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From the Silk Road to Wall Street: National Character and Mongolia's Future
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20261 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
3,028 Words |
| Author
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Michael McNierney
Michael McNierney is a haiku poet and free-lance
writer/photographer living in Boulder, Colorado. |
With only three hours of sleep out of the prior thirty-six, our party of four--representatives of the British organization Operation Raleigh--stumbled off the plane from Ulan Bator about ten in the morning of a crisp September day at Khovd in western Mongolia. Mr. Battsuuj, a lively young teacher of economics, met us at the airport and escorted us to the Khovd Hotel. On the way, he naturally asked about our trip. Being punchy with fatigue and with the long air journey from London to Moscow to Irkutsk to Ulan Bator to Khovd still fresh in mind, we could not help but make comparisons between the Soviet Aeroflot line and Miat, its Mongolian counterpart, to the former's disadvantage.
Both airlines are state owned, and both fly Soviet Ilyushin-24s. The similarity stops there. In our experience, the Aeroflot people were inefficient--and almost proud of it--rude, and insensitive. The planes were shabby, smelly, and dirty inside, and the food was unspeakable. All during our layover in Irkutsk we (especially I, with my cameras) were followed around quite obviously by one or both of the KGB agents there. Once aboard Miat, however, we were in a different world. The plane's interior was shabby and worn, as were the interiors of every Mongolian hotel and government building we visited, but like them it was as clean as constant hard work could make it. The flight attendants were gracious and the food edible. Battsuuj's response was a smile and shrug that seemed to imply, "I'm not going to say it, but what do you expect from Russians?"
On the drive to the hotel, it occurred to me that the Russians have a great deal to learn if they are to compete on the world market. Perhaps the Mongols have less to learn. It seemed to us that if Miat were given the equivalent of Aeroflot's resources and it became an international airline, the Mongols would blow the Russians out of the economic sky.
But that is fantasy. The reality lies in the Mongols' twentieth-century history. And the future lies in the people--their strengths and weaknesses, their indefinable character, in fact--and how they work with what history has given them. Mongolia has lacked true independence since the days of Genghis Khan and his heirs. Landlocked and compressed between two scrapping behemoths, the Soviet Union and China, Mongolia has had no choice but to trim its desires to the winds of outside pressure. Now that the Soviet Union is no more and virtually all Russian troops have gone home, relations between the Commonwealth of Independent Sates and China have warmed. Mongolia is finally left on its own, unmolested but also unsupported by its
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