The political and social changes in Mongolia initiated by the Fifteenth Party Congress in the Soviet Union, held between 2 and 19 December 1927, affected the country on levels even deeper than the 1921 revolution. Indeed, until the late 1920s, Mongolia was not really functioning as a revolutionary state, and as Charles Bawden writes, it was ‘in fact making steady economic and social progress, not in the direction of communism, but along the divergent road of free enterprise’. And, just as the New Economic Policy instigated by Lenin had been abandoned with the rise of Stalin in 1928, so too was the left in Mongolia ready by the following year to turn the country towards the Soviet Union and have it cleave ever more assiduously to socialist policies.

Much of the business of the Congress in the Soviet Union focused on the economic processes – rapid industrialization and collectivization – of what would become Stalin's first Five-Year Plan (1928-1933), designed to put into practice the policy of ‘socialism in one country’. In addition, the internal disagreements within the Soviet Communist Party, characterized by the calls for greater freedom of expression from the so-called Joint Opposition led by Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, had been brought to an end by their expulsion.