Not long after their arrival the “Reds” passed a law making the Russian silver ruble legal tender on a par with the “Mex” dollar and requiring every one to accept it as such. When an American firm protested that this meant a loss of 40 per cent on prices, and refused to comply, it was heavily fined. Moreover, the fine was paid, legal rights of extraterritoriality notwithstanding. It is small wonder that foreign stock is scarce in Urga and that important firms are closing their branches there. So far as I was able to find, the “Reds” had introduced only one reform worth while: they had decreed that Mongol women must give up their extravagant head-dress, saying that the silver with which it is heavy could be used to better purpose. Some twoscore head-dresses were seized, but even Bolsheviks learn in time that feminine fashions cannot be decreed by lawmakers; they returned the confiscated contrivances later, and the custom remains. In fact, all the “Reds” in Urga have not done as much for the handful of the human race there as have three brave Swedish girls who are fighting alone the most wide-spread of Mongolia’s physical diseases with missionary zeal and without making any noise about it.
Whatever other forms of violence the Soviet has used in its efforts to make neighboring Mongolia a first convert and a nation after its own heart, it has not dared openly attack the “Living Buddha.” The fanatical Mongols would almost certainly kill all foreigners in the country, irrespective of nationality, if their blind god were molested; though the rumor is rife that the “Reds” have threatened to deal with him as with the former prime minister if he uses his influence against them. Outwardly they try as hard to keep up the fiction that he is the head of the Mongol Government as they do to convince the world that they have no real hand in the latter. The official bulletin, only newspaper in Urga, in announcing the execution of the fifteen alleged conspirators, called attention to the law which decrees that those who try to change the form of government shall be cut up in small pieces, their immediate family banished two thousand versts from the capital, all their property confiscated, and all their relatives sent as slaves to distant princes. There are many such slaves in Mongolia, by the way; Bogda-Han has thousands of them, just as he has of cattle. But, added the official organ, the family and the property of these fifteen were not molested, _by order of the “Living Buddha!”_ It is true that the title Bogda-Han means emperor, but he was long since shorn of any temporal power, not to mention the fact that he is said to have no sympathy whatever for the “Reds” or any of their works.