Bolshevik Russia paid little attention to Mongolia or its pleas for aid until Ungern-Sternberg arrived and started military maneuvers. It was concerning for the newly formed Bolshevik government in Moscow since Ungern-Sternberg was so close to Russia’s Siberian and far eastern boundaries. In a swift move to bolster its recent triumph, it dispatched soldiers from the Red Army to assist the revolutionary forces of Mongolia in vanquishing Ungern-Sternberg’s army and establishing socialism in Mongolia.
Once allies of Ungern-Sternberg against the Chinese, the Buryats were now facing up against the Bolsheviks and the revolutionary Mongols. A socialist government in Mongolia was set up by the Bolsheviks, who prevailed. Soviet and Mongolian governments turned their backs on the Buryats who had sided with Ungern-Sternberg in their fights against China, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and revolutionary Mongol groups. Until until the purges of the late 1930s, the Buryats’ unfavorable reputation was based on their battles against the Russians and the Mongolians, and their roles in promoting Mongolia’s independence were deliberately downplayed.
Because the dead cannot speak, the accounts of the victims of the arrests and deaths were buried long before they could be heard. Their last moments are shrouded in mystery and speculation since no one was around to witness their deaths. In an odd way, it seems that the stories told by the living have a hard time breaking the stillness left by the dead. Many of the residents of Bayan-Uul gave me evasive or aloof responses when I brought up the topic of state brutality. After the conflict, most of the people I talked to were born. The arrests, which occurred in the middle of the night or in meadows where there were few witnesses, were something that the living of the 1930s could only hear or see reported. Everyone involved was hoping that the arrested would go home, including the captives who were sure of their innocence. Many women perished without ever finding out what happened to their male relatives because they waited in vain.
While many focused on the scale and dissemination of the violence, few questioned the state’s motivations for using force. According to the Buryats, the violence escalated rapidly because, once started, it got ingrained in local culture, multiplied itself, and became impossible to stop. In the wake of revolution and collectivization, the powerless saw purges and local denunciations as an opportunity for vengeance against those who had dominated them in the past. There was a lot of bloodshed because of the quotas that each killer had to reach; if they didn’t, they were punished. Additionally, “some of the offenders desired greater authority and executed their duties flawlessly,” while “others utilized their authority to resolve preexisting interpersonal disputes.”
These comments helped me to better grasp the complex chain reaction that led to the increase in violence, but they also rendered the state’s involvement in the violence vague, faraway, and irrelevant. The majority of people I talked to avoided placing blame on the government, instead stating things like, “Once it began, the state had little control over the purging.” The fact that “everyone was a victim at that time” further demonstrated how difficult it was to determine who was responsible for the state’s violent cycles. It was hopeless. The ones who made the arrests one day ended up becoming the ones who were victims the following day.
There were no apparent winners or losers in the violence, and the communal nature of the pain likely contributed to people’s decisions to accept and bear it. Some people didn’t even think the government was to blame for the bloodshed. I still don’t see how the state managed to escape with so little, if any, responsibility, even though the Buryats could clearly see how the violence was spreading due to local politics.
One way the state did this was by constantly purging and rehabilitating people, which diluted the idea of victimization. There were at least three waves of state violence in Mongolia’s socialist era, each accompanied by rehabilitative measures for the falsely accused and subsequent purges of the guilty.9 Munhdalain Rinchin, a historian of 20th-century Mongolia whose work I came to know, explains the ebb and flow of state violence and rehabilitations that followed, providing light on the perplexity, fear, and uncertainty that people endured under socialism, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1930s, the socialist revolution was violently pursued with the goal of eradicating its opponents. The state’s targeting of remaining antirevolutionaries, particularly inside the MPRP, occurred in the 1940s, during the second cycle. In the 1960s, during the third cycle, intellectuals were suppressed alongside internal purification.
After each violent cycle, the state would rehabilitate individuals it found to have been wrongfully accused, recognizing that there were some aspects that went wrong with eliminating enemies, such as individual officers’ misconduct, internal power struggles, bureaucratic confusion, and so on. After then, it would eliminate some of the violent offenders for various reasons, including the fact that they were also criminals during the violence. Thus, it is clear that the lines between victims and perpetrators, as well as between the two groups, were increasingly blurred as a result of the purges of the offenders and the rehabilitation of the accused after each cycle of violence.
In the wake of the purge or during its duration, nearly everyone became a victim, whether that victim was actual or imagined. The Buryats’ assertion that they were unable to flee the violence is somewhat explicable by the cyclical nature of purging and target shifting. Some of the reasons for arrests were murky, and it was hard to see how one person’s right guess might turn out to be incorrect the next. Neither the rehabilitations nor their commemoration were ever mentioned in public or incorporated into local history.
The erasure of personal narratives was aided by the recurrent patterns of persecution and rehabilitation, which were both made public while rehabilitations were kept under wraps. The victim is stigmatized as an enemy of the state when publicly accused. However, people’ victim identities are removed through private rehabilitations, which may or may not lead to public rehabilitation. Though some endured just repeated repressions, others went through all three cycles; yet others went through rehabilitation once, only to be repressed again in the next round, and so on.
It seems like everyone has been a victim since the line between victim and offender has been blurred by the never-ending cycle of punishment and redemption. Even when socialism falls, the postsocialist state portrays political violence as a national tragedy rather than an individual one. This helps to normalize victims within a shared narrative and experience, elevating collective memories above personal ones. On a more local level, talking about how pain should be distributed becomes the extent of remembering violence. When people’s personal histories are absorbed into a larger collective narrative, their memories become quiet or unimportant.
