Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Mongolian Independence Day
Twenty-eight years ago today I was in Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia, on a three-week tour. My wife and I and the rest of our tour party were taken to some games that celebrated the "National Day" of the country. The games included a fifty-mile horse race and an archery contest. Men rode the horses. Archery contestants were both men and women. There were other games as well.
Twenty-eight years is a significant time interval in our calendar. Twenty-eight years is an integral (whole) number of weeks. The eleventh of July fell on a Tuesday twenty-eight years ago, just as it does today.
Our visit to Mongolia was part of a three-week tour of the Soviet Union. In those days, the Russians had stopped worshipping Stalin. Khruschev's secret speech some years before had listed some of Stalin's worst crimes. Inside Russia proper, there were no longer any statues of Stalin. A city once renamed for him had been renamed again (Tsaritsyn > Stalingrad > Volgograd). There were plenty of statues of Lenin. We went through Lenin's tomb in front of the Kremlin wall. Along the wall were grave stones lying flush with the ground with names of various famous Bolshevik revolutionaries. At the far left was a stone with the name "Stalin."
Moscow is a big city and I saw only a very small part of it. That grave stone was the only memorial I saw to one of the most influential men of the century. In Ulaan Baatar, however, we saw one day a very large statue of Stalin on the main street. We insisted that the tour guide stop the bus so that some of us tourists could photograph the statue.
I wonder if that statue is still there today.
Twenty-eight years is a significant time interval in our calendar. Twenty-eight years is an integral (whole) number of weeks. The eleventh of July fell on a Tuesday twenty-eight years ago, just as it does today.
Our visit to Mongolia was part of a three-week tour of the Soviet Union. In those days, the Russians had stopped worshipping Stalin. Khruschev's secret speech some years before had listed some of Stalin's worst crimes. Inside Russia proper, there were no longer any statues of Stalin. A city once renamed for him had been renamed again (Tsaritsyn > Stalingrad > Volgograd). There were plenty of statues of Lenin. We went through Lenin's tomb in front of the Kremlin wall. Along the wall were grave stones lying flush with the ground with names of various famous Bolshevik revolutionaries. At the far left was a stone with the name "Stalin."
Moscow is a big city and I saw only a very small part of it. That grave stone was the only memorial I saw to one of the most influential men of the century. In Ulaan Baatar, however, we saw one day a very large statue of Stalin on the main street. We insisted that the tour guide stop the bus so that some of us tourists could photograph the statue.
I wonder if that statue is still there today.
