By Marissa J. Smith
After leading the Mongolian People’s Republic continuously since 1952, Yu. Tsedenbal was dismissed from his office in 1984 while traveling in Moscow (Atwood 2004, 549). Tsedenbal and his Russian wife, Filatova, never returned to Mongolia.
However, ever since, Tsedenbal’s legacy has been periodically re-contested. Though at the time of the Democratic Revolution some had even called for Tsedenbal to be tried in Mongolia, when Tsedenbal did die in 1991, his body was returned to Mongolia (Sanders 2017, 818). Tsedenbal’s son Zorig also returned and ran for parliamentary election in 2000 (Ibid.). More recently, in the mid-2010s, a new statue of Tsedenbal was erected in front of the State Drama Theater, directly across from the statue of Rinchen at the National Library, which in turn had replaced a statue of Stalin. For a few years at least, members of the Mongolian People’s Party participated in an official ceremony laying flowers there to memorialize Tsedenbal.
Since the beginning of 2025, a new wave of Tsedenbal-memorialization has taken place. As in the mid-2010s, Tsedenbal and Filatova’s son Zorig, media productions, and the statue have been elements in the drama.
Pop star and former Member of Parliament Javkhlan performs his ballad about Tsedenbal and their shared homeland, “Baruul Dargiin Nutag.” The official music video is available on YouTube:
However, a new element is the explicit participation of Russian actors to encourage narratives of Russian-Mongolian friendship featuring Tsedenbal and Filatova.
As previously discussed on this blog, the marriage of Tsedenbal and Filatova has long been symbolic of Mongolian-Russian relations. However, in the past this was a multivalent and ambiguous; while today, parties are moving to make the marriage Tsedenbal and Filatova an explicitly positively coded example of Russian-Mongolian friendship, with Mongolia as a subject of Russian civilizational and imperial projects.
In December 2024 it was reported that, the Russian ambassador to Mongolia laid flowers at the statue of Tsedenbal in front of the State Drama Theater:
In recent years, Filatova has been annually celebrated on Children’s Day, and credited with projects such as the Nairamdal (“Friendship”) camp. This year, however, the Russian Cultural Center participated in “continuing the tradition of memorialization.“
At the same time, backlash from the public against these narratives is also evident from social media commentary (see links above). Additionally, while visiting Erdenet this past summer, I observed a memorial placard to Tsedenbal at the Mongolian-Russian Friendship monument, which had been defaced.
Monument to Russian-Mongolian victory in WW2 with Erdenet mine in the background (left), and defaced monument to Tsedenbal (right), Erdenet, June 2024
References:
Christopher P. Atwood. (2004). Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire. New York: Facts on File.
Julian Dierkes, Kenny Linden, and Marissa Smith. (2020). “Historical Memories: Contemporary Perspectives on Choibalsan,” Mongolia Focus.
Sanders, Alan J.K. (2017). Historical Dictionary of Mongolia (4th ed.). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 816–823.