ULAN BATOR -- G. Tserendulam remembers the year Josef Stalin detained her father and his family during a trip to Moscow and sent them to the Soviet Union's Black Sea. It was 1936, and the pro-Soviet government of Mongolia told the people that Prime Minister Genden had felt the urgent need for a holiday.
She remembers the day she went to her father's study to call him for tea and found him surrounded by secret police. He started to say something. An officer shouted, "Don't speak Mongolian." Then on second thought, they ordered her to translate for her father's interrogation -- until her mother intervened. Genden was taken away. This was the last time Tserendulam saw her father.
"Not long ago, I went to the archives of the KGB and found the file on my father," Tserendulam, now 72, recalled recently. "There were 29,800 people executed in that purge, 17,000 of them [Buddhist] lamas. And it all started with the death of my father."