Sükhbaataryn Yanjmaa

Who was Sükhbaataryn Yanjmaa?

Sükhbaataryn Yanjmaa was the widow of Mongolian revolutionary leader Damdin Sükhbaatar, who as Chairperson of the Presidium of the State Great Khural from September 1953 to July 1954 became only the second woman in history to be elected or appointed head of state.

Yanjmaa was born on February 15, 1893 into a poor herding family near present day Ulaanbaatar. She worked for Sükhbaatar's revolutionary group as a messenger in 1919 and when her husband traveled to the Soviet Union in 1920 to establish contact with Bolshevik revolutionaries, Yanjmaa stayed behind in Ulaanbaatar with their son, evading capture from Chinese officials hunting down subversives. In 1921 Khorloogiin Choibalsan helped her and her son flee to Kyakhta to be reunited with Sükhbaatar.

After her husband led Mongolian partisans to victory in the Outer Mongolian Revolution of 1921, Yanjmaa became a member of the Mongolian Revolutionary Youth League. When Sükhbaatar died in 1923, she adopted "Sükhbaataryn" in place of her patronymic Nemedeyen and joined the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party a year later in 1924. As a member of the party Central Committee and of the Presidium of the Central Committee, she represented the MPRP at the Third International Conference of Communist Women and the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow, both in 1924. She was involved in the creation of Mongolia's first trade union in 1925. From 1927 to 1930 she studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. In 1933 Yanjmaa headed the newly created women's section of the MPRP Central Committee where she focused on developing women's educution.