During the Great Leap Forward, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese famine refugees headed to Inner Mongolia, Cheng Tiejun arrived in 1959 as a middle school student. In 1966, when the PRC plunged into the Cultural Revolution, he joined the Red Guards just as Inner Mongolia's longtime leader, Ulanhu, was purged. With the military in control, and with deepening conflict with the Soviet Union and its ally Mongolia on the border, Mongols were accused of being nationalists and traitors. A pogrom followed, taking more than 16,000 Mongol lives, the heaviest toll anywhere in China. At the heart of this book are Cheng's first-person recollections of his experiences as a rebel. These are complemented by a close examination of the documentary record of the era from Cheng and his two coauthors. The final chapter offers a theoretical framework for Inner Mongolia's represion. The repressions's goal, the authors show, wes not to destory the Mongols as a people or as a culture-it was not a genocide. It was, however, a "politicide," an attempt to break the will of a nationality to exercise leadership of its autonomous region. This unusual narrative provides urgently needed primary source material to understand the events of the Cultrual Revolution, while also offering a novel explanation of contemporary Chinese minority politics involving the Uyghurs, Tibetans, and Mongols.