evidence: Seventy years ago, on October 20, 1945, Mongolia held a referendum on independence from China. The Chinese had by then lost all effective control of what they then called "Outer Mongolia." The last Chinese forces in Mongolia were chased out by the anti-Bolshevik general Roman von Ungern-Stenberg in 1921 (who was in turn defeated by the Bolsheviks later that year). Mongolia soon became the "People’s Republic of Mongolia" – the first Soviet satellite, even as it remained, de jure, a part of China. In February 1945, at Yalta, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin asked his wartime allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, to consent to Mongolia maintaining its "status quo" after the war, and obtained their agreement to this innocuous proposition. [...] True to Chiang’s earlier promise, the Republic of China recognized Mongolia’s independence in January 1946. This recognition was rescinded some years later when Chiang accused Stalin of violating the agreements of 1945 by supporting the Chinese Communists in the Civil War. For decades afterwards, the maps of the Republic of China, published in Taiwan, featured Mongolia as a part of the Chinese territory.