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TSAKHIA ELBEGDORJ was running late. After his first 100 days as the prime minister of Central Asia's only multiparty democracy, he had stopped by a hospital to check his blood pressure .. It was easier in graduate school at Harvard, he said, studying problems of government instead of dealing with them .. Now, he has to receive the grandchildren of the two former leaders when they troop into his office to ask him not to remove their relatives' mausoleums from the capital's central square. The government plans to replace them with an enormous statue of Genghis Khan, still the proudest symbol of Mongolia, nearly a thousand years after his death in 1227.

Perhaps Asia's most unlikely democratic leader, Mr. Elbegdorj is a pudgy, bespectacled intellectual whose 41 years track the extraordinary political transformation of this vast, thinly populated nation sandwiched between Russia and China. Like most members of his 17-member cabinet, Mr. Elbegdorj studied in the Soviet Union but now advocates free market economics.

The son of a herder in Mongolia's far west, the young Tsakhia proudly wore the red kerchief of a Communist Young Pioneer in elementary school. Twenty-five years later, he helped privatize the nation's livestock herds, all 31 million head.

In the army, he was so diligent in running a Revolutionary Youth unit that he won a scholarship to study Marxism, Leninism and journalism in the Ukrainian city of Lvov. Now, his Liberty Center foundation, which promotes political and legal reform, is overseeing translations into Mongolian of the works of Milton Friedman and Friedrich A. Hayek.

The turning point for Mr. Elbegdorj came in 1989, when the Soviet grip began to weaken. He quit a comfortable job as a reporter for a military newspaper to found Mongolia's first independent newspaper, called Democracy. Soon, he was a charter member of a group that is now revered as the 13 First Democrats, and took the lead in the protests that toppled the country's Communist government after a 70-year rule ..