Living under the soviet shadow: Postcolonial critique of soviet politics in Mongolia

Abstract

This chapter conceptualizes the disintegration of the Soviet as a milieu to examine the weight of the Soviet role in Mongolia. It provides an analytical framework that is grounded in first-person experience of growing up during the period to illuminate the various material, symbolic, and embodied implications and manifestations of the Soviet political influence in Mongolia. The essay is informed by conceptual tools that are rooted in literatures on critical political geography and postcolonial studies and is organized around several personal vignettes all of which speak to a larger theoretical framework. The vignettes are spatially tied to my hometown, Bulgan, from whence the stories emerge and through which we can situate our theoretical contestation of the lived experience of everyday Mongolia during the Soviet era.