Free Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux Page B

Ulan Bator turned out for the parade—not to watch it but to join it. It was a Mongolian custom for everyone to be in the parade. The only spectators were tourists—some Finns and us: Kicker, Bud, Morris, Miss Wilkie, Wilma, Morthole, Ashley, the Gurneys and all the rest. I stood behind Blind Bob.
    "Who are those people with the flags?"
    They were the round-shouldered wrestlers from the train, but this time wearing their medals. There was something simian in their posture and in the way they walked. It seemed so sad that Blind Bob's last visions on earth should be the messy thaw in Poland, the dreariness of Russia, Siberian hotels and Mongolian wrestlers. Stepping off the sidewalk for a closer look, he tripped and fell.
    "I'm all right!" he cried, rubbing his knee. "No harm done! My own darn fault!"
    There were thirty people marching in a row, and a row passed me every two seconds. The parade lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. That was 450,000 Mongolians. They carried flags and banners; they dipped these when they passed the mausoleum, like Lenin's, of their leader from the 1920s, Suhe Baator.
    There were no soldiers, no uniforms, no weapons at all—how inconvenient it would have been for the Soviets if the Mongolians had had an army. The faces on their banners were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Suhe Bator and Gorbachev. There were large banners bearing the likeness of (so I was told) Chairman Batmunkh, of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party, head of the Great People's Assembly.
    Over a loudspeaker, a man howled, "May the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party prosper!"
    The parading people cheered and repeated this slogan.
    Children wearing fur hats marched by, beating drums and singing.
May the sun shine in the sky forever

May the sky be blue forever

May my mother live forever

May the world be peaceful forever
    A big pictorial banner was paraded past, showing Lenin and Suhe Bator in 1921. Suhe had a big, bony skull and wore a traditional dresslike gown. Lenin wore his train-conductor's cap. The caption on the banner was
Unforgettable Meeting.
    There was another portrait, of the Mongolian cosmonaut, Gurragchaa who in 1981 went into space in a Soviet rocket and produced a detailed study of Mongolian topography.
    Warsaw Pact for Peace,
one banner said; and another:
We are Followers of the Mongolian Revolutionary People's Party.
    "What does that one say?"
    The guide translated the banner, "Congratulations to Workers in Capitalist Countries."
    "That's us," Rick Westbetter said.
    That was the end of the parade.
    At Mongolia's only working monastery the next day, listening to the monks in the watchtowers blowing conch shells as a summons to other monks to pray, I reflected on this country. Once there were 2000 monasteries, the monks all Buddhists of the Yellow Sect. Now there was only this wooden wreck of a place behind an apartment house. Once, Mongol armies had conquered the world. Now there was no army. Mongols had been Chinese emperors—the Manchus were a Mongol dynasty. That had ended. Once, these people had lived on the plains and in the mountains. Now they lived in two-room apartments in this lifeless and stark city. They were in every sense a subject race, and in this—one of the largest and emptiest countries on earth—they lived cheek by jowl. They lived out of the world, almost totally cut off. It had not made them angry. It had kept them innocent in many ways. There was something very sweet about the Mongolians.
    Perhaps that was the whole point about Mongolia: that after a Soviet-inspired revolution in which everything was destroyed and swept away—religion, the old economy, the army, the social order—the country was so changed that it could not function without Soviet help. The Mongolians had been reduced to a state of infancy. All their old habits and institutions were gone. The Soviets stepped into this vacuum: they brought Soviet buildings and urban structures, Soviet railways