Socialist and Post–Socialist Mongolia

Nation, Identity, and Culture

Simon Wickhamsmith, Phillip P. Marzluf, Simon Wickhamsmith, Phillip P. Marzluf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000337273
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

This book re-examines the origins of modern Mongolian nationalism, discussing nation building as sponsored by the socialist Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party and the Soviet Union andemphasizing in particular the role of the arts and the humanities. It considers the politics and society of the early revolutionary period and assesses the ways in which ideas about nationhood were constructed in a response to Soviet socialism. It goes on to analyze the consequences of socialist cultural and social transformations on pastoral, Kazakh, and other identities and outlines the implications of socialist nation building on post-socialist Mongolian national identity. Overall, Socialist and Post-Socialist Mongolia highlights how Mongolia's population of widely scattered seminomadic pastoralists posed challenges for socialist administrators attempting to create a homogenous mass nation of individual citizens who share a set of cultural beliefs, historical memories, collective symbols, and civic ideas; additionally, the book addresses the changes brought more recently by democratic governance.

Chapters 2 and 3 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Phillip P. Marzluf and Simon Wickhamsmith

The centenary of the 1921 Mongolian People’s Revolution provides an excellent opportunity to examine the dynamics of culture and identity in socialist and post-socialist Mongolia. One-fifth of the way through the twenty-first century, three decades after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and a century after its own socialist revolution, Mongolia has become a site that attracts a large number of scholars from an increasingly diverse range of fields, who work on issues such as emerging democracies and civic societies, globalization, economic restructuring, and social and cultural change. Yet to carry out these studies requires cultural and historical sensitivity, an awareness of how members of a seminomadic, pastoralist culture – or of an urban population still rooted in some ways to this traditional nomadic culture – represent themselves and others and experience the physical and imaginary landscapes of their environment. It was in order to engage with this awareness and to explore how Mongolians negotiate new and alternative discourses, ideologies, and social practices while bearing in mind tradition and legacy that we initially conceived of this collection about Mongolia’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century relationship with the humanities.

As the chapters in this collection demonstrate, the humanities were instrumental in developing Mongolia’s new national and socialist identities through various strategies and technologies, including the adaptation of new terminology to define ideas about nationhood; language policy reforms; government and party sponsoring of literature, music, cinema, and art; and the shaping of ethnic forms of national identity. Moreover, as an approach to the academic study of Mongolia, the humanities can make an important contribution by their attention to languages, archival research, and primary texts to illuminate Mongolians’ agency in responding to their changing worlds, addressing at the same time the concerns of B. Rinchen and D. Natsagdorj, among others, who feared that Mongolia would be received as intellectually backward by the West (e.g., Sodnom 1961, 16). An additional value of the humanities is to reveal the ways in which Mongolians have expressed themselves and related to their changing worlds; that is, by again focusing on archives, interviews, primary texts, and other sources, we can consider Mongolian history over the past 100 years, in Eric Hobsbawm’s (2012) words, “from below,” immersing ourselves in the complex interrelationship of history, culture, and identity in how individuals understand their experiences (11). As we will address in more detail, the humanities, in other words, are well placed to explore “Mongolianness” without a need to resort to simplistic conclusions and assumptions that narrow these inquiries into an issue of identity alone.

In their attempts to bring Mongolia to the humanities and the humanities to Mongolia, the 17 international contributors to this collection offer a wide range of humanistic, transnational, and interdisciplinary research methods, including history, sociolinguistics, literary criticism, geography, film studies, and anthropology. Similarly, the contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds and scholarly fields, including those within and outside of academia, a diversity that opens up opportunities to study different strands of Mongolians’ experiences over the past 100 years. The contributors acknowledge the development of the modern Mongolian state even as they acknowledge internal forces, such as nomadic cultural traditions and practices, and external political, scholarly, and linguistic influences. In short, the diversity of voices and perspectives in this collection offers a genuine exchange of ideas and reveals the social, cultural, and political complexity that characterizes the constructions of Mongolianness; moreover, these benefits align with many Mongolians’ acceptance of a broader and more flexible range of evidence and academic inquiry, which draws as much on what is commonly accepted as on what can be explicitly referenced and proved (Wickhamsmith 2020, 14).

The main goal of this collection, then, is to showcase the ability of the humanities and social sciences to contribute to our understanding of Mongolian identity – that is, “Mongolianness” or ideas about “being Mongol” (Kaplonski 2004, 7), discourses which became especially pertinent immediately after the 1990 Democratic Revolution. It was during this transition that Mongolians actively distanced themselves from the previous socialist worldviews, symbols, and images; created or reimagined traditions and practices from the pre-socialist past; and separated themselves from non-Mongolians, including Han Chinese and other Asian groups (see Billé 2015) or “inauthentic” Mongolians, such as Inner Mongolians or Buryads (see Bulag 1998). At the same time, Mongolians navigated new global identities. Even though the past three decades have been especially rich for identity studies in Mongolia (e.g., Billé 2015; Bulag 1998; Tumursukh 2001), the socialist period, as we will see in several of the chapters in the first half of the collection, provided challenges for describing and theorizing Mongolian identity. Mongolians had to negotiate Soviet, internationalist, and modern identities with shared cultural Mongolian ideas.

The contributors to this collection offer new and alternative paths through the knotty issue of Mongolian identity, using the voices not only of political elites and historians, but of artists, poets, musicians, movie directors, linguists, scientists, pastoral women, and social media users; in particular, they explore how these various social actors participate in and circulate these ethnic and national identities. That being said, as we will explore more fully in the following two sections, describing Mongolian identity is far from clear. Despite the efforts of certain nationalist discourses, Mongolian identity – that is, identities – do not lie “out there” to be discovered as a commonsensical, unified whole (Kaplonski 1998, 40); instead, we need to take into account the historical entanglements with groups such as the Manchu, Han Chinese, Tibetans, Russians, and Kazakhs; the ways in which historiography and the conceptual vocabulary have played a role (Atwood 1994; Kaplonski 1998); and the challenges in defining “Mongolianness” in ways that are appropriate for all groups, including Inner Mongolians, Buryad Mongolians, Mongolians in far-western Mongolia, and other non-Khalkh groups (Bulag 1998), as well as in defining “Mongolianness” in political and cultural ways (Sneath 2018). Of course, we also need to contend with the anxieties of Mongolians in the twenty-first century, who may feel that the defining conceptions of the land, culture, and language are no longer as viable in a deeply global and capitalist world.

Socialist Mongolia (1921–1990)

Ivan Sablin, Jargal Badagarov, and Irina Sodnomova’s “Khural democracy: imperial transformation and the making of the first Mongolian constitution, 1911–1924” (Chapter 2) outlines the ways in which the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) and the 1924 Constitution emerged from the discourses, institutions, and social actors of the previous Russian and Qing Empires. Additionally, as a common theme that runs throughout the chapters in this collection, the nation-building of the MPR was, without question, strongly influenced by the Soviet Bolshevik Party and its informal relationship with the Soviet Party, yet we need to remain vigilant and tease out the complexity of these relationships and account for the contributions of Khalkh and Buryad Mongolian intellectuals and leaders. Moreover, Sablin, Badagarov, and Sodnomova reveal how this early history of the MPR was far from inevitable, and we can imagine many alternative twentieth-century “futures” for Mongolia.

Nonetheless, the impact of the MPR government and the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party (MPRP) commitment to Soviet socialism on Mongolian society was, depending upon who you were and where you lived, sudden and substantial, or gradual and patchy. The changes devised by the new state focused, in a more or less effective way, on social – educational, medical, and infrastructural – improvement, but while these changes were promoted as bulwarks of the new system, they were only implemented gradually and were not always easily accessible. For example, it was still easier to receive medical treatment from an herbalist (generally a Buddhist monk) in the early 1930s than from a western allopathic doctor (Bawden 1989, 146); similarly, at the same time, representatives of the MPRP expressed concerns that the Buddhist educational system was attracting more students than that of the socialist government (Pürevjav and Dashjamts 1965, 180).

Irina Morozova (2009) emphasizes the long duration that it took for the values and habits of what would become a “socialist identity” to develop, in particular among rural pastoralists. Through the example of a long travel poem written by the writer, D. Natsagdorj, in the late 1920s, Phillip P. Marzluf, in his “D. Natsagdorj, Mongolian travel writing, and ideas about national identity” (Chapter 3), suggests how early formations of socialist identity could complement pastoralist forms and yet project young Mongolians towards more urban and European identities. Moreover, as Christopher Kaplonski (1998) and David Sneath (2018) have argued, Mongolia represents a case in which the socialist state was created before the socialist identity. In other words, a new national identity had to be constructed retroactively, recasting an elite, political notion of prerevolutionary identity and generalizing it for non-elites, a transcultural project in which Mongolian socialist leaders and intellectuals, heavily influenced by Soviet ideas and Russian Buryads such as Tsebeen Jamtsarno, adapted existing terms or created new ones to describe a highly Sovietized paradigm of national identity.

We should not lose track of the irony of how elite Mongolians, having initially invoked the discourse of Bolshevik revolution and sought Soviet support to untangle Mongolia from China (see Sablin, Badagarov, and Sodnomova in this collection) had by the late 1930s found themselves inexorably enmeshed in the Soviet Union’s own process of transformation into a Stalinist dictatorship. At the same time, we should recognize that it was during this time that Mongolia became an object of academic and intellectual discourse through the kind of scientific exploration essayed by scholars and adventurers such as Andrei Simukov, the subject of Mary Rossabi and Morris Rossabi’s “Andre Simukov and Mongolian nationalism” (Chapter 4). Such exploration, mapping, linguistic research, naturalism, and archaeology, shared through journals available to the world beyond the Soviet bloc, opened Mongolia to the world, with universities such as Harvard, Indiana University, the University of Washington, SOAS University of London, and the University of Bonn opening departments in Mongolian Studies during the Cold War in which scholars worked to develop expertise in Mongolian language, culture, and history.

The ideological movement of Mongolia towards the Soviet Union, and its increasing economic and infrastructural dependence upon it, intensified during World War II. The war effort occupied Mongolia’s resources and labor almost entirely, necessitating that the hearts and minds of Mongolian citizens turn likewise towards Soviet models, which came to appear in all aspects of daily life in Mongolia. Among other significant changes, a process of collectivization was instigated on the Soviet model after the war. While the policy itself was successfully implemented, its effectiveness was far less obvious. The MPRP had failed in its initial attempt at collectivization in the late 1920s following its Seventh Congress (1928), but the need to confirm the dependency on and “friendship” with the Soviet Union required that the renewed effort succeed. The centrality of the appearance of reality (as opposed to actual reality) to the overarching ideological concept of Socialist Realism meant that Mongolians were presented to themselves as universally supportive of the Soviet Union, even when that support was neither in their interests, nor necessarily in their beliefs and values. The development of industrial towns such as Erdenet and Darkhan during the 1960s and 1970s reflected neither nomadic life nor the traditional Mongolian treatment of the land, nor did the successful training and eight-day orbit in Salyut 6 during 1978 of the cosmonaut L. Gürragchaa reflect the true pace of Mongolia’s development at the time. The vital role of literature in convincing readers about the benefits of socialist reform is reflected in Simon Wickhamsmith’s “D. Sengee and the birth of Mongolian socialist realism” (Chapter 6), which examines how D. Sengee, a writer selected by Kh. Choibalsan to develop literature in the immediate aftermath of the Great Repression, invested Soviet Socialist Realism with his highly poetic understanding of Mongolia’s nomadic culture, a process which could still be sensed, more than three decades after Sengee’s death, in the intensely nationalist poetry of O. Dashbalbar.

While the lives of herders certainly improved, especially in terms of the development of the rural infrastructure (see Humphrey and Sneath 1999), improvement came at a social and cultural price. The complex system of traditional culture and arts, developed over many hundreds of years through interactions within and outside the Mongolian homeland, shifted from point to point with the corresponding shifts in political power and policy. As was the case in most other socialist countries (before and after the death of Stalin), traditional artforms were placed in the service of the state, and their history and nature morphed and warped to fit the current ideological mold. Several contributors to this collection, therefore, examine the ways in which the Mongolian uptake of socialism influenced what remained of Mongolian nomadic traditions during this period. Sunmin Yoon’s chapter, “Shadows of a heroic singer: the legacy of J. Dorjdagva and its impact on the Mongolian long-song tradition” (Chapter 10) explores how the need during the Soviet period for cultural “heroes” to define and promote folk genres has continued into the present, while Baatarnaran Tsetsentsolmon, in her “ ‘Running in My Blood’: the musical legacy of state socialism in Mongolia” (Chapter 9), describes how the reliance on Soviet cultural forms brought changes in cultural capital. Tsetsentsolmon examines how identities were taken up by an elite social class formed by those who directed themselves toward European classical music models, as opposed to those who focused more on the kind of professionalized folk music described by Yoon.

Perhaps such ambiguities lie at the heart of Mongolia’s “socialist identity.” While there were clearly additional political and economic reasons why the initial collectivization process in the late 1920s failed, there was definitely...