Walking around Ulaanbaatar, one cannot escape the feel of Stalinism that absolutely pervades the place. If I were given only three words to describe the city, “Stalinist” would indubitably make the list, and I’m not sure that, if I were given only one word, “Stalinist” wouldn’t be it.
It shows in the city’s name: “Ulaanbaatar” is translated as “Red Hero,” and it received its name in 1924 after being conquered by communists. (Who exactly the “Hero” is, I have yet to discover, though I suspect it is Sukhbaatar, who also gives his name to the main Square of the city.) And the buildings… I never realized until I got here how much of an effect architecture has on a place (which shows how little I’ve been paying attention). Most of the standing structures in Ulaanbaatar were built by the USSR, and they look like exactly what you’d expect: Square apartment buildings. Period. But it’s a neglected sort of Stalinism, like an abandoned communist city, despite the crowds of people walking around, knowing to avoid the open manholes and unbothered by the bits of wreckage that stand on (or are) the side of the road. Grass pokes through the concrete and makes a reluctant appearance in backyards and parks, but even the plants here look Soviet.
But here’s the thing: Ulaanbaatar is not communist. It is not Soviet, and officially, it never was. The Mongolian people are pretty ready for the future, evidenced by some of the new modern buildings and the rapid privatization of the country’s industry. When the coordinator of International Programmes dropped me off, I asked about a statue in front of the NUM and wondered who it was. She said she doesn’t like him much, that he was president of Mongolia when the NUM was founded, but she does not like him much (she repeated), because he was friends with Stalin. So people’s attitudes seem to be very un-communist.
My first meditation, then, is very appropriate to Mongolia in general (as I’ll get to later): How significant is the past? What prompts a people to reject their past, and once they collectively want to, how easy is it? Is it even possible, or does the past still stand as long as the buildings do? How are our own societies still tied to the past? Did America emerge the way it did due to the very fact that it was without a past, that it was a people starting fresh and erecting their own buildings? Getting back to Mongolia, is the Stalinism something that will wear off as new institutions of the country emerge (i.e. democracy, capitalism, technology), or has it made enough of a mark that they’re stuck with it for a while? What effect will new institutions have not only on the literal remnants of the past (buildings, statues, etc), but also on people's views of the past? And I haven’t even started with gers yet.
I wanted to give you just one quote that I feel is relevant to your meditation, but I can't choose just one! I just read a book that is talking almost exactly about the idea of forgetting the past in order for the future to be possible...hope you like them!
ReplyDelete"...it was always the same street, they just kept changing its name, brainwashing it into a half-wit. Wandering the streets that do not know their names are the ghosts of monuments torn down. Torn down by the Czech Reformation, torn down by the Austrian Counter-Reformation, torn down by the Czechoslovak Republic, torn down by the Communists; even the statues of Stalin have been torn down. In place of these destroyed monuments, statues of Lenin are nowadays springing up in Bohemia by the thousands, springing up like weeds among ruins, like melancholy flowers of forgetting."
"He shouted, 'Children, never look back!' and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. For children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles." (children=america? you decide...)
--Milan Kundera//The Book of Laughter and Forgetting