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.