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Dossier: Material Constraints

Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980

Une modernisation incertaine : le ger mongol dans l’historiographie soviétique, 1935-1980
Ksenia Litvinenko

Résumés

La période socialiste a donné lieu à une rencontre inédite entre modernisme et construction vernaculaire, dans un contexte de sédentarisation des pasteurs nomades, de collectivisation, et d’urbanisation de la République populaire de Mongolie, avec l'aide de l'Union soviétique et du COMECON. Cet article analyse l’évolution de l'historiographie soviétique relativement au ger mongol : une habitation portable construite par soi-même à partir d'une structure en bois et enveloppée de feutre ou d'autres matériaux pour l'isolation. En reconstituant les hiérarchies de connaissances et les différentes approches proposées par les architectes, les universitaires et les fonctionnaires mongols et soviétiques entre 1935 et 1980, on met en lumière le rôle joué par cette historiographie au sein de l’idéologie plus large de « modernisation de l'État socialiste ». On montre en particulier l’instrumentalisation du ger comme canon du Réalisme socialiste « national » mongol après la destruction des monastères bouddhistes, et son utilisation comme variable d’ajustement, entre promesses de progrès, retards dans la fourniture de logements, et contraintes matérielles dans le développement des coopératives d’élevage de l’État. L’article décrit comment le ger réifié est mis au service de la mobilisation ethno-nationaliste visant à faire converger les conceptions soviétiques et mongoles des futures mobilités urbaines, via le trope de "l'héritage nomade partagé".

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Introduction

  • 1 A. Khishigt, “Etapy razvitiya proyektnogo dela v MNR [Stages in the development of design work in (...)
  • 2 The term “ger” was typically used by the Mongol-speaking people of the MPR, while “yurt” prevailed (...)
  • 3 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pa (...)

1In 1979, the Soviet architectural journal Arkhitektura SSSR released a special issue on the history and current problems of urban planning and architecture in the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR), with contributions from both government officials and architects based in Ulaanbaatar, Moscow, and Leningrad. The issue celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the MPR’s first state design and budgetary bureau, established with Soviet assistance in 1929.1 Along with articles discussing the results and challenges of architectural projects and urban planning in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, several pieces concerned new structures envisioned for rural areas. One of the reviews foregrounded the joint Mongolian-Soviet research on the “modernization” of portable vernacular ger or yurt2 dwellings which were still actively used in the MPR among pastoral workers of the herding collectives. Herders, as the authors contended, were involved in the most important economic activity in the MPR: wool production. Along with meat, butter, and leather, wool was an important export product delivered to the international market of the member countries of the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), which the MPR joined in 1962.3 At the same time, what concerned the authors was that these pastoral workers continued to employ a vernacular material—felt for the insulation of the ger’s portable wooden structure. According to the architects, this vernacular practice of felt insulation required too much valuable raw wool and was therefore viewed as a material and economic constraint to modernization and international integration of the MPR. Although Soviet and Mongolian experts of the 1970s criticized the ger’s core construction technique, they nevertheless somewhat paradoxically designated the portable yurt as an architectural typology suitable for the future development of a socialist rural economy. 

  • 4 Luntengiin Batchuluun, Felt Art of the Mongols, Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian University of Arts and Cult (...)

2This contrasted sharply with the interpretation of felt among some mobile pastoralists. Besides opting for the material for reasons of practicality—to compensate for the delayed availability of other housing materials—they also saw it as an object of worship. As the historian Luntengiin Batchuluun reminds us, this handmade material played a crucial role in organizing social relations, as its production and use were deeply intertwined with communal labor, festivals, and the blurring of distinctions between work and leisure in Mongolia’s diverse “felt cultures.”4 Taking this difference as a starting point, this paper is interested in identifying the main actors and tropes behind the characterization of ger and the marginalization of felt-making in the official architectural discourse between the interwar period and the late twentieth century.

3The study aims to track and interpret changes in the dominant discourse on self-made buildings and related construction techniques during state socialist modernization. Accordingly, we focus on the critical reconstruction of Soviet architectural historiography (i.e. a corpus of largely Russophone publications created by Soviet and Mongolian authors within the Soviet institutional system of publishing, distribution, and censorship), which imposed a dominant epistemic framework for the rapid modernization of the MPR for most of the twentieth century. Relying solely on Soviet historiography may limit the comprehensive understanding of existing vernacular architecture in the MPR due to potential biases and gaps in coverage. Nevertheless, it offers valuable insights into mutations of the dominant ideology and architectural epistemology in the region. Notably, we demonstrate that architectural historiography was tightly intertwined with promises and constraints of modern architecture and helped to classify, modernize, or transform the vernacular construction techniques in the MPR into a resource.

  • 5 See, for example, Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in (...)
  • 6 See, for instance, Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Abbingdon; N (...)

4In recent years, scholars have foregrounded the persistence and importance of informal building techniques for urban and rural development in state socialist countries.5 They have demonstrated that informal self-organization or building materials procurement had helped citizens across various centrally planned economies and regions to compensate for delayed state-led modernization, under-urbanization, and various economic and material constraints. Such a reorientation overlaps with the broader interest of contemporary architectural historiography that has sought to come to terms with the materiality of building materials, extractivism, labor conditions and dispossession in the production of modern architecture.6

  • 7 Carmen Popescu, “A Genealogy of Architectural History’s Flattening: A Perspective from Post-Histor (...)
  • 8 Ibid., p. 3.

5This paper extends existing literature by highlighting how modern architectural historiography (re)shaped the perception of vernacular architecture, removing it from its actuality, and establishing new socio-technical orientations and centers of knowledge. Like Nikolaus Pevsner and Sigfried Giedion, who presented themselves as “historian-witnesses,” 7 authors writing on Mongolian portable buildings often claimed authority on the subject as contemporaries. For instance, architects and government officials involved in modernization efforts in the MPR also frequently assumed the role of historians or heritage specialists. They adjusted the official architectural narrative to maintain the illusion of linear progress despite setbacks. This narrative contributed to legitimizing Soviet-style socialist modernity in the MPR amid state violence, economic constraints, or the persistence of self-made buildings. The following article reflects upon architectural historiography as integral to the ideological framework of modernity, echoing Carmen Popescu’s call to analyze architectural history-writing as a product of modern epistemology.8

6We shall begin by reconstructing and contextualizing the rise of the discourse of Mongol “national” architecture associated with the research of the Soviet Orientalist Melitina Kondratyeva and architect Nikolay Shchepetilnikov. Their early typological classifications were cited and developed in all major publications on the history of Mongolian architecture published both in the Soviet Union and in the MPR up until the collapse of the state socialist regime. The section will demonstrate that this discourse was used to establish symbolic continuity with the pre-socialist past against the backdrop of the repressions of the late 1930s—the violent transition to state socialism in the MPR, characterized by the destruction of the network of Buddhist monasteries and repression of lamas, wealthy herdsmen, and other “class enemies” of the Soviet-backed Mongolian government. The second section focuses on the practices and discourses put forward by Mongolian and Soviet technocrats–architects and government officials involved in the planning of rural areas in the MPR and “modernizing” vernacular dwellings of mobile pastoralists during the late 1970s. It argues that this re-appreciation of vernacular building typologies drew on older classifications but had reacted to newly recognized constraints associated with under-urbanization and delayed rural development in the MPR. Lastly, we reconstruct the publication by the Soviet architectural researcher Dzangar Purveev and the first deputy chair of the Council of Ministers of the MPR Damdinjav Maidar, where, recycling the ideas of radical Eurasianism and Marxist-Leninist theories, they advocated for a selective sourcing of “nomadic” architectural heritage and construction techniques for the purposes of modelling the future of mobile socialist urbanism.

The ger and the classification of Mongolian vernacular architecture

Figure 1: The Gandan monastery in Ulaanbaatar surrounded by gers in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.

Figure 1: The Gandan monastery in Ulaanbaatar surrounded by gers in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.

Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/9/2, “Images of monasteries named E through J [1930s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-9-2. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia

  • 9 S. Chuluun and T. I. Yusupova, “Melitina Ivanovna Klyagina-Kondratyeva: biografiya i nauchnaya dey (...)
  • 10 Valery V. Mitin, “Nauchnye Svyazi SSSR i MNR v 1920-1950-e gg. Akademiya Nauk SSSR i Mongolsky Uch (...)
  • 11 S. Chuluun and T. I. Yusupova, “Melitina Ivanovna Klyagina-Kondratyeva,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 59, (...)

7In 1926, at the invitation of the Buryat philologist and Secretary of the Scientific Committee of the MPR Jamsrangiin Tseveen, the Mongolian Commission under the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR sent Russian Orientologist-Indologist Melitina Klyagina-Kondratyeva to Ulaanbaatar on a work assignment.9 The initial task of this Scientific Committee was to facilitate literacy campaigns and book translations into the Mongolian language. But it was also a hub that employed (and controlled the activities of) Soviet researchers–ethnographers, archeologists, geographers, and others—who were arriving to conduct their studies within the framework of intragovernmental cooperation between the two countries.10 From 1926 to 1930, Kondratyeva had worked on the systematization and cataloguing of the European book fund of the Committee’s Library. In her free time, she accompanied Soviet ethnographic expeditions around Mongolia and collected materials, commissioned photographs, and performed measurements of built structures of Mongolian Buddhist monasteries and temples, many of which were still in operation at the time of her stay (fig. 1).11 Upon return to the Soviet Union, Kondratyeva published several works on Mongolian architecture, becoming the first scholar in Soviet historiography to offer a typological categorization of Mongolian “national” or “yurt-based” “style.” For decades, tropes that were first highlighted in her works pervaded the Soviet discourse on Mongolia’s vernacular architecture and construction techniques.

  • 12 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii [Toward the yurt-shaped bui (...)
  • 13 Carmen Popescu, “A Genealogy of Architectural History’s Flattening: A Perspective from Post-Histor (...)

8In her publication Toward the yurt-shaped buildings of Outer Mongolia (1935), Kondratyeva foregrounded the yurt or ger—a portable building with a collapsible wooden framework and felt covering used by mobile pastoralists during seasonal migrations—as the main typological category and an “ancestor” of Mongolian “national” architecture.12 Using biological terminology, she argued that certain “factors,” such as the relatively high percentage of wealthy, sedentary people in the population, had prompted the ger’s “evolution” into “full-fledged” architectural objects—temples and monasteries. Equating a settled lifestyle with progress, Kondratyeva argued that the otherwise “primitive” portable yurts used as a “nomadic” dwelling nevertheless led to the emergence of “advanced” permanent buildings. Using methods of observation and architectural drawing, she presented a typological analysis of “ger-based” temples that she had observed while travelling around the country (fig. 2). The drawings categorized a variety of footprints of ger-shaped buildings. Sections revealed constructive similarities between them, and catalogued “types” of tonoo—the wheel-shaped structural element of the roof. Similar to the narrative of the “primitive hut,” defined by Carmen Popescu as a primary reference point in the European architectural canon,13 the Soviet Orientalist characterized the ger as a timeless architectural form transcending various historical and socio-political contexts.

Figure 2: “Schematic plans and sections of different types of yurt-shaped buildings.”

Figure 2: “Schematic plans and sections of different types of yurt-shaped buildings.”

Source: Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii [Toward the yurt-shaped buildings of Outer Mongolia],” Sovetskaya Etnografiya, no. 3, 1935, p. 23

  • 14 On the intellectual history of the early Soviet Oriental studies, see Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orie (...)
  • 15 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii,” op. cit. (note 12), p. 15
  • 16 On the concept of “cultural guardianship,” see Johan Lagae, “History Matters: Authenticity and Cul (...)
  • 17 See similar observations on the “compartmentalization” of Javanese building practice and “epistemi (...)

9Trained in the revisionist tradition of Russian Orientology (Oriental studies), Kondratyeva must have been sensitive to the epistemic hierarchies established by colonial and imperial powers.14 In her analysis, for instance, she had separated the Mongolian style from “foreign” Tibetan and Chinese “elements” that had resulted from the long-term proliferation of Tibetan lamaism and Manchu political and economic domination in Outer Mongolia.15 She instead described Mongolian national ornaments, “typical” construction methods and other elements of local tradition in order to distinguish them from “foreign” influences. However, in acknowledging that architectural elements arriving with religious institutions had prevailed from the 16th to the early 20th century, Kondtratyeva had also forged new epistemic hierarchies, because criticism of Soviet “cultural guardianship” over Mongolian architectural history was not possible at the time due to (self-)censorship.16 She advocated “modernization” of Mongolian architecture17 within an episteme of Soviet teleology:

  • 18 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii,” op. cit. (note 12), p. 39

We must know the cultural heritage left over from past centuries and, discarding its elements that are alien and unnecessary to us, take from it everything that can be useful for building a new, socialist culture. Every architectural style, even if it is archaic and has no future, is still worthy of study from a historical point of view as a monument of a certain era in the cultural history of a given country.18

  • 19 David Sneath, Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopoliti (...)
  • 20 Charles R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, New York, NY; Washington DC: Frederick A. Prage (...)

10The ideological basis for such a transformative process in Mongolia was provided by Marxist-Leninist theories adjusted to the Mongolian case. It characterized the modernization of the largely non-industrialized Mongolia as a “leap” from feudalism to socialism, bypassing capitalism.19 In the context of the modernizing discourse evoked by Kondratyeva, the so-called “traditional” ways of life associated with presocialist mobile pastoralism and religious practices were, consequently, rendered as “backward” and “reactionary.”20

  • 21 Balazs Szalontai, “From the Demolition of Monasteries to the Installation of Neon Lights: The Poli (...)
  • 22 On the epistemic separation between “modern” and “vernacular” architecture in the context of moder (...)
  • 23 Trevor N. Dupuy and Wendell Blanchard, Area Handbook for Mongolia, Washington DC: Foreign Area Stu (...)
  • 24 Łukasz Stanek and Nikolay Erofeev, “Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Sociali (...)

11The opposition between “old feudal” and “new socialist” Mongolia intensified with the rise of the MPR leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan. During 1937-39, with the help and instruction of the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), he conducted a country-wide purge. It led to the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of tens of thousands of high- and middle-ranking lamas and other so-called “class enemies.” The purge also destroyed most of the country’s Buddhist monasteries, temples, and holy objects (some of which had recently been catalogued by Kondratyeva). Only a fraction of the buildings survived, and would later become museums.21 Further re-conceptualization of the “modern” and “vernacular” architecture followed.22 In 1940, Choibalsan highlighted the necessity of settling the population from gers to modern houses, which were “stronger, longer-lasting, better protected from rain, warmer, more comfortable, and also induced culture,” thereby encouraging an eventual transition to a sedentary secular lifestyle, associated with socialist models of urbanization and industrialization.23 Numerous specialists and laborers, as well as institutional models, building norms, and technical equipment from the Soviet Union, Eastern European state socialist countries, and China (until the Sino-Soviet split in 1960), were harnessed by MPR leaders to help forge these visions.24

Figure 3: Disassembled wooden and felt elements of a ger loaded on a cart. Photographer unknown.

Figure 3: Disassembled wooden and felt elements of a ger loaded on a cart. Photographer unknown.

Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/8/14. “A collection of images about working people, auto vehicle drivers, herdsmen, service people as well as law enforcement personnel [1930s-1950s].” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-8-14. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.

  • 25 O. G. Litvinova, V. G. Zalesov and T. N. Manonina, Arkhitekturno-gradostroitelnoye naslediye sovet (...)
  • 26 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii [Architecture of Mongolia], Moscow: Gosstroyizda (...)

12Among them was Nikolay Shchepetilnikov, a recent graduate of the Moscow Civil Engineering Institute, who was sent on a work assignment to the MPR in 1941. Shchepetilnikov remained in the MPR for six years, completing designs for housing, administrative, public, and industrial buildings in the capital city, Ulaanbaatar.25 Similar to Kondratyeva, outside of his working hours, he conducted research trips, performing architectural measurements and observations of the surviving and ruined pre-socialist built structures, as well as working with the photographic collections of the MPR’s Scientific Committee. Upon his return to the Soviet Union, he also analyzed and synthesized late imperial and early Soviet Russian-language historiography on Mongolia from the fields of archeology, history, geography, and Oriental studies, as well as translations of the writings of European travellers. In 1960, he published Architecture of Mongolia, the first survey of Mongolian architectural history written within the theoretical framework of Marxist sociology.26 Chronologically, Shchepetilnikov’s narrative began in the mid-13th century with the foundation of Karakorum, the capital of the Mongol Empire, and concluded with the evaluation of the recent state socialist building efforts in the MPR capital Ulaanbaatar. The publication cited the Mongolian architect Budzhavyn Chimed, a 1948 graduate of the Moscow Architectural Institute known for numerous urban, architectural, and monumental designs in post-WWII Ulaanbaatar, as the volume’s scientific consultant. However, determining the extent of his contribution to the book is difficult, due to the scarcity of remaining sources. The limited historiographical legacy left by Chimed suggests disparities in knowledge production between local architects and their Soviet counterparts.

  • 27 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, “Arkhitektura Mongolskoy Narodnoy Respubliki [Architecture of the Mong (...)

13Overall, Shchepetilnikov built upon Kondratyeva’s earlier typological approach of the gradual “evolution” of Mongolian “national” architectural style from ger into more complex religious structures (fig. 4). While avoiding any mention of the recent destruction of most of these monasteries and temples (which hardly would have been possible under the censorship of books officially published in the Soviet Union), Shchepetilnikov continued to expand the vocabulary of Mongolian “national” architectural “tradition”. Along with the ger, he included the vernacular tent maykhan, a mobile cart on wheels, the khuree planning principle of circular arrangement of both Mongolian mobile encampments and the first known permanent settlements, as well as ornaments, such as ulzii khee. While Shchepetilnikov applauded some elements of the Mongolian vernacular as symbolic talismans of national liberation and socialist modernization, the urban fabric of the “old” Urga (the previous name of Ulaanbaatar), with its “dirty, narrow streets, [and] overcrowded” residential areas was deemed unfit for the city’s socialist future, and due for replacement with new fireproof housing blocks that would be more sanitary.27

Figure 4: “A diagram of development of national architecture of Mongolia.”

Figure 4: “A diagram of development of national architecture of Mongolia.”

Source: Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii [Architecture of Mongolia], Moscow: Gosstroyizdat, 1960, p. 72.

  • 28 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii, op. cit. (note 26), p. 239.
  • 29 Ibid., p. 27, 240.
  • 30 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “City of felt and concrete: Negotiating cultural hybridity i (...)
  • 31 The main theses of such a critique were later reiterated by Mongolian experts, who cited Shchepeti (...)

14In the modernization efforts, Shchepetilnikov encouraged contemporary Mongolian architects to “more boldly utilize the traditions of national architecture […] in the decoration of modern buildings.”28 In contrast to “pseudo-national” or “constructivist” architectural forms used by architects working in the MPR during the inter-war period, such an approach, according to Shchepetilnikov, would help forge a truly “national” architecture in the conditions of the state socialist modernization, serving as an example to the “workers of colonial and dependent countries in the struggle for independence.”29 Therefore, contrary to the common consensus that the turn to vernacularization was announced by local Mongolian architectural elites later in the 1970s-80s,30 we find a critique of earlier formal approaches already in the axiom “national in form, socialist in content,” circulated with the patronizing narratives of post-war Soviet architectural historiography.31 Incorporating these segmented “national” elements into modern architectural designs supposedly aimed to restore an imagined connection with the pre-socialist past. However, this state-sponsored “national revival” omitted discussion of state violence and the destruction of architectural heritage during the MPR’s transition to a state socialist economy in the late 1930s. Promoting vernacularization coincided with an oversight of recent repressions, avoiding its direct acknowledgement or reconciliation.

The material constraints of state socialist modernization and the commodification of felt

  • 32 Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and (...)

15In the early 1970s, the first Mongolia-based authors had started publishing architectural historiographies with Soviet publishing houses, thus gradually decentralizing expertise on Mongolian architecture and history from Moscow and Leningrad. Among the most prominent Mongolian experts who published for Soviet readers were the first deputy chair of the Council of Ministers of the MPR, Damdinjav Maidar, and the art historian, artist, and chairman of the Union of Artists of the MPR, Nyamosoryn Tsultem. Adding to the earlier accounts of Kondratyeva and Shchepetilnikov, which relied on late imperial and early Soviet sources, Russian translations of historical documents, observations, and architectural drawings, Maidar and Tsultem brought in interpretations of new Classic Mongolian and Tibetan-language evidence. They added more nuance to the descriptions of Lamaist temples, self-built architecture, and related construction and building materials procurement techniques.32

  • 33 Ibid., p. 144-146.
  • 34 On the problem of under-urbanization in socialist Hungary, see Virag Molnar, Building the State, o (...)

16Their works appeared against the background of increasing acknowledgement of the limits and the hybrid nature of state socialist modernization in the MPR. For example, in his 1971 publication, Maidar highlighted a long list of challenges: “monotonous” mass housing construction, which did not take into account the “specificities of the local climate” and had ignored existing vernacular planning principles for mitigating the effects of high seismic activity, gusting winds, and sandstorms; the under-urbanization of Ulaanbaatar in the context of extensive industrial development and the mass labor migration to the capital; the failed attempt of the second urban plan (1961) to limit Ulaanbaatar’s population growth and the related uncontrolled sprawl of self-built ger districts; and a lack of builders familiar with industrial construction methods, equipment, and building materials.33 It is important to note that many these challenges were not unique to the MPR. Instead, they constituted part of the broader experience of informal citizen self-organization, compensating for gaps in the planned urbanization of other socialist states and regions.34

  • 35 David Sneath, “Mobility, Technology and Decollectivisation of Pastoralism in Mongolia,” in Stephen (...)
  • 36 For the most recent account on the topic, see Sandagsuren Undargaa, Pastoralism and Common Pool Re (...)
  • 37 This number combines all raw material exports. Dendeviin Badarch, Naidangiin Batsukh and Sereeteri (...)

17In this section, I will focus on how Soviet architectural historiography reacted to the constraints and specificities of the MPR’s rural development, prompting the re-negotiation of the place of vernacular buildings and techniques in the dominant narrative of the MPR’s modernization. Like Ulaanbaatar’s sprawling ger districts, the continuous use of self-made portable and stationary ger buildings was crucial for the organization of labor in the herding collectives (negdel). The collectives’ specialized mobile herding brigades (brigad) were allowed to migrate with collectively owned livestock (and a small number of privately owned animals) several times a year within specifically designated grazing pastures to supply the state enterprises with animal by-products. Rural sum government centers provided herders with hay, transport, mechanized equipment, and veterinary and social services, thus forming a unique organization of pastoral production within a state socialist economy.35 The collectivization of mobile pastoralism in the MPR was completed during the period 1956-1959 through state-sponsored taxation, expropriation, and propaganda campaigns, with 259 negdels (in 1974-75) becoming a backbone of the national economy.36 Production within collectives was coordinated within the five-year plan principle: on the one hand, with the centrally established quotas of wool and animal hair to be supplied domestically for state manufacturing enterprises and, on the other hand, with the MPR’s raw-materials export commitments coordinated with the COMECON countries, which “absorbed 97 percent of Mongolian exports” in exchange for economic “aid.”37 Therefore, continuous procurement of wool for international markets was one of the prerequisites of the MPR’s participation in trade and barter exchange with other state socialist countries.

  • 38 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and ever (...)
  • 39 B. Makhanko and V. Linevich, “TsNIIEPgrazhdalselstroy–dlya Mongolskoy Narodnoy Respubliki [TsNIIEP (...)
  • 40 N. Sogomonyan and Yu Ryabchenko, “Puti Razvitiya Selskogo Zhilishcha v MNR [Ways to develop rural (...)
  • 41 Takahiro Tomita, “Dzud and the industrialization of pastoralism in socialist Mongolia,” Journal of (...)

18Social infrastructure and housing provision in the sum centers, by raising the overall living standard in rural areas, was seen as a governance technique for preventing the mass migration of citizens to overcrowded Ulaanbaatar.38 In 1978, the State Planning Commission of the MPR approved factory-premade timber houses as the main building typology deemed suitable for permanent construction across sum centers.39 However, the limited number of timber panels and the need for more construction workers familiar with new construction techniques were obstacles to achieving the desired housing construction output. To compensate for the housing shortage, some members of the rural collectives continued to use gers, arranging them in small makeshift neighborhoods with other buildings without the involvement of professional architects.40 Moreover, members of mobile herding brigades continued to consume large amounts of increasingly valuable felt to construct their gers. Typically, the ger was assembled from wooden frame elements and covered in several layers of felt. The layers were thicker in winter to provide insulation against the cold and thinner in summer to allow for better ventilation. On rare occasions, some families or neighborhood communities produced their felt insulation using manual or non-industrial techniques (fig. 5). The alleged overconsumption of wool was perceived by Mongolian economists as a problem, because growing domestic consumption of livestock products coupled with overall population growth diminished national exports.41

  • 42 D. B. Ulymzhiyev, Put Mongolskogo Aratstva k Sotsializmu [The Path of the Mongolian Arats to Socia (...)
  • 43 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “City of felt and concrete: Negotiating cultural hybridity i (...)
  • 44 On the impact of the industrialization of wool and felt production on vernacular felt-making, see (...)
  • 45 For comparison, see Lampland’s account on commodification of rural labor in state socialist Hungar (...)

19Between 1960 and 1978, it was estimated that 16.4 thousand families of the agricultural cooperatives had built new gers, and 29 thousand had updated pre-existing structures.42 The persistence of the ger as a living unit also contradicted the linear imaginaries of socialist modernization, according to which the “nomadic” lifestyle was slated to disappear.43 The continued use of wool in the vernacular practice of felt insulation44 also posed economic problems, both in terms of affordability and the availability of wool. In this context, wool became a hybrid object—a commodity for domestic and international consumption,45 a means of subsistence for the remaining herders, and a compensation for the slackening availability of state-sponsored housing.

  • 46 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this observation.
  • 47 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and ever (...)

20The persistence of gers in the rural context created unique trade-offs. While in metropolitan Ulaanbaatar, vernacular architecture competed with industrially produced housing blocks for land but not building materials, the situation was reversed in rural areas. Land availability did not seem to pose an issue for decision-makers in this context. However, as wool and felt became commodities in a command economy (fig. 6), the state faced rising opportunity costs for building gers.46 Due to this continued use of gers, the dominant professional architectural discourse was reassembled to consider the materiality of the rural construction in the MPR. Accordingly, within the pages of the Soviet journal Arkhitektura SSSR, the Mongolian architect Tserendorj called for an integration of the ger into the state socialist economy through its modernization.47

Figure 5: A person performs “rolling,” one of the last stages in the process of communal felt making. Knowledge of artisanal felt making methods was only rarely preserved. Photographer unknown.

Figure 5: A person performs “rolling,” one of the last stages in the process of communal felt making. Knowledge of artisanal felt making methods was only rarely preserved. Photographer unknown.

Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/8/14. “A collection of images about working people, auto vehicle drivers, herdsmen, service people as well as law enforcement personnel [1930s-1950s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-8-14. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.

Figure 6: With the start of industrialization, most of the handmade felt production was replaced with semi-mechanized methods. This photo showcases the production of felt boots at a wool factory in Ulaanbaatar. Photographer unknown.

Figure 6: With the start of industrialization, most of the handmade felt production was replaced with semi-mechanized methods. This photo showcases the production of felt boots at a wool factory in Ulaanbaatar. Photographer unknown.

Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/5/2, Box 25 “Images related to such factories operating Ulaanbaatar as skin processing, wool and shoe making, timber processing as well as hand factories [1930s-1940s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-5-2. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia

  • 48 A. Khishigt, “Etapy razvitiya proyektnogo dela v MNR [Stages in the development of design work in (...)

21In the late 1970s, the Mongolian Institute for the Design of Agricultural Structures partnered with the Leningrad Zonal Scientific Research and Design Institute (LenZNIIEP) to conduct an experimental research project, aiming to replace felt with more affordable modern building materials and ultimately to transform the MPR’s vernacular portable housing construction technology at a national scale. In contrast to the research approaches by Kondratyeva, Shchepetilnikov, and Maidar, outlined above, this work was technocratic from the outset and aimed at practical and economically effective design solutions to help modernize the state economy. LenZNIIEP and the Mongolian Institute for the Design of Agricultural Structures were vertically integrated with relevant state governmental bodies. They collaborated within a 1975 scientific-technical cooperation agreement between the Construction-architectural Commission of the MPR and the State Committee for Construction of the USSR.48 Conceptually, the research relied on a combination of typological analysis and Marxist dialectics, which viewed rural dwellings as a changing spatial, technical, and symbolic system that required reform, in view of shifting material production forces. Although no evidence suggests that a range of design proposals developed within this research project were implemented, they present an important entry point to consider the changing narratives of socialist modernization in the rural MPR and the collaborative inter-institutional practices set up to deal with them. LenZNIIEP architects S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, who participated in this research, noted that, despite the undoubted advantages of ger dwellings (e.g., “fast assembly and disassembly,” “lightness,” “adaptability to natural conditions,” and “reflection of diverse folk traditions”),

  • 49 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pa (...)

[…] in the modern conditions of a socialist society, when the requirements for a mobile dwelling of nomadic pastoralists as a habitat and social activity have changed, the yurt, with all its merits, has become unprofitable as a type of mobile dwelling […] the two-layer insulation of one yurt requires about 500 kg of felt, and, in total, yurts take up to 60 percent of the annual production of high-quality natural wool, which could surely be otherwise more appropriately utilized.49

  • 50 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and ever (...)

22It was planned, instead, to merge the “traditional” Mongolian techniques of mobile housing and recent experience in operating mobile service units with the Soviet experience in the development of portable dwellings for the indigenous reindeer herders in the Soviet Far North (another plan that remained largely unrealized) to solve the problem of wool overuse in mobile building design.50 In their projects, architects sought to replace valuable wool with synthetic fiber, plastic, wood, and other building materials, but also to find new “rational” solutions for modular building design forms (fig. 7). The first phase of experimental research was conducted at the LenZNIIEP office via a scale modelling method. It tested four variations of a mobile living unit:

- A collapsible structure with an overall weight of up to 2.5 tons, which could be erected by hand and transported fully assembled by helicopter or, in disassembled form, in a container—by car or horse. Considered suitable for long-term placement far from the sum centers;

- A collapsible polyhedron-shaped structure from flat wooden parts with an overall weight of up to 600 kg, which could be disassembled by hand and transported in a container by car or horse. Considered suitable for several seasonal migrations;

- A small transformable living cell of up to 400 kg, disassembled by hand and transported on a chassis by horse-drawn transport (at the time still a common transportation mode in the MPR);

  • 51 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pa (...)

- A small, collapsible structure loosely based on the timber structural elements of the ger (crown wheel tonoo and lattice wall khana) of up to 360 kg, disassembled by hand and transported by pack on a horse or a camel for more frequent migrations.51

Figure 7a: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.

Figure 7a: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.

Photos on the left capture the erection of a ger. Photos and drawings in the center depict the prototypes of “modernized” dwellings for mobile pastoralists, related floor plans, and suggested assembly methods.

Figure 7b: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.

Figure 7b: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.

Photos and drawings in the center and on the right depict the prototypes of “modernized” dwellings for mobile pastoralists, related floor plans, and suggested assembly methods.

  • 52 Ibid., p. 37-38.
  • 53 Ibid., p. 36, 38.
  • 54 Ibid., p. 38.
  • 55 Ibid.

23The next stage in the research program included producing the true-to-size experimental version of the first structure—a collapsible communal house on a pile foundation, erected from six typified rectangular walls and six triangular ceiling panels made of fireproofed, sanitized timber, each weighing up to 100 kg. It was estimated that four workers could manually assemble the house without any mechanical lifting or even nails—the panels were attached with wooden pegs.52 Hexagonal in plan, the house would contain three to four sleeping spaces arranged along the walls, a stove in the center, a washroom and a small kitchen. A separate vestibule unit could be attached to the 22 sq. m. structure to enlarge the overall space. The outer skin of the panels could be made of batten, aluminum, steel or fiberglass. If utility lines were available in the placement location, the house could be connected to them or use energy from portable generators.53 The unit could also be used for “communal purposes,” such as storage.54 According to the article, the house was successfully tested in different “climatic regions.” Architects from the Mongolian Institute for the Design of Agricultural Structures suggested that something described as the “panel variation of the yurt” be developed (although no further explanation was provided on the content of such a proposal). Such new mobile building typologies, the article noted, could be covered with “conductive textiles”—a new product developed at the Leningrad office of the Scientific-Research Institute of Artificial Fibers—to eventually “replace the traditional heating methods.”55 However, widespread implementation of these plans never occurred.

Figure 8. “An approximate evolution of the Mongolian yurt” (left) and “Hexagonal log house for the northern regions of Mongolia” (right).

Figure 8. “An approximate evolution of the Mongolian yurt” (left) and “Hexagonal log house for the northern regions of Mongolia” (right).

Source: Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and urban planning of Mongolia. Essays on history], Moscow: Stroyizdat, 1971, p. 17-18.

  • 56 Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and (...)

24In the development of their research, the research group appears to have relied upon Maidar’s classifications and drawings of Mongolian “national” architectural typologies (fig. 8). The experimental house loosely resembled the stationary log yurt for seasonal migration, which was widespread in the northern regions of the MPR. Drawings of such a yurt type were featured in Maidar’s 1971 publication. Along with tents and gers, herders themselves built this type of permanent yurt for the organization of seasonal camps.56 The logs forming the walls of the yurt were stacked at an obtuse angle, forming a polyhedron in plan. As a result, the “experimental” design borrowed features that were considered “national” at the time. However, untreated wood was replaced with industrially processed building materials, and techniques for assembly, heating, and transportation were revised. The formal solutions chosen by the architects, therefore, reflected the nation-building aspirations of the Mongolian and Soviet establishment, and echoed the Soviet approach to nationality policies in Asian republics, where modern buildings were often decorated with “national” ornaments or imitated pre-revolutionary architectural forms. These new forms of “mobile” buildings were also to be produced from modern materials that could not be sourced without state involvement (via the sum local government); this would have made herders more dependent on the state while simultaneously incorporating the mobility of selected herders into the needs of the state socialist economy.

  • 57 Orhon Maydar, Mobility and Displacement: Nomadism, Identity and Postcolonial Narratives in Mongoli (...)
  • 58 Caroline Upton, Mining, Resistance and Pastoral Livelihoods in Contemporary Mongolia, PhD Thesis, (...)
  • 59 Caroline Humphrey, “Inside a Mongolian tent,” New Society, 1974, p. 273-275.
  • 60 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and ever (...)

25The project had also reflected desired changes to herders’ family structure and behavior and a new “progressive” and “collectivist” subjectivity that was encouraged in the MPR through state socialist education and propaganda.57 For example, the pre-collectivization herding group based on familial or neighborhood relationships was replaced with more formal specialized brigades, each made up of one to four herding households, appointed by the negdel government.58 At the same time, presocialist worldviews, gender roles, and rituals were not supported, because they contradicted the goals and values of the extractive-centered industrial economy and the secular socialist epistemology. While the interior arrangement of the traditional ger was strictly organized to reflect age- and gender-based roles within herding families,59 in the experimental designs for the mobile dwellings, the interior arrangement was more suited for the communal living of working-age adults. The planners also envisioned putting several modules together to become the foundation for small mobile settlements of herding households. Although this approach imitated the form of the log yurt, it also resembled contemporaneous projects of fly-in/fly-out settlements in Soviet Western Siberia, where oil-industry workers would spend several weeks onsite, staying in communal barrack-type houses. Not by coincidence, LenZNIIEP staff had also designed such housing units for Siberian shift workers (despite the fact that modes and timeframes of mobility there were quite different from those in the MPR). These proposed designs had never reached mass production. Nevertheless, the experimental research resulted in design guidelines entitled “Nomenclature of types of mobile residential buildings for state farms and agricultural associations of the Mongolian People’s Republic until 1990 and the subsequent stage of construction,” excerpts from which were published in the Arkhitektura SSSR, along with the research report.60

26The joint attempt of Mongolian and Soviet architects to facilitate the commodification of wool and felt and to reintegrate the ger into the rural economy via its “modernization” is an excellent example of the application of a technocratic Marxist-Leninist approach to the conceptualization of vernacular buildings. On the one hand, the material constraints of rural development in the MPR prompted mobile pastoralists to continue to rely on vernacular portable housing and building techniques, such as felt insulation. On the other hand, the continuous use of felt as a building material prevented a considerable amount of valuable raw wool from being commodified on the international market. While acknowledging the practical superiority of vernacular building in this case, the architects had used earlier typological classifications to select a formal “national” reference for a new design, separating the ger’s structure (considered “progressive”) from felt coverings (labelled “backward” and unproductive), and rendering the latter disposable in the name of modernization. Therefore, the conceptual compartmentalization of vernacular architecture had allowed specialists to pick and choose parts of pre-socialist culture to be recycled or discarded. While the structural elements of the self-made architecture of mobile pastoralists persisted, the lifestyle or construction techniques associated with it had continued to be interpreted from modernising positions as something that would be soon—in theory—replaced by secularism, industry, and mechanised technology.

How the ger was made into a resource for the tourist and extractive industries

  • 61 Short for “the Main Department for the creation and use of space technology for the national econo (...)
  • 62 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architec (...)
  • 63 On Gumilev’s concepts of “ethnos” and “ethnogenesis” and their reception in the late Soviet Union, (...)

27In 1980, Damdinjav Maidar and Dzangar Purveev, a Kalmyk architectural researcher and later the chief architect of the Glavkosmos61 of the USSR, co-authored a book entitled From Nomadic to Mobile Architecture.62 The introduction to the volume was written by the Soviet architectural theorist Yury Yaralov and Lev Gumilev, a proponent of radical Eurasianism and the author of the pseudo-scientific “passionarity” theory of “ethnogenesis.” In his theory, Gumilev had proposed a mystic and naturalized view of the lifecycle of “ethnies,” which were, allegedly, “organically” formed via encounters with the natural world and, like humans, went through periods of birth, rise, decline and death. He also argued that “super-ethnies” could be formed when “powerful” ethnic units ally with each other. 63 This conceptually eclectic volume further complicated the Soviet historiographical interpretations of “nomadic” vernacular architecture by mixing elements of ethnos-theory with earlier typological classifications and the technocratic narratives aimed at modernization.

  • 64 On the coloniality of the concept of indigenous “adaptation” in the Stalinist context, see Alla Vr (...)
  • 65 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architec (...)
  • 66 Ibid. p. 208-210. On the construction of Mongolian “nomadic” identity, see Orhon Maydar, Mobility (...)
  • 67 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architec (...)

28The book by Maidar and Purveev argued that specific “nomadic” building culture had evolved as an “adaptation” to the challenging climate and landscape of the Eurasian steppe among various peoples inhabiting Central Asia across the territory of what was then the Soviet Union and the MPR.64 According to this narrative, a portable yurt with a collapsible wooden structure evolved across different cultures in response to climatic and geographical factors and changing subsistence methods (hunting and mobile pastoralism).65 The characteristic ger or yurt was therefore defined as a shared heritage of “nomadic civilization” which assumed a cultural affinity and kinship between Kalmyks, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Buryats, Halh and other Soviet and Mongolian ethnic groups, which had “inherited” similar mobile built techniques and typologies. Thus, within this theory, heavily influenced by Gumilev’s terminology, the Mongolian “national” architectural style based on the local modifications of ger (the use of felt as a building material, taken from the “surrounding natural environment,” was seen as one such modification) eventually became not only a functional but also a symbolic part the “mental make-up” of the “Mongolian nation.” It had allegedly been passed down for generations over several centuries, yet it was simultaneously “genetically connected” to the ancient adaptations to environments performed by all “Eurasian nomads.”66 Moreover, according to the authors, nations with a nomadic heritage had similar trajectories of joining the state socialist economy, introducing modern construction technologies, and increased international “communication.” These factors, argued the authors, were gradually “thinning” national differences in architectural forms down to shared principles of prefabrication and mobility.67 Maidar and Purveev, reiterating the experimental research of possible proposals to “modernize” portable mobile dwellings we analyzed above, also projected ways in which, in their opinion, portable buildings of mobile pastoralists in the MPR could be developed. These included the mass introduction of mobile transport and helicopters instead of horses and camels for the delivery of mobile housing and service units; the introduction of solar energy sources for electricity and power; and, finally, the further automation and industrialization of rural production that was projected to reduce the number of people involved in mobile pastoralism and reform existing relationships between humans and animals.

Figure 9: A mobile veterinary station converted from a vehicle at work in the MPR. Exact location unknown. Photographer unknown.

Figure 9: A mobile veterinary station converted from a vehicle at work in the MPR. Exact location unknown. Photographer unknown.

Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/10/9, “Animal veterinary services and study [1930s-1950s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-10-9. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.

  • 68 Ibid., p. 5.

29Interestingly, these concepts allowed the representatives of the architectural establishment in the Soviet Union and the MPR not only to announce the gradual withering away of the “national” features in architecture, but also to claim the architectural heritage of “nomadic civilizations” as their own. As a result, this heritage became relevant to modernization plans not only in the MPR, but also the Soviet Union. The book argued that the “experience of nomadic architecture can be used for the benefit of the scientific and technological revolution.”68 Particular attention was thus paid to the ability of nomadic architectures to create a certain level of “comfort” in “extreme” weather conditions, to its cost- and energy-effectiveness, and to its portability, which was especially important due to the projected mass proliferation of private automobiles, tourism, and extensive oil and gas extraction in remote regions:

  • 69 Ibid., p. 9.

Futurologists—specialists dealing with the problem of architecture of the future—turn to the experience of nomadic construction. [...] And the traditional Mongolian wagon now seems strikingly modern because it embodies solutions to centuries-old problems that a modern architect is working on.69

  • 70 Alun Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin, New York, NY; London: I. (...)

30Such statements indicated both a change and a continuity in the late socialist modernizing discourses and views on indigenous building cultures, in contrast to those of the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union and the Choibalsanist in the MPR. While in the Stalinist vision (which also found its way into Choibalsan’s ideology, as seen in the first section), nomads should have been “modernized out of existence,”70 the late socialist technocratic approach, reflecting on the material constraints faced by industrialization, urbanization, and rural development, chose to continue pushing against the “nomadic lifestyle” by integrating mobile pastoralism into its economy through the modernization of the ger and the mechanization of livestock herding. Expanding on this, Maidar and Purveev argued for a mystic transnationalism, emphasizing mobility as the shared heritage of an imagined ancient nomadic community. Instrumentalizing earlier classifications, they suggested that selected elements of indigenous knowledge in building design could be appropriated to imagine an alternative future of state socialist leisure and labor, no longer based solely on definitions of settled industrial cities. Maidar and Purveev saw labor- and leisure-related mobility as a transnational phenomenon “rooted” in the shared history of “Eurasian nomadism” and, therefore, observed similarities, for instance, between the governance of reindeer herders in Arctic Siberia and mobile pastoralists in the MPR, in the fly-in/fly-out movements of Soviet oil field workers and in cosmonauts venturing into space, of Mongolian urban residents travelling into the countryside with their gers and Soviet citizens exploring other cultures through tourism. Therefore, they advocated for making a resource out of the principles of portable architecture for the modern aims of settling and claiming new territories—whether for industrial exploitation or tourist exploration.

31The high-tech solar-powered mobile buildings proposed in the volume were never built. Existing archival photos (albeit from the earlier period) reveal herding brigades in the MPR using mobile veterinary stations made from refurbished vehicles (fig. 9). The Soviet mobile living units produced for industrialization or extractive activity in the remote regions were also much less extravagant than envisioned. Nevertheless, the text’s significance lies in the fact that architectural establishment, while providing normative interpretations of the past, had also established discursive control over the future, projecting the promise of continuous material improvement. In this context, vernacular building techniques were compartmentalized as either a disposable or (re)usable past. While indigenous communities in the Soviet Union and the MRP were gradually deprived of their culture through secularization, assimilation, extractivism, and sedentarization policies, the stereotypical ger was instrumentalized by theorists and architectural practitioners for imagining utopian futures defined by new types of socialist mobility.

Conclusion

  • 71 E.g. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, New York, NY: Oxford Unive (...)

32Recent architectural historiography has started reckoning with modernism’s changing relationship to nonindustrial, indigenous, or tribal architecture and construction techniques in (neo)colonial and post-colonial contexts. Scholars have demonstrated that the notion and canon of vernacular architecture emerged as a compensatory measure in modernism’s tireless stride through the modes of destruction, building, and preservation. Architectural vernacular was cultivated, they contended, as a tool for classifying and establishing knowledge authority or recouping the loss of culture in the name of progress.71  Building on these observations, this article has explored the role of architectural historiography in formulating modernism’s response to material constraints. It demonstrated that along with the material means for transformation, the modernist project required its own stories to counterbalance the inconsistencies between the promises and the materiality of urban and rural change and thereby to maintain control over its future. This article has critically re-read Soviet Russian-language historiography on Mongolian architecture published between 1935 and 1980 by Oriental studies scholars, architects and government members. We have also retraced the establishment of the historiographical canon and identified various shifts and theoretical borrowings in the Soviet historiography of the ger, a portable dwelling widely used in the Mongolian People’s Republic. We demonstrated that the classifications of pre-socialist architectural history and the ascension of the ger into the Mongolian “national” architectural canon were conducted using the conceptual apparatus of Oriental Studies, typological-geographical classifications, Marxist-Leninist sociology, technocratic architectural research, and ethnos-theory. The Soviet historiography on the Mongolian ger reacted to changing modernization goals and challenges related to under-urbanization and delayed rural development.

33More specifically, this article addressed three ways in which the ger was mobilized within Soviet historiography: (1) as a means for formulating a narrative of Mongolian “national” architectural style through typological classifications (the 1930s-1950s); (2) in response to delayed housing provisions, the ger was re-defined and “updated” as a model for a solution for dwellings of mobile pastoralists (1950s-1970s); (3), and, on the one hand, the ger was used as a symbol of a supposed “shared nomadic heritage” between the Soviet Union and the MRP, while, on the other hand, being utilized as a resource for imagining the future of a socialist mobile urbanism. Architectural historiography helped to gloss over cases of state violence and compensate for the erasure of material culture or revise the narratives of development in the face of economic constraints and delayed promises. Reacting to these changing material realities, the ger in Soviet architectural historiography had evolved from a “primitive hut” of the Mongolian national style to a model for mobile settlement projected into the socialist future.

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Notes

1 A. Khishigt, “Etapy razvitiya proyektnogo dela v MNR [Stages in the development of design work in the MNR],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 1979, p. 9; For a more recent history of institutionalization of the architectural and construction industries in the MPR, see Łukasz Stanek and Nikolay Erofeev, “Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia,” Architecture beyond Europe, no. 19, 2021. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.12604.

2 The term “ger” was typically used by the Mongol-speaking people of the MPR, while “yurt” prevailed among Turkic-language communities. In the literature on Mongolian vernacular architecture, it was customary to use “ger” and “yurt” synonymously.

3 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pastoralists in the Mongolian People’s Republic],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 1979, p. 35-38.

4 Luntengiin Batchuluun, Felt Art of the Mongols, Ulaanbaatar: Mongolian University of Arts and Culture, Institute for the Study of Arts and Culture, 2003, p. 19-21, 30-39, 55.

5 See, for example, Virag Molnar, Building the State: Architecture, Politics, and State Formation in Postwar Central Europe: Routledge, 8 October 2013; Jonas Van Der Straeten and Mariya Petrova, “Mud Bricks in a Concrete State: Building, Maintaining and Improving One’s Own House in Soviet Samarkand, 1957-1991,” in Stefan Krebs and Heike Weber (eds.), Science Studies, 1st ed., Bielefeld, Germany: transcript Verlag, 12 October 2021, p. 111-138.; I. N. Stas, Ot poselkov k gorodam i obratno: istoriya gradostroitelnoy politiki v Khanty-Mansyskom okruge (1960 - nachalo 1990-kh gg.) [From villages to cities and back: history of urban planning policy in the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug (1960 - early 1990s)], Surgut: Defis, 2016.

6 See, for instance, Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Abbingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020; Barnabas Calder, Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency, Pelican, 2021 (Pelican Books); Kim Förster, Undisciplined Knowing: Writing Architectural History through the Environment, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2022 (Environmental Histories of Architecture); Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion Books, 2012; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York, NY; London: Norton, 1991.

7 Carmen Popescu, “A Genealogy of Architectural History’s Flattening: A Perspective from Post-History,” Architectural Histories, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022, p. 20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/ah.8283.

8 Ibid., p. 3.

9 S. Chuluun and T. I. Yusupova, “Melitina Ivanovna Klyagina-Kondratyeva: biografiya i nauchnaya deyatelnost [Melitina Ivanovna Klyagina-Kondratyeva: biography and scientific activity],” Senri Ethnological Reports, no. 113, 2013, p. 59.

10 Valery V. Mitin, “Nauchnye Svyazi SSSR i MNR v 1920-1950-e gg. Akademiya Nauk SSSR i Mongolsky Ucheny Komitet [Scientific connections between the USSR and the Mongolian People’s Republic in the 1920-1950s. Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Mongolian Scientific Committee],” Metamorfozy istorii, no. 5, 2014, p. 111-133.

11 S. Chuluun and T. I. Yusupova, “Melitina Ivanovna Klyagina-Kondratyeva,” op. cit. (note 9), p. 59, 60, 61.

12 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii [Toward the yurt-shaped buildings of Outer Mongolia],” Sovetskaya Etnografiya, no. 3, 1935, p. 14-41.

13 Carmen Popescu, “A Genealogy of Architectural History’s Flattening: A Perspective from Post-History,” op. cit. (note 7), p. 7.

14 On the intellectual history of the early Soviet Oriental studies, see Vera Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods, 1st edition, Oxford; New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011 (Oxford Studies in Modern European History).

15 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii,” op. cit. (note 12), p. 15.

16 On the concept of “cultural guardianship,” see Johan Lagae, “History Matters: Authenticity and Cultural Guardianship,” in Philipp Meuser and Adil Dalbai (eds.), Architectural Guide. Sub-Saharan Africa. 1. Introduction to the History and Theory of Sub-Saharan Architecture, Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2021 (Architectural Guide Sub-Saharan Africa), p. 160-165.

17 See similar observations on the “compartmentalization” of Javanese building practice and “epistemic imposition” of colonial Dutch architects in David Hutama Setiadi, Building Practice in the Dutch East Indies: Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023 (The Architext Series).

18 Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii,” op. cit. (note 12), p. 39.

19 David Sneath, Mongolia Remade: Post-socialist National Culture, Political Economy, and Cosmopolitics, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018, p. 25-26.

20 Charles R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia, New York, NY; Washington DC: Frederick A. Prager, 1968, p. 376.

21 Balazs Szalontai, “From the Demolition of Monasteries to the Installation of Neon Lights: The Politics of Urban Construction in the Mongolian People’s Republic,” in Wasana Wongsurawat (ed.), Sites of Modernity: Asian Cities in the Transitory Moments of Trade, Colonialism and Nationalism, Berlin; Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2016, p. 166-167.

22 On the epistemic separation between “modern” and “vernacular” architecture in the context of modernization, see Mark Crinson, “Dynamic Vernacular–An Introduction,” ABE Journal. Architecture beyond Europe, no. 9-10, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.3002.

23 Trevor N. Dupuy and Wendell Blanchard, Area Handbook for Mongolia, Washington DC: Foreign Area Studies (FAS) of the American University, 1970, p. 171.

24 Łukasz Stanek and Nikolay Erofeev, “Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia,” op. cit. (note 1).

25 O. G. Litvinova, V. G. Zalesov and T. N. Manonina, Arkhitekturno-gradostroitelnoye naslediye sovetskoy epokhi v Mongolii [Architectural and urban planning heritage of the Soviet era in Mongolia], Tomsk: Publishing house of Tomsk State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, 2022, p. 24.

26 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii [Architecture of Mongolia], Moscow: Gosstroyizdat, 1960.

27 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, “Arkhitektura Mongolskoy Narodnoy Respubliki [Architecture of the Mongolian People’s Republic],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 3, 1953, p. 29. Such a viewpoint was also typical of the Soviet architectural elites regarding the Soviet Central Asian republics. See, for example, Mariya Petrova and Jonas Van der Straeten, “Prefabricating Uzbekistan? Discourses and Realities of Urban Redevelopment in Tashkent and Samarkand under Soviet Rule,” in Christoph Bernhardt, Andreas Butter and Monika Motylińska (eds.), Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints. Global Entanglements of Socialist Architecture and Planning in the Cold War Period: De Gruyter, 2023, p. 73-103; Boris Chukhovich, “Orientalist modes of modernism in architecture : Colonial/Postcolonial/Soviet,” Études de lettres, no. 2-3, 2014, p. 263-294. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/edl.728.

28 Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii, op. cit. (note 26), p. 239.

29 Ibid., p. 27, 240.

30 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “City of felt and concrete: Negotiating cultural hybridity in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar,” Nationalities Papers, vol. 41, no. 4, 2013, p. 633. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.743513.

31 The main theses of such a critique were later reiterated by Mongolian experts, who cited Shchepetilnikov. See, for example Damdinjav Maidar, Mongolyn architektur ba chot bajguulalt [Architecture and urban planning of Mongolia], Ulaanbaatar : Ulsyn chevlelijn gazar, 1972; Nyamosoryn Tsultem, Arkhitektura Mongolii. Mongolian architecture. Architecture de la Mongolie. La arquitectura de Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar : State Publishing House, 1988.

32 Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and urban planning of Mongolia. Essays on history], Moscow: Stroyizdat, 1971, p. 8.

33 Ibid., p. 144-146.

34 On the problem of under-urbanization in socialist Hungary, see Virag Molnar, Building the State, op. cit. (note 5), p. 89; on the continuous use of mud bricks in Soviet Samarkand, see Jonas Van Der Straeten and Mariya Petrova, “Mud Bricks in a Concrete State, op. cit. (note 5); on informal constructions by fly-in/fly-out oil industry workers in Western Siberia, see I. N. Stas, Ot poselkov k gorodam i obratno, op. cit. (note 5).

35 David Sneath, “Mobility, Technology and Decollectivisation of Pastoralism in Mongolia,” in Stephen Kotkin and Bruce A. Elleman (eds.), Mongolia in the Twentieth Century. Landlocked Cosmopolitan, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999, p. 223.

36 For the most recent account on the topic, see Sandagsuren Undargaa, Pastoralism and Common Pool Resources: Rangeland co-management, property rights and access in Mongolia, London: Routledge, 2016.

37 This number combines all raw material exports. Dendeviin Badarch, Naidangiin Batsukh and Sereeteriin Batmunkh, “The Impacts of Industrialisation in Mongolia,” in Dendeviin Badarch, Raymond A. Zilinskas and Peter J. Balint (eds.), Mongolia Today. Science, Culture, Environment and Development, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 7.

38 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and everyday features of rural settlements in Mongolia],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 10, 1983, p. 87.

39 B. Makhanko and V. Linevich, “TsNIIEPgrazhdalselstroy–dlya Mongolskoy Narodnoy Respubliki [TsNIIEPgrazhdalselstroy–for the Mongolian People’s Republic],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 1979, p. 40.

40 N. Sogomonyan and Yu Ryabchenko, “Puti Razvitiya Selskogo Zhilishcha v MNR [Ways to develop rural housing in the Mongolia],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 1979, p. 41.

41 Takahiro Tomita, “Dzud and the industrialization of pastoralism in socialist Mongolia,” Journal of Contemporary East Asia Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2022, p. 65. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/24761028.2021.2011554.

42 D. B. Ulymzhiyev, Put Mongolskogo Aratstva k Sotsializmu [The Path of the Mongolian Arats to Socialism], Moscow: Nauka, 1987, p. 240.

43 Alexander C. Diener and Joshua Hagen, “City of felt and concrete: Negotiating cultural hybridity in Mongolia’s capital of Ulaanbaatar,” op. cit. (note 30), p. 633.

44 On the impact of the industrialization of wool and felt production on vernacular felt-making, see Luntengiin Batchuluun, Felt Art of the Mongols, op. cit. (note 4); on manual felt-making among Kazakhs in western Mongolia in the post-socialist period, see Anna O. Portisch, “Social and economic aspects of the uses of animal wool and hair in western Mongolia,” Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines, no. 43-44, 2013 . DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/emscat.2080; on manual felt-making among Darigangas in south-eastern Mongolia in 1957-58, see A. Rona-Tas, “Felt-making in Mongolia,” Acta Orientalia Scientiarum Hungariarum, vol. 16, no. 2, 1963, p. 199-215.

45 For comparison, see Lampland’s account on commodification of rural labor in state socialist Hungary: Martha Lampland, The Object of Labor: Commodification In Socialist Hungary, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

46 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this observation.

47 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and everyday features of rural settlements in Mongolia],” op. cit. (note 38), p. 87.

48 A. Khishigt, “Etapy razvitiya proyektnogo dela v MNR [Stages in the development of design work in the MNR],” Arkhitektura SSSR, no. 9, 1979, p. 14.

49 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pastoralists in the Mongolian People’s Republic],” op. cit. (note 3), p. 35.

50 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and everyday features of rural settlements in Mongolia],” op. cit. (note 38), p. 87.

51 S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko, “Zhilishche skotovodov-kochevnikov v MNR [Dwelling of nomadic pastoralists in the Mongolian People’s Republic],” op. cit. (note 3), p. 35-36.

52 Ibid., p. 37-38.

53 Ibid., p. 36, 38.

54 Ibid., p. 38.

55 Ibid.

56 Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and urban planning of Mongolia. Essays on history], op. cit. (note 32); N. Sogomonyan and Yu Ryabchenko, “Puti Razvitiya Selskogo Zhilishcha v MNR [Ways to develop rural housing in the Mongolia],” op. cit. (note 40), p. 40.

57 Orhon Maydar, Mobility and Displacement: Nomadism, Identity and Postcolonial Narratives in Mongolia, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021, p. 66-67; Ines Stolpe, “Display and Performance In Mongolian Cultural Campaigns,” Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library, special issue Conflict and Social Order in Tibet and Inner Asia, vol. 21, 2008, p. 59-84.

58 Caroline Upton, Mining, Resistance and Pastoral Livelihoods in Contemporary Mongolia, PhD Thesis, University of Leicester, 2012, p. 4-5.; Sandagsuren Undargaa, Pastoralism and Common Pool Resources, op. cit. (note 36).

59 Caroline Humphrey, “Inside a Mongolian tent,” New Society, 1974, p. 273-275.

60 U. Tserendorzh, “Sotsialno-bytovye osobennosti selskikh naselennykh mest Mongolii [Social and everyday features of rural settlements in Mongolia],” op. cit. (note 38); B. Makhanko and V. Linevich, “TsNIIEPgrazhdalselstroy–dlya Mongolskoy Narodnoy Respubliki [TsNIIEPgrazhdalselstroy–for the Mongolian People’s Republic],” op. cit. (note 39), p. 41.

61 Short for “the Main Department for the creation and use of space technology for the national economy and scientific research of the USSR.”

62 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architecture], Moscow: Stroyizdat, 1980.

63 On Gumilev’s concepts of “ethnos” and “ethnogenesis” and their reception in the late Soviet Union, see Mark Bassin, The Gumilev Mystique: Biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the Construction of Community in Modern Russia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016 (Culture and Society after Socialism), p.23-206.

64 On the coloniality of the concept of indigenous “adaptation” in the Stalinist context, see Alla Vronskaya, “The White Sea Canal and the Rhetorical Desertification of Karelia,” in Samia Henni (ed.), Deserts Are Not Empty, New York, NY: Colulmbia University Press, 2022 (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City), p. 315-339.

65 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architecture], op. cit. (note 62), p. 12-13.

66 Ibid. p. 208-210. On the construction of Mongolian “nomadic” identity, see Orhon Maydar, Mobility and Displacement, op. cit. (note 57).

67 D. Maidar and D. B. Purveev, Ot kochevoy do mobilnoy arkhitektury [From Nomadic to Mobile Architecture], op. cit. (note 62), p. 210-212.

68 Ibid., p. 5.

69 Ibid., p. 9.

70 Alun Thomas, Nomads and Soviet Rule: Central Asia under Lenin and Stalin, New York, NY; London: I.B. Tauris, 2018 (The Library of Modern Russia), p. 19.

71 E.g. Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1995 (1984); Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience, London; New York; NY: Routledge, 2016 (The Architext Series); David Hutama Setiadi, Building Practice in the Dutch East Indies: Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023; Mark Crinson (ed.), Dossier: Dynamic Vernacular, ABE Journal, vol. 9-10). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.2944.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: The Gandan monastery in Ulaanbaatar surrounded by gers in the 1930s. Photographer unknown.
Crédits Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/9/2, “Images of monasteries named E through J [1930s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-9-2. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 661k
Titre Figure 2: “Schematic plans and sections of different types of yurt-shaped buildings.”
Crédits Source: Melitina I. Kondratyeva, “O yurtoobraznykh zdaniyakh Vneshney Mongolii [Toward the yurt-shaped buildings of Outer Mongolia],” Sovetskaya Etnografiya, no. 3, 1935, p. 23
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,1M
Titre Figure 3: Disassembled wooden and felt elements of a ger loaded on a cart. Photographer unknown.
Crédits Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/8/14. “A collection of images about working people, auto vehicle drivers, herdsmen, service people as well as law enforcement personnel [1930s-1950s].” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-8-14. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,1M
Titre Figure 4: “A diagram of development of national architecture of Mongolia.”
Crédits Source: Nikolay M. Shchepetilnikov, Arkhitektura Mongolii [Architecture of Mongolia], Moscow: Gosstroyizdat, 1960, p. 72.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 495k
Titre Figure 5: A person performs “rolling,” one of the last stages in the process of communal felt making. Knowledge of artisanal felt making methods was only rarely preserved. Photographer unknown.
Crédits Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/8/14. “A collection of images about working people, auto vehicle drivers, herdsmen, service people as well as law enforcement personnel [1930s-1950s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-8-14. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,2M
Titre Figure 6: With the start of industrialization, most of the handmade felt production was replaced with semi-mechanized methods. This photo showcases the production of felt boots at a wool factory in Ulaanbaatar. Photographer unknown.
Crédits Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/5/2, Box 25 “Images related to such factories operating Ulaanbaatar as skin processing, wool and shoe making, timber processing as well as hand factories [1930s-1940s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-5-2. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 868k
Titre Figure 7a: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.
Crédits Photos on the left capture the erection of a ger. Photos and drawings in the center depict the prototypes of “modernized” dwellings for mobile pastoralists, related floor plans, and suggested assembly methods.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 3,7M
Titre Figure 7b: The spread of the article by LenZNIIEP's architects, S. Verizhnikov and I. Lushchenko.
Crédits Photos and drawings in the center and on the right depict the prototypes of “modernized” dwellings for mobile pastoralists, related floor plans, and suggested assembly methods.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-8.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 2,6M
Titre Figure 8. “An approximate evolution of the Mongolian yurt” (left) and “Hexagonal log house for the northern regions of Mongolia” (right).
Crédits Source: Damdinjav Maidar, Arkhitektura i gradostroitelstvo Mongolii. Ocherki po istorii [Architecture and urban planning of Mongolia. Essays on history], Moscow: Stroyizdat, 1971, p. 17-18.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-9.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,2M
Titre Figure 9: A mobile veterinary station converted from a vehicle at work in the MPR. Exact location unknown. Photographer unknown.
Crédits Source: The British Library, Endangered Archives Program, EAP264/1/10/9, “Animal veterinary services and study [1930s-1950s],” URL: https://eap.bl.uk/​archive-file/​EAP264-1-10-9. The original material is held by the Archives for Cinema, Photography and Sound Recording, Mongolia.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/16242/img-10.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,4M
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Ksenia Litvinenko, « Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980 »ABE Journal [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 octobre 2024, consulté le 07 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16242 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ebl

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Auteur

Ksenia Litvinenko

Associated Postdoctoral Researcher, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany ORCID 0000-0001-8447-151X

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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