Zbigniew Szmyt (Adam Mickiewicz University), Memory Regimes in Post-Socialist Mongolia
The presentation examines how collective memory of early-twentieth-century communist repressions is assessed and negotiated in post-socialist Mongolia. Drawing on selected case studies, it identifies the key social actors and guardians of public memory, as well as the main arenas in which memory conflicts unfold. In contrast to Poland – where the communist period and Soviet influence are unequivocally evaluated as an era of subjugation and dependence on the USSR – in Mongolia the institutions and individuals responsible for communist-era crimes are simultaneously regarded as co-founders of modern Mongolian statehood. This ambivalence is neutralised through the division of memory regimes among actors within the political field.
Zbigniew Szmyt is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Between 2017 and 2019, he conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Mongolia, Tuva and Buryatia focused on public history.
Zolzaya Nyamdorj (National University of Mongolia) How were Soviet/Russian political repressions experienced in Mongolia and how are they remembered in contemporary Mongolian society?
The Soviet-backed repressions of the 1930s–1950s left profound and lasting scars on Mongolian society. More than 30,000 people were executed, imprisoned, or exiled, and over 1,000 monasteries were destroyed, reshaping Buddhism, intellectual life, and social structures. This paper examines both the historical experience of these purges and the contemporary politics of remembering them. It traces how post-1990 rehabilitation efforts, monuments, commemorations, and oral histories intersect with grassroots memory practices and political debates. Drawing on archival research, scholarship, and civil society monitoring, I argue that memory of repression in Mongolia remains simultaneously national and local, official and contested.
Bringing together academic and human-rights perspectives, the paper considers how remembrance contributes to democracy-building, transitional justice, and the prevention of future repression. It also reflects on family memory—my great-grandfather, a Buddhist monk, survived the purges by hiding in the mountains—to illustrate the intimate, intergenerational impact of repression on ordinary Mongolians.
Zolzaya Nyamdorj is a Master’s student in International Relations at the National University of Mongolia. She works in the nonprofit sector with a focus on human rights and peacebuilding, currently serving as Board Director of the Freedom Wing NGO, which advocates for the rights of refugees in Mongolia. Her interest in political repression and memory is also informed by her own family history: her great-grandfather, a Buddhist monk, survived the Stalinist purges by going into hiding, a story passed down through her grandmother.
Battogtokh Javzandolgor (National University of Mongolia), Transitional Justice and Memory: How International Human Rights Law Frames Mongolia’s Response to Soviet-Era Repressions?
Mongolia’s geopolitical position and socialist past have profoundly shaped its engagement with international human rights law and its contemporary response to Soviet-era political repression. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mongolia began a democratic transition aimed at strengthening national sovereignty and aligning its legal system with global human rights standards. Yet the legacy of Soviet legal doctrine - particularly a model that subordinated individual rights to state interests and granted security services broad extrajudicial powers - continues to cast a long institutional and cultural shadow. From the 1920s to the early 1990s, Mongolia operated under a system that restricted civil liberties, property rights, and the rule of law, drawing on the legal theories of Soviet jurists such as Andrei Vyshinsky.
This presentation explores how contemporary human rights politics and transitional justice initiatives attempt to confront, reinterpret, or dismantle these inherited frameworks. It assesses the extent to which international human rights law enables meaningful accountability for past repression, and where entrenched legal norms continue to hinder the full realization of justice and remembrance in Mongolia.
Battogtokh Javzandolgor currently serves as a Professor in the Department of International Relations at the School of Political Science, International Relations, and Public Administration, National University of Mongolia. She has published over 50 academic articles in leading international journals and conference proceedings, focusing on international law, human rights and analyses of international agreements concluded by Mongolia.
Zuzanna Bogumił (University of Warsaw), Limits of Western Memory Theory in the Study of Political Repression in Mongolia: In Search of New Conceptual Tools
This paper examines whether dominant Western memory theories adequately capture the dynamics of remembering Soviet political repression in Mongolia. Recent commemorative practices—such as the 2022 monument in Ulaanbaatar modeled on the Komunarka memorial in Russia, or the stupa at Hambo ovo inspired by Cambodian temples displaying the bones of Khmer Rouge victims—raise important questions about how global memory forms circulate, are appropriated, and are transformed in Mongolian contexts. Do these examples fit concepts such as Astrid Erll’s travelling memory or Michael Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, or do they point to analytical blind spots in existing theory?
Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, and comparative memory studies, I argue that Western memory frameworks only partially grasp the conditions shaping Mongolian remembrance. I outline the limits of current approaches and propose directions for developing new conceptual tools capable of interpreting how memories of Soviet repression operate across post-Soviet spaces.
Zuzanna Bogumił is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw. Her research focuses on memory of Soviet repressions across post-Soviet spaces, and the intersections of memory, religion, and decolonization. She is currently a PI of an international academic project “Memories of Soviet Repressions in Post-Multi-Colonial Post-Soviet Spaces”.
Maria Vyushkova (Cambridge University) Intervention: Soviet Repressions, the War in Ukraine, and Medieval Mongol Conquests Memory
The suppressed memory of the Soviet-Era repressions in Buryatia has recently powerfully resurfaced in connection with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and disproportionate war death toll affecting the Siberian Indigenous (most notoriously Buryat) communities in Russia. Disproportionate drafting of Buryatia residents and Irkutsk Buryats during Russia’s 2022 “partial mobilization” campaign, brutal crackdown on anti-war activism and generally any kind of dissent in Buryatia, mass exodus of Buryats to Mongolia and Kazakhstan – all these events revive the painful memories of Stalin’s era. Some scholars make even parallels between Joseph Stalin’s secret deployment of Soviet troops from Buryatia to the Korean war under the guise of “Chinese volunteers” and Vladimir Putin’s present-day deployment of the North Korean soldiers to the Ukraine war under the guise of “Buryats” and “Tuvans”.
Disproportionate placement of the moral burden of Russia’s occupation and war crimes on the Ukrainian land on Russia’s ethnic Buryat troops reveals another facet of eurocentrism and historical amnesia. It is quite common both among Ukrainians and anti-Kremlin Russians to frame Russia’s aggression against Ukraine as “the last battle between the golden Horde and Kyivan Rus”, thus shifting responsibility away from the Kremlin and the Russians and scapegoating Russia’s Mongolic and other Asian ethnic minorities. Such narratives not just misinterpret the present-day Russia’s imperial and authoritarian tendencies as a direct consequence of the 13 th century Mongol conquest but also erase the history of colonization and oppression of Russia’s Mongolic and other Asian minorities both under the Russian Empire and during the Soviet era.
Maria Vyushkova is a PhD computational scientist, Buryat activist and expert in how Russia’s ethnic minorities are involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine. Currently she is MPhil student in Social Anthropology of the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are historical imagination of the 13-15 century Mongol conquest in the context of war in Ukraine.
