The Soviet Union supported the revolution which brought the Mongolian People's Party (later the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party) to power as the ruling party of the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR), established in 1924. Over the next seventy years, Mongolia "pursued policies in imitation of the devised by the USSR" as a Soviet satellite state. Mongolian supreme leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan, acting under Soviet instructions, carried out a mass terror from 1936 to 1952 (see Stalinist repressions in Mongolia), with the greatest number of arrests and executions (targeting in particular the Buddhist clergy) occurring between September 1937 and November 1939. Soviet influences pervaded Mongolian culture throughout the period, and schools through the nation, as well as the National University of Mongolia, emphasized Marxism-Leninism. Nearly every member of the Mongolian political and technocratic elite, as well as many members of the cultural and artistic elite, were educated in the USSR or one of its Eastern European allies. The Mongolian economy was heavily reliant on the Soviet bloc for electric power, trade, and investment. The MPR collapsed in 1990 and the first democratically elected government took office the same year, leading to "a wedge in the previously close relationship between Mongolia and the Soviet bloc." After 1992, Russian technical aid stopped, and Russia made a request to Mongolia to pay back all the aid which it had received from the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1990, a figure which the Soviets estimated at 11.6 billion Soviet transferable rubles (disputed by the Mongolians).