The Nomad Vote

The most astute political pollster in Mongolia is a half-Jewish Mongol named Sumati. He runs a public polling organization called the Sant Maral Foundation, which consists of him, two assistants, two computers, and two telephones, all operating out of one room in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. From there, Sumati surveys a country more than twice as big as Texas. He has done independent advance polling for the past three Mongolian national elections, two of which involved major changes of political power, and, in each case, his results predicted the winner to within fewer than 2.8 percentage points.

”Sumati’s bloody good,” one Western diplomat told me recently. “He was dead on with that parliamentary election last year. Nobody listened to him, but he was right.” I met Sumati in April, when I arrived in Mongolia to cover the Presidential election, which was held on May 20th. There were three candidates: the incumbent, Bagabandi, representing the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (M.P.R.P.); Gonchigdorj, the choice of the Democratic Party; and Dashnyam, of the Civil Will Party. (Most Mongolians use only one name.) During our first meeting, Sumati predicted that the final results would be extremely close to the findings of his initial poll, which had shown fifty-eight per cent of the vote going to Bagabandi. When I asked if Sumati had used random-sampling techniques, he gave me a look that suggested that this wasn’t the brightest question he’d ever heard.

”A sample-collection method doesn’t work in Mongolia, because half the population are nomads,” he explained. “You can’t do random sampling with nomads. For random sampling, you need to have a situation where every person in the target population has an equal probability of getting into your sample. But in Mongolia you can’t predict where the nomads will be.”

Sumati is forty-five years old, and he speaks excellent English, with a Russian accent. His mother was Latvian and his father was Mongolian, and they met while attending university in Moscow. Sumati grew up in Ulaanbaatar, and later he did research in applied mathematics, social sciences, and artificial intelligence in St. Petersburg, Warsaw, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is a thin man with high cheekbones, sallow skin, bushy black hair, and gray-green eyes. He looks a lot like what you’d expect a Mongolian Jew to look like. Professionally, his unusual appearance is something of a handicap, because it prevents him from doing his own polling. (His assistants distribute the questionnaires.) “I look like a foreigner,” he said. “It creates a bias, I’m afraid.” Sumati was always polite with me, but when it came to revealing personal details he had the caginess of an outsider.

Sumati’s ambiguities seemed appropriate to his position among the Mongolian élite. Mongolia has a long history of occupation by foreign powers. Before the Qing dynasty fell, in 1911, the country had been a Chinese protectorate for more than two centuries, and in 1921 it became a satellite of the Soviet Union. In 1990, a democratic movement gathered force as the Soviet advisers withdrew. Since then, Mongolia has been in a remarkable period of transition. Political power has peacefully changed hands twice, and the national elections have not been marred by accusations of fraud. Voter turnout is routinely more than eighty per cent, and the country ranks high in the Freedom House index, which measures a country’s pluralism and respect for human rights. Meanwhile, Mongolia’s neighbors to the west, the other new Central Asian republics, have slipped into authoritarianism. Western observers often describe Mongolia, which shares a northern border with Russia and a southern border with China, as an island of democracy in a decidedly undemocratic part of the world.

Anthropologists have suggested that Mongolia’s receptiveness to democracy derives, in part, from its traditional nomadic way of life, which encourages both individualism and an adaptability to outside forces, particularly the weather. Temperatures in the Gobi Desert, which occupies a third of the country, can rise above a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and drop below minus-forty degrees in the winter. Mongolia’s population is almost 2.7 million—approximately four inhabitants to every square mile. Livestock outnumber people by roughly twelve to one. Some Mongolians have three-digit phone numbers.

International organizations, prompted by Mongolia’s embrace of democracy, have rushed to fill all that empty space. During the nineteen-nineties, the country received nearly two billion dollars in loans and donations from such sources as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the Japan International Coöperation Agency. Much of this money was spent on restructuring the Soviet-designed government and financial system, as well as on the development of roads, power stations, and other basic infrastructure. Mongolia hoped eventually to attract foreign investment, especially in the exploitation of the country’s impressive natural mineral resources.

Most of the outsiders who came to Mongolia were aid organizations, which sometimes seemed to view the country as a blank slate on which to project their own images. In shifting to a market economy, Mongolia followed the sort of rapid “shock therapy” favored by American economists. Germany’s Christian Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the United States have sent political strategists. Japan has been the most generous donor country, largely to encourage Mongolia’s democratic progress.

According to Japanese folklore, Mongolia’s greatest historical figure, Genghis Khan, was a Japanese warrior who fled to Mongolia in the late thirteenth century. During the Soviet era, Genghis Khan’s image was banned; in the new Mongolia, it is everywhere—from labels on beer bottles to the walls of the Ulaanbaatar headquarters of the International Republican Institute, an American group that promotes democracy and free trade. At the institute, I saw a portrait of the world conqueror in a room decorated with stickers that said “McCain” and “I Wish I Lived in New York, So I Could Vote Against Hillary.”

Despite the profusion of development programs, there are few signs that Mongolia’s transition is leading the country toward self-sufficiency. During the past decade, Mongolia’s per-capita foreign aid has been among the highest in the world, and the country has run up a foreign debt of about a billion dollars—a figure that is roughly equivalent to the annual G.D.P. The development programs sometimes lack coördination, and corruption has become a problem. Income gaps have widened. Even as foreign advisers speak of long-term industrial development, the population has moved in the opposite direction. When the old Soviet-era factories were shut down, many city dwellers, who found themselves out of work and with little welfare support, returned to the traditional nomadic life. Although the production of one of Mongolia’s most valuable goods—raw cashmere—increased, the domestic processing industry didn’t keep pace, and most Mongolian cashmere is now finished overseas.

In 1991, according to a report by the Asian Development Bank, only fifteen per cent of Mongolians fell below the poverty level; now the figure is thirty-six per cent. Each of the past two winters has been marked by a devastating zud, a combination of heavy snow and deep freeze, preceded by drought; together, the storms have wiped out a fifth of Mongolia’s livestock and driven many of the inexperienced herdsmen back to the cities, where they struggle to find work. The Mongolian Prime Minister, Enkhbayar, told me that the country needs to turn away from nomadism, and yet he also spoke proudly of how the resilient herdsman mentality had contributed to Mongolian democracy.

Sumati never spoke idealistically about Mongolian democracy. When I asked him about the chances of an upset in the election, he said that Mongolia’s political climate was too immature and predictable for that. He told me that he had gone into polling largely because he had failed at business during the initial post-Communist period. “I was just looking for some kind of intellectual occupation,” he said. A friend introduced him to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German pro-democracy organization, which was interested in supporting a Mongolian pollster. Sumati founded Sant Maral in 1994, and the foundation flew him to Germany so that he could see how polling was done in the West. When I asked him what he had gained from this trip, Sumati said, “After I returned home, I produced a report. In ninety days, I had drunk forty-six types of German beer. One thing I found was that when you are travelling on German trains you normally get only one type of beer—Jever. It was quite an interesting report. My favorite beer was the Paulaner weiss bier from Bavaria.”

But I sensed that Sumati may not have been quite as cynical as he liked to appear. He is the chairman of the board of directors for the Mongolian chapter of the Soros Foundation, which promotes democracy-building, and his polling work is widely admired. I talked with one of his part-time assistants, a twenty-one-year-old college student who had recently flown out to the remote Khovd Province, where he had rented a motorbike and driven across the mountains, giving questionnaires to the nomads. It had been a rough trip. There weren’t any roads. The weather was bad. The young man told me that, when he handed out questionnaires, it wasn’t unusual for the nomads to begin weeping.

”Is it because they were afraid?” I asked.

”No,” he said. “It’s because for the first time they feel that somebody cares about what they think.”

According to Sumati’s polls, President Bagabandi’s lead had dropped to fifty-three per cent by the time he flew into the village of Züünbayan-Ulaan, in central Mongolia. During the past sixteen hours, the temperature had dropped fifty degrees, snow had started to fall, and a hard wind had kicked up. It was mid-May—less than ten days until the election. The wind was a problem for the President, who was campaigning by helicopter. Bagabandi is a former Communist. He has a trim mustache, short black hair, and feline eyes; political cartoonists frequently depict him as a cat. Like many Mongolians, he is the son of nomads. One of his campaign slogans was “I grew up in the dust of many horses.”

Züünbayan-Ulaan is nothing more than a small cluster of concrete buildings—a school, a government center, a town hall, some houses—and most of its five thousand four hundred and thirty-one residents live in felt tents, called gers, in the surrounding countryside. More than three hundred people stood waiting for Bagabandi in a pasture just north of town. Some of them had arrived on motorcycles, and others had come on horseback; most were dressed in their best dels—traditional woollen cloaks. When the helicopter landed, they rushed over the grass, pressing close to the battered Russian Mi-8. The President stepped out, smiling and waving to the crowd.

None of the roads into Züünbayan-Ulaan are paved. There’s a grass track that comes in from Arvaykheer, the provincial capital, and that was how I had travelled the day before, along with a translator and a photographer, in a four-wheel-drive Mitsubishi. We had driven southwest from Ulaanbaatar—a trip of eleven hours. On the way, we had passed through half a dozen permanent settlements. Occasionally, I could see a ger tucked into the crease of a valley, but mostly the land was empty. There were virtually no trees; huge hawks and kites perched heavily on the grass. Sometimes my driver had to honk to get them off the road. In the vast landscape, with its endless backdrop of green mountains, the only changing element was the weather. It rushed past us in waves, as if the sun and the wind and the rain were trying to fill all that emptiness.

Bagabandi was campaigning on the need for stability. In the town hall, he gave a speech in which he promised to work for the kind of non-partisan government that would find favor with the big international donors, who had recently pledged twenty-five million dollars in emergency zud relief. The town hall had plywood walls and an old wooden floor that had been painted red. Bare electric bulbs hung from the ceiling. More than four hundred people listened intently. Near the end of his speech, Bagabandi said, “Next week in Paris, there will be a meeting of donor countries, and the international community will give us assistance. I will continue to promote an open foreign policy. Meanwhile, your job is to tend your livestock and recover from the effects of the winter.”

Bagabandi’s Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party is an old party with a new face. It ran the country during the Soviet era, and it converted livestock into state-owned property, organized the nomads into rural collectives, and engaged in a brutal crackdown on Buddhism and in political purges that killed many thousands. The Soviets also invested heavily in social services and significantly raised the average Mongolian’s standard of living. In the seven decades of Soviet rule, the country’s population tripled, the average life expectancy doubled, and the rate of literacy soared to almost a hundred per cent.

After the collapse of Soviet rule, the M.P.R.P. changed course. At the urging of the I.M.F., the World Bank, and other international organizations, it dismantled state industries, lowered trade barriers, disbanded the livestock collectives, and redistributed the animals to the nomads. In the 1996 parliamentary elections, several opposition parties, coached by the International Republican Institute, formed the Democratic Coalition, and campaigned on a Contract with Mongolia, inspired by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. The coalition won a majority and gained control of the government. (Mongolia is a parliamentary democracy, similar to the French model, in which the President has much less power than in the American system.) The coalition accelerated the shock-therapy transition, and its members bickered among themselves, appointing four Prime Ministers in four years. In 1998, the coalition’s most charismatic leader, Zorig, was stabbed to death; the crime remains unsolved, and most Mongolians believe that it was politically motivated. In last year’s parliamentary elections, the M.P.R.P. promised to increase social-support programs, and it was swept back into power.

After Bagabandi finished speaking, he opened the town meeting to questions. An old man in a fur cap stepped up to a microphone. “My talk will be mixed with criticism and suggestions,” he began. “I wish you success on the campaign. But I want to tell you that last year was very hard for us, and over the past two years the size of our herds has decreased dramatically. How can we live now? Some herdsmen are saying we shouldn’t have animals, because this life is no longer appropriate for us. People are giving up.”

He said that his pension of fifteen dollars a month wasn’t adequate, and that he had had problems with theft. The President tried to answer, but the old man wouldn’t stop. He complained that political power in the new Mongolia changed hands too frequently, and he criticized smear campaigning. The crowd was so attentive that I could hear the flakes of snow tapping against the windows.

During my time in Mongolia, I attended more than half a dozen of these town meetings, and it was always the silence that impressed me the most. Sometimes the meetings dragged on for three or four hours, but still the people listened. Herdsmen rely heavily on shortwave radio for the limited information they receive, and foreign-aid workers told me that the Mongolians have a remarkable capacity for retaining what they hear. “But the Mongolians are also not particularly experienced in analyzing the quality of the information,” a British woman who had distributed information about health care told me. “They’re a little vulnerable.”

There wasn’t any sign of fear among the herdsmen, who often challenged the candidates, sometimes aggressively. I attended one meeting at which a man openly accused the Democratic candidate of being a liar. Usually, though, the people were respectful, and there was a purity and an intimacy to these exchanges—a politician and a group of voters meeting in the middle of nowhere.

In Züünbayan-Ulaan, Bagabandi and his ministers answered the old man’s questions carefully. The President gave the statistics for nationwide zud losses, and said that he was working to get more assistance to this region. Then he passed the mike to the local member of parliament, who talked about problems with crime. The old herdsman stood up again and interrupted him twice. After that, the mike went to the Minister of Nature and Environment, who talked about the need to reduce the national debt, and then he passed the mike to the provincial governor, who gave details on World Bank loans that would provide zud assistance.

After the President headed off to the helicopter, the old man was one of the last to leave the hall. I stopped him outside. He was seventy-seven, and his name was Legtseg. The decades of cold had left a red web of tiny capillaries on his face. He smiled and answered my questions eagerly. Legtseg was not a member of any political party, and last winter he had lost eight of his seventeen cows and sheep. He said that he didn’t know anything about the World Bank. I asked him if the politicians’ answers had satisfied him.

”No,” he said. “They didn’t answer straight on. I will vote for Gonchigdorj, because I support the Democrats and I support democracy. We have been under the influence of our two neighbors for many years, but now we are open to the rest of the world, so I believe that democracy is the only path for Mongolia.”

A month earlier, I had travelled with Gonchigdorj on a whistle-stop train trip to the Siberian border. We stopped in Partizan, Batsumber, Tünkhel—tiny settlements of a few hundred people. At each town, the train paused for fifteen minutes while Gonchigdorj took a ceremonial sip from a bowl of milk, sprinkled a few drops in the air in honor of the local spirits, and gave a brief speech. Along the way, his assistants distributed calendars featuring Genghis Khan in a pensive pose beneath the inscription “Democratic Mongolia.”

Gonchigdorj is a former math professor who first made his mark in politics as a leader of the 1990 pro-democracy movement. He is forty-seven years old, and has a round face, slick black hair, and a reputation for opportunism. I met him in his private carriage on the way north; he was resting between stops, sipping tea while the scenery slipped past. “The ruling party is against privatization,” he told me. “The reason is that during the Communist regime we couldn’t even talk about that issue, and the M.P.R.P. still believes that the state should own everything. It’s softening, of course, but it’s still there.”

It seemed that Gonchigdorj was creating something of a nonissue—after all, the M.P.R.P. had presided over the initial stages of Mongolia’s privatization. But Gonchigdorj’s former party, the Social Democrats, had been part of the coalition government in 1996, and they were still coping with the backlash that had cost them the 2000 parliamentary election. Gonchigdorj was in trouble. He was running on the theme of balancing the M.P.R.P.’s majority in parliament with a Democratic president, but his message wasn’t coming across as strongly as Bagabandi’s plea for one-party domination, as expressed in the slogan “If the government is stable, the people will be peaceful.” Before the start of the campaign, Sumati’s poll had indicated that only thirty-seven per cent of the voters supported Gonchigdorj.

The train trip did not go well. The crowds were small and unfriendly, and the northward swing ended at Altanbulag, a town on the Russian border whose residents seemed more involved with the movement of strange goods across the border than with the drama of the election. I saw a cluster of ethnic Buryat women packing spools of thread into empty laptop-computer cases, which they then transported into Russia. Nobody could explain this activity to me. At the border station, a sad-faced young man was trying to use a bicycle pump to inflate the left front tire of a red Lada. He paused when Gonchigdorj came through, and when the politician left he started pumping again.

I began to wonder what the average Mongolian actually felt about democracy. Sumati’s polls had shown that, nationwide, eighty-seven per cent thought the 1990 shift to democracy was the right step for the country, and fifty-two per cent had expressed satisfaction with the present political system. But among older Mongolians there was still a strong sentimentality for the Soviet past, when incomes were secure and the old M.P.R.P. made all the decisions. At rallies, I met many people who seemed disillusioned with their country’s changes. “Since democracy came, people have just become poorer,” one woman told me at an M.P.R.P. rally in Zuunmod, south of Ulaanbaatar. “I think if there’s just one party ruling it will be better.” She was fifty-two years old, trying to survive with a herd of eight cows, and she struck me as a paradoxical creation of the post-Communist world—someone who longed for the clarity of old authoritarianism while relishing her new freedom of speech. She said that last spring she had become so fed up with the coalition government that she had organized a protest of a hundred and eight herdsmen. They had tried to ride fifty miles to the national parliament building but had been stopped by the police before they reached the center of Ulaanbaatar. Still, she was enormously pleased that the newspapers had reported the protest.

During my last meeting with Sumati before the election, he remarked that there were indeed authoritarian elements in Mongolian politics, especially in Bagabandi’s camp. “He’ll be quite quiet until after May 20th,” Sumati said. “And then he will create some problems. He’ll try to show some principles, but I’m afraid that those principles are not democratic principles. They are authoritarian principles.”

Sumati grinned. He seemed to delight in pointing out the frailties of the Mongolian system; earlier he had told me about a mudslinging campaign that was going on between the M.P.R.P. and the Democratic Party. The Democrats had accused Bagabandi of accepting a million dollars in bribes from the Chinese; meanwhile, there were insinuations that Gonchigdorj and other former coalition leaders had hindered the investigation into Zorig’s murder, and there was talk of a scandal from Gonchigdorj’s days as a math professor, during which he had allegedly helped a Mongolian youth team cheat at an international math competition. This insinuation seemed to give Sumati particular pleasure, possibly because his wife is a mathematician who once worked with Gonchigdorj at the Academy of Sciences. “It was quite a nice place until Gonchigdorj arrived,” Sumati had once told me, with a smile.

That was his characteristic pose—the detached acuity of someone who is both an insider and an outsider—and it occurred to me that it was one of the traits that made him so good at what he did. He was dressed as he had been when I’d last seen him: gray Umbro sweatshirt and faded jeans. He was sitting beneath one of the Democratic Party campaign posters of Genghis Khan—a new addition to his office—and I asked him why he had put it up.

”I don’t know why they think Genghis Khan was a Democrat,” he said. When I asked whether he supported the Democrats, he shook his head and said that the only candidate who impressed him was Dashnyam, a political unknown who had become something like the Ralph Nader of Mongolian politics. By Sumati’s estimate, Dashnyam currently had seven-per-cent support in Ulaanbaatar. “I’ll vote for somebody who is in opposition to the M.P.R.P., even though he doesn’t have a chance,” Sumati said. “Just for my own pleasure, maybe.”

I talked with other highly educated Mongolians who shared Sumati’s apparent indifference to the outcome of the election. Some of them felt that, regardless of who won, the country’s fortunes were largely in the hands of the three most influential foreign donors—the I.M.F., the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank. The two major candidates had campaigned heavily on the need for continued assistance from those organizations, and nobody had openly challenged this assumption, despite the hardships caused by the shift from a state-subsidized to a free-market economy. Representatives of the World Bank and the I.M.F. told me that a period of economic pain was an inevitable part of the process, and they assured me that the essential pillars for sustained development were now in place. Even so, in the past two years there has been a slight increase in foreign aid, and none of the major donors has established a clear timetable for ending their support. At times, I had the disquieting thought that Mongolia had simply traded one form of dependence for another.

I also met a prominent businessman in Ulaanbaatar named Enkhbat, who feared that Mongolia’s dependence on Western aid was undermining the initiatives toward democracy and an open economy on which that aid was based. Five years ago, Enkhbat, a handsome man in his early forties, founded Datacom, the company that brought the Internet to Mongolia. Datacom now has approximately a hundred employees, and it is currently working on a pilot project to develop software for an American company. Whenever Enkhbat mentioned the international organizations, he spat out their names angrily. “The World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have now been working for ten years in Mongolia,” he said. “They never have regular meetings with the private sector. It’s just our bureaucrats and the Western bureaucrats working together. They love each other, and they work very well together, because they don’t need any new ideas.”

When I mentioned Enkhbat’s criticisms to Robin Mearns, a World Bank official, he said, “I can understand why he might have had that view until the mid-nineties. Until that point, the World Bank’s focus was on stabilizing the country’s finances.” He added that since then the bank had offered a credit program designed to fund new business ventures, and put a lot of effort into the alleviation of poverty.

Still, Enkhbat believed that the international organizations had not done enough to capitalize on Mongolia’s greatest resource for development: the country’s high literacy rate. (Since 1990, it has dropped to something under ninety per cent.) Moreover, he noted that many people in Ulaanbaatar speak foreign languages, a legacy of the large number of Mongolians who studied abroad during the Soviet period. Enkhbat felt that Mongolia should be establishing technological parks and high-tech export-processing zones, rather than focussing so much on infrastructure. “And why does our government always ask for money for power-plant development?” he said. “Because many corrupt officials will have an opportunity to make money off it.”

Four days before the election, Bagabandi’s party scored a major success when the international organizations made a one-year pledge of three hundred and thirty million dollars in assistance. M.P.R.P. officials appeared on television to announce the donations, and they noted that, having received the support of the international community, they also hoped to enjoy the support of the Mongolians.

On Election Day, there was a high blue sky and almost no wind; the sun glanced bright off the gers. I was heading south with Chinzorig, my translator, in his 1992 Toyota Carina, looking for Voting Station No. 69. After an hour, the paved road gave way to a grass track. There were few people living here, but there was a lot of traffic, because one of the country’s most important Buddhist shrines was ahead of us. We passed Mitsubishi jeeps, Toyota coupes, and old Lada sedans. We saw two yellow cabs parked in the middle of a pasture, where their occupants were having a picnic.

We kept going. Hawks floated beneath thin wisps of cirrus cloud; there was nothing else in sight but grass and sky. After a while, Chinzorig turned off the track, and we climbed a hill. We crested a ridge and saw a Mongolian flag flapping outside the voting station, which had been set up in a ger.

Inside the station were two tables, a ballot box, and a red screen that afforded privacy to voters. There were six people at the tables. They were observers, representing all three parties. The main official, Shinbatar, was also the headmaster of the local secondary school. He was twenty-nine years old, and he spoke Mongolian, Russian, Tibetan, and some English. He showed me the registration list for the district, which covered sixty square miles with a population of two hundred and forty-five people, of whom exactly a hundred had already voted. Shinbatar was an M.P.R.P. member. He told me proudly that Mongolia was following the American system of democracy.

”We’re learning how to do it,” he said. “We’ve made a step forward, but it’s not enough. America is a powerful country, while here in Mongolia we have nomads spread everywhere. We should unite together and build more cities.”

We waited for nearly two hours before a voter appeared. Finally, two men materialized on an old Soviet Planeta 5 motorcycle; they were sweating, and said that they had been travelling for half an hour.

After they voted, by circling a name on the ballot, an official marked the index finger of their left hands with a blot of indelible ink. It was hard to keep track of the herdsmen, and Mongolia had started using the system last year, to make sure people didn’t vote again at another station. This year’s blots were small; last year, excessive enthusiasm for the new system had led to a liberal use of ink, and for a week it looked as if 82.42 per cent of the Mongolian adult population had smashed their fingers with a hammer.

One of the men told me that he had voted for Bagabandi. He was twentysix years old, and he said that he had lost thirty animals last winter; he had ten left. He wasn’t sure how he’d make it through the next year. When I asked him why he’d voted for Bagabandi, he said that his parents had asked him to. He smiled and shook my hand, and then he headed off, with his friend on the back of the bike.

Three days after the election, I had dinner with Sumati at the Café de France, an expat hangout in Ulaanbaatar. Bagabandi had won, with 58.13 per cent of the vote. In the course of the campaign, he had gained .13 percentage points over the total predicted in Sumati’s initial poll, in March. Voter turnout had been eighty-three per cent. An estimated million dollars had been spent on the campaigns.

”If you look at how much money was spent and how much mud was thrown in both directions, it must be frustrating for our politicians,” Sumati said, with a smile, as he sipped his Genghis beer.

For the first time, Sumati talked in detail about his background. His Mongolian grandfather had been an official in the pre-Communist government, and after the revolution he had been arrested on the trumped-up charge that he was a Japanese spy. Sumati’s father, who was five at the time, accompanied his father to prison, because children were allowed to come and go in order to get food. When he grew older, he became a hardline Communist and a director of the Mongolian Institute of Languages. As an old man in the nineteen-eighties, Sumati’s father had organized a Party election with opposition candidates, without the permission of his superiors; he was eventually purged from the Party. In self-imposed exile, he went to Moscow, where he worked on a Mongolian-Russian dictionary, which he never completed. He had left Ulaanbaatar in 1990, before the democratic movement gained power. He died in 1997.

”He was gone for all these changes,” Sumati said. “And, despite being thrown out of the Communist Party, he still believed in its ideas.” He went on, “Just the other day, I talked with a friend who had been at the academy with me. He remembered that a K.G.B. agent had talked to him about me. The agent said, ‘This guy Sumati has no chance of success, because he is under special surveillance.’ “

It was one of those stories, heard often in post-authoritarian countries, that move quickly in the telling. Suddenly, I understood where all those layers of cynicism had come from, and I sensed that Sumati was finally going to express his gratitude for democracy.

”That’s why I really enjoy this time,” he said. “I do what I like, and I don’t care what these stupid assholes say. Some of the people who used to denounce me even became leaders of the democratic movement. I know for certain that at least two of them became leaders of the Democratic Party. I will never become a member of any political party.”

He took another drink of his beer, and I glanced at his left index finger. It was clean.

”Did you vote?” I asked.

He put the beer down and then, sounding like the millions of Americans who had decided to stay home on Election Day last November, he said, “At the start, I thought I would vote for Gonchigdorj. But then I thought, I know how this election will end, so why should I vote? It’s a waste of my time.” ♦