AHC: Mongolian SSR

This shouldn't be too hard to accomplish, either from the beginning or at least by the end of WW2. I guess I just don't really know why it didn't happen in the first place. Might not even necessarily have many butterflies down the road, although I bet it'd impact the USSR-China relationship a whole lot.
 
Replace Khorloogiin Choibalsan with someone else. He was one of the few local leaders Stalin trusted, so with him out of the picture Mongolia will most likely follow the route of Tannu Tuva.
 
One of the few reasons it wasn't made into one is because it gae the soviets another UN vote

Yeah, it wasn't worth much
 
One of the few reasons it wasn't made into one is because it gae the soviets another UN vote

Yeah, it wasn't worth much

But didn't Stalin manage to get Ukraine and Belarus places as UN founding members to “balance” the General Assembly? Surely a Mongolian SSR could achieve a similar status too with enough wrangling and convincing.
 
The idea does indeed seem to have been floated from time to time--more by Mongolians than by the Soviets:

"Given Mongolia's profound dependence on the Soviet Union, Mongolians had several times proposed that Mongolia join the Soviet Union, yet Soviet leaders, wary of accusations from China, were not supportive. In the late 1920s, radical western Mongols...resented Khalkha domination and proposed that western Mongolia and Tuva together join the Soviet Union. In the 1940s and early 1950s the Soviet-trained technocrats under Choibalsang repeatedly qustioned whether socialism could be built in Mongolia without joining the Soviet Union. The procurator B. Jambaldorj raised the possibility in 1944, when Tuva joined the Soviet Union, and Daramyn Tomorochir and Yumjaagin Tsedenbal raised it again late in Choibalsang's life. Choibalsang himself violently opposed such ideas, but after his death the Mongolian Politburo in 1953 approved unification, only to be rebuked by V. M. Molotov for their 'simple-minded error.' In the mid-1970s the Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev sounded out his Mongolian counterpart Tsedenbal about this issue. By then, however, the very success of Mongolian industrialization with Soviet aid had decreased Mongolia's perceived need for unification, and the issue was dropped." Article "Soviet Union and Mongolia," p. 515 in Christopher P. Atwoood, *Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire* (New York: Facts on File, 2004) http://www.fofweb.com/History/MainPrintPage.asp?iPin=EME485&DataType=WorldHistory&WinType=Free

I doubt the Soviets would do it, because it was unnecessary and would be resented by the Chinese--both Nationalist and Communist. What difference would it make if they did it, though, since Mongolia was so closely connected with the USSR in OTL, and as an SSR would still presumably win its independence in 1991? Some years ago, in soc.history.what-if, I suggested one possible difference:

"Had he [Stalin] done so, might he or a successor have transferred the Buryat ASSR from the Russian to the new Mongolian SSR? (Note how Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the RSFSR to Ukraine. Sometimes the Soviets liked to humor non-Russian nationalities that way. No harm done, since the important decisions were made in Moscow anyway.) And then, with Outer Mongolia presumably gaining its independence in 1991, it would take the Buryat ASSR with it (though some Russians would protest, just as they have protested Ukraine's taking Crimea with it)."

As a Mongolian contributor to the newsgroup noted in reply:

"They sure would! Transsiberian railroad would run through Mongol territory then. And Russians will have to pay nice transit duties for everything that goes to and from Chita, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok." http://groups.google.com/group/soc.history.what-if/msg/145ed8c4d6624a37

He also noted that, leaving aside possible territorial changes, becoming part of the USSR would probably mean a considerably larger migration of Russians and other non-Mongols into Mongolia.
 
Top