Archived Relations: Repression, Rehabilitation and the Secret Life of Documents in Mongolia

Abstract

This article examines the rehabilitation of victims of political repression from the 1930s in contemporary, postsocialist Mongolia. Since the collapse of socialism, the Mongolian state has initiated a process of rehabilitation for those repressed during the socialist period (1921–1990). This process is predicated upon the existence of records of the original repression, and it is the implications of this that I explore here. I focus upon the way documents are used to judge the fitness of a particular person for rehabilitation while simultaneously constructing the past they are said to document. There is a multiple process taking place where the documents used to originally convict a person, and descendants of the documents, are used to reinvestigate, reconstruct and overwrite the documentable past. I trace this process by piecing together the case of a lama, Samdan, who was twice arrested as a counter-revolutionary in the 1930s.

Keywords:

• Archives
• Political Repression
• Documents
• Rehabilitation
• Mongolia

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Manduhai Buyandelger, Liana Chua, Rebecca Empson, Paula Haas, Batchimeg Sambalkhundev, Catherine Trundle, and people who offered questions and comments on the various presented versions of this paper, including particularly at the Department of Anthropology, MIT, and the Postcolonial Studies Group at CRASSH, University of Cambridge as well as the conference The Political Life of Documents, University of Cambridge. This paper is based on the research carried out in part under a British Academy Small Research Grant (SG-50260).

Notes

The political reality was much more complex in the decade leading up to the 1921 revolution (see Ewing 1980), but in terms of the influence of the Buddhist establishment, the key issue here, this simplification will suffice.

The Supreme Court resolution has an accompanying cover letter, but that largely repeats information available in the resolution itself, so I omit it here.

There is no substantial new information in the Supreme Court resolution that is not contained in the document in the Central Historical Archives.

The exact number will never be known. Some put the number repressed as high as 40,000–45,000. I use a commonly accepted figure, based on the number of cases handled by the rehabilitation process.

The issue is complicated by the fact that there are overlapping discourses of “repression”. Some people who suffered as a result, for example, of being children of declared “counter-revolutionaries” consider themselves repressed, although according to the legal definitions they are not. We can distinguish between social and legal conceptions of repression.

This figure is somewhat misleading, as a significant proportion of lamas did not live in monasteries, but lived much the same as ordinary herders.

To give one example of an attempted co-option: The monasteries, as in medieval Europe, were traditional centres of education and learning, although they taught Tibetan, the liturgical language, rather than Mongolian. The socialist state deployed literacy campaigns to counter this influence. Some monasteries, in turn, began to offer classes in Mongolian to oppose the government's efforts.

Of the roughly 36,000 people repressed, only about 18 were women. The figure given sometimes is one higher or lower in various sources.

I have been unable to find out how often rehabilitation was refused on these grounds. Although I was told it happens, it appears to be rare. The case in question here is that of Eregdendagva, also known as the “Affair of the 38”. See the Diluv Khutagt's autobiography (Lattimore & Isono 1982) for an account of the trial by a minor figure in the case.

Unlike other parts of the Soviet bloc, such as Eastern Germany, the secret police archives survived the end of socialism intact.

Public Prosecutor's resolution referencing the case of Ts. Damdinjav.

Keynote address by Christopher Andrew, The Political Life of Documents conference, University of Cambridge, 16 January 2010.

The other two were Namsrai, head of the security services, and Choibalsan. Similarly, the commission that sentenced the bulk of people in the late 1930s was a troika which included the Minister of Justice.

The document from the Central Historical Archives is entitled “Summary of cases to be discussed at the meeting of the Special Commission attached to Internal Security on [blank] day of December, year 21 [1931]”, and the archive reference is F 284, D-1, H/N-494, pp. 28–44. The Supreme Court resolution is “About the criminal case connected with N. Samdan”, dated 30 January, 1997, Supreme Court Resolution 50. It bears no archive or cataloguing numbers.

In my experience, this is a unique label. “Secret” and “Top secret” are the usual categories.

One word illegible—but the General Intelligence, in writing the cover letter, does not seem to think it effects the following word, “son”, although it calls him Dondogdorj.

A huv' (meaning “share”) was a unit used for valuing livestock, worth 30 tögrög.

I have been unable to find a copy of the legal code in force at the time that includes section 49, but the preceding ones dealt with counter-revolutionary activity, spreading rumours, etc.

Mongolians use only one name. The initial represents something akin to a patronymic, although the mother's name is sometimes used as the basis.