Mongolia First

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia — As you drive out of the Mongolian capital, you see a strange sight: At first it seems like the mirage of a magic mountain, glimmering silver over the steppe. As you approach you see that the mountain has a head, shoulders … it is a Statue of Liberty-sized effigy of Genghis Khan.

The statue’s face is full of grim, almost caricature, resolve — and it was built by the newly elected president of Mongolia, Khaltmaa Battulga, a martial arts champion turned tycoon turned politician, a man who named his first company “Genco” after Marlon Brando’s firm in “The Godfather,” and whom I met on a trip to Mongolia several years ago when he was already a minister with grand plans for the country.

In recent decades if you went anywhere in UB, as the Mongolian capital is known, it’s likely you would find yourself using a business that Battulga founded: whether you stayed at one of his hotels, or used one of his taxi services, or played his national lottery, or watched his television channel or just ate one of his supermarket chickens.

But he’s still best known to many as the national hero who won the world sambo [a Russian martial art similar to judo] championship in 1986. “My favorite move was crawling under opponents and flipping them on their back,” he smiles at me. “Would you like me to show you now? It won’t hurt.”

Lithe, with soft hands you sense could break your back in seconds, Battulga has a talent for the unexpected. Ben Moyle, an adventurous Brit who ran a television channel connected to Battulga, remembers how the former sambo champion hired him. “I got this call saying he’d pick me up at noon. No explanation why. He sat in the front. Didn’t say a word. We drove for hours, out of the downtown and into the slums. I started to get the fear — could I have pissed him off in some way? We got out at a yurt. Inside was this old lady, a giant plasma TV, and everywhere photos of Battulga winning judo championships. Only then did Battulga speak: ‘This is my mother,’ he told me. ‘Though I am rich, she wants to live in yurt like always. I bring you here so you know who I am, so you can trust me.’”

Battulga’s journey from yurt to the presidency is a modern Mongolian adventure. He spent his childhood staring enviously through the window of Ulaanbaatar’s elite “dollar store,” where Communist functionaries could buy Western goods unavailable to ordinary Mongolians. On making it into Art High School to study graphic design, Battulga was bullied by street kids who picked on the soft Art School boys. He turned to sambo for self-defense.

People attend a rally for Khaltmaa Battulga at Independence Square in Ulan Bator, after he clinched Mongolia’s first-ever presidential runoff election |Byambasuren Byamba-Ochir/AFP via Getty Images

Battulga makes no bones about why he decided to pursue a career in the sport. “It was a way to travel and make money,” he says. And travel he did. On his first trip abroad, to Paris in 1983, he saw a chic woman whose dog had a little fur coat on. “I cried when I saw that,” he says. “In Mongolia, people couldn’t afford fur coats, and here this dog was wearing one.”

* * *

On trips to international sambo championships, Battulga would buy swathes of denim, then sew and sell them as jeans to the hipsters back at Art School. He won silver medals at the Sambo World Championships in 1983 and 1986, the hundreds of dollars of prize money going toward a Panasonic VHS player. Back in Ulaanbaatar, he rigged the VHS player to a gigantic, 80-kilogram Soviet television. Together with his friends, he created a touring “cinema,” screening bootleg copies of Jackie Chan films and “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. Mongolia had never seen anything like it.

“Everywhere we went we were greeted with red carpets,” remembers a friend from that time. “To keep the Communists happy, we would show a documentary about a North Korean youth festival before the kung fu and cartoons. One time we showed ‘Rambo,’ but the local KGB said we were spreading Western propaganda and burnt the tape. Battulga always carried the TV himself, he had these permanent cuts in his hands. The video player and Soviet TV were not compatible. The picture was black and white, the sound so loud Battulga has to unscrew the speakers and carry them outside. The dusty streets of the provincial towns we traveled to echoed to the sound of kung fu and cartoons.”

After Communism ended, Battulga had more international connections than most Mongolians. He traveled to Moscow to buy Ladas and set up one of Mongolia’s first taxi services. “Moscow was run by Chechen gangsters at the time,” said Battulga. “But they were all former wrestlers and knew me. I didn’t get any hassle from them.” Over the next decade, Battulga imported and exported feverishly, trading everything from Singaporean TVs to Hungarian ties, and selling them at UB’s huge open-air market, where locals say you can find “anything but human eyes.”

A Japanese television report about him from that time shows Battulga wearing a black leather trench coat and Ray-Bans, with slicked back hair and a brooding stare: some sort of Mongolian Scarface. It was in this period he named his company after the “Godfather” movies.

“Our generation, we all grew up on Western movies, especially gangster movies. And the music we listened to were the Stones and the Beatles — all the stuff that was illegal under Communism but that Mongolian students brought back from Moscow,” says Denzen Barsbold, a Mongolian sculptor, whose new Beatles monument adorns the city center. Almost 96 percent illiterate before Communism, Mongolians learned to read, write, watch films and listen to rock ‘n’ roll under the aegis of Russian and European culture.

When Battulga entered politics, he swapped the black trench coat for natty suits. He signed over his business interests to associates, and in 2008 he became minister for roads, transport and construction. When I met him in 2013, he planned to create a network of railroads and refineries that would allow Mongolia to process its own minerals and export them worldwide, instead of simply sending the raw material to energy-famished China as many in the country’s business elite preferred.

* * *

The country, which has spent 500 years as a backwater of first the Chinese and then Soviet empires, has the world’s largest undeveloped energy and mineral reserves. When I visited, it was booming, with 17 percent growth, and the world’s great powers had descended on the capital to play a new Great Game: whoever controlled the country would control Asian energy.

Since then, the economy has crashed as global demand for commodities has plunged: Mongolia might be officially independent of Russia and China, but it still has to obey the commands of the market. Battulga ran his presidential campaign on a “Mongolia First” message, but to be truly independent he will have to diversify the country’s economy while playing off China, Russia and the thing once known as “the West.”

Mongolia might be officially independent of Russia and China, but it still has to obey the commands of the market.

What is perhaps most curious about Mongolia is that it is a democracy at all — corrupt and rambunctious for sure, but just about functioning. In virtually all the countries around Mongolia, from Russia through Central Asia and China, a truly free and fair vote is unthinkable. Mongolia is a democracy in a desert of dictatorships. Whether it can remain so, while overcoming its corruption, inequality and geopolitical suffocation adds an extra dimension to the Mongolian story. Resource rich former communist states have tended to go the other way.

Baabar, publisher, historian, and former finance minister who goes only by his shortened name, believes Mongolia’s democracy is the result of its nomadic roots: “Every man is used to being independent, to be the captain of his own yurt. Everyone considers himself a little Genghis Khan. No one will kneel down.”

Indeed, there’s an irreverence to Mongolian life. In Battulga’s office, I didn’t see any of his underlings bow and abase themselves before their boss, as you would in Russia or China. Hanging out in the bar of a hotel, Battulga blended in with a crowd that featured everyone from ministers to grizzled miners. He was straight from training, sweaty and wearing a gym suit. He didn’t put on any airs or graces, and no one offered him any either.

Peter Pomerantsev, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, is the author of “Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia” (PublicAffairs, 2014).