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

摘要

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.View full textDownload full textKeywordsArchives, Political Repression, Documents, Rehabilitation, MongoliaRelated var addthis_config = { ui_cobrand: "Taylor & Francis Online", services_compact: "citeulike,netvibes,twitter,technorati,delicious,linkedin,facebook,stumbleupon,digg,google,more", pubid: "ra-4dff56cd6bb1830b" }; Add to shortlist Link Permalink http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2012.626407