this question in public, people muse, ‘perhaps they were traded into the organ or sex market,’ and as if that was a normal thing to say, they’d shrug it off.
Today, I am an indie author writing books about vampires and selling them worldwide. Capitalism, democracy, globalism, and freedom of speech worked out well for me.
During the years of transition, I was young enough to grow into a new mindset and fortunate enough that my mother found her footing in this new system. She’d learned to turn a profit, keeping for family afloat. But so many others were lost in that decade Mongolians my age, or older call, ‘zah zeel’. Translated, it means ‘free market’ — the wondrous new thing the politicians at the time had promised. But incredible cruelty and loss of humanity are what I associate the ‘free market’ with.
My daughter, a teenager who lives on Discord, would never understand such a thing, but I understand why those who remember communism might miss it. Unlike what some conservatives claim, it’s not because they are third-world or ignorant, nor is it because they don’t know any better.
The Communist regime was tyrannical, of course, but that is not what they are reminiscing about when Mongolian elders freely vote for the communist party in a democratic election, time after time. They remember (because I do) the sense of community and human kindness to each other. That is why they vote communist.
Because my parents worked late, after school I used to stay at my downstairs neighbor’s one-bedroom apartment. She was a large woman who spoke Russian and cooked for the neighborhood children.
We played outside unsupervised by our parents because a group of old women was always sitting outside and gossiping. They’d keep an eye on all of us.
If my mother preparing dinner was short an ingredient, she sent me with an empty cup to knock on a neighbor’s door. ‘Can I have sugar?’ ‘Do you have flour?’ ‘Here’s your pot back.’
Even though the government was tyrannical, although no one had enough of anything, people were kind. There was a sense of community. A sense of not being alone is what people miss about communism.
During the ‘free market’ decade, neighbors fell into despair and left for the Valley of the Old Man. And some of their children became part of the Trench Kids who never grew up.
In the short term, my grandfather made a killing trading his hoarded liquor. But in the long run, he walked on foot half the city to work two jobs. He rented out half the space of his two-bedroom apartment and lived in a single room. At age 65, he died from an illness he’d been hiding so as not to burden his children. Had he been alive today, he’d be 86, and people his age vote for the communist party. People my mother’s age, even self-made and doing well, reminiscence communism. And people my age, understand why.
It might be a hard thing for the western mind to grasp, but not coveting material items can alleviate the soul. A communist home was a meager place made of essential items but he didn’t aspire for more because his neighbor’s home was the same. More money didn’t buy better things because none existed. And I’m not so sure that’s a terrible thing.
A hypocritical thing for me to say, of course. But what human isn’t full of contradictions?
