Memorial Museum to Victims of Political Repression

Memorial Museum to Victims of Political Repression

In the 1930s, Stalin launched the Great Purge, during which a large number of Russian Buryat Mongolian intellectuals were severely persecuted and suppressed, posing a huge threat to the inheritance and preservation of ethnic culture. After the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under Khrushchev’s leadership, the victims were rehabilitated. Similarly, in the 1930s under Stalin’s orders, Choibalsan launched the Great Purge in Mongolia, where a large number of intellectuals, religious figures, and civilians suffered immense persecution, causing Mongolia to lose many of its top writers, scientists, and thinkers.

The Memorial to Victims of Political Repression was established in honor of P. Genden, Mongolia’s former Prime Minister, who was sentenced to death by the NKVD in Moscow in 1937 for refusing Stalin’s purge orders. The museum is currently managed by his daughter. One of the halls in the museum displays skulls pierced by bullets, vividly recreating the historical scene of the mass incarceration, trials, and brutal killings of intellectuals during Choibalsan’s Great Purge in the 1930s. During this period, approximately 28,000 innocent Mongolian civilians were killed. On the first floor of the museum, the names of 20,000 victims are displayed on the wall, color-coded to distinguish their backgrounds — yellow for those who were monks, red for those who were Communist Party members, and blue for ordinary civilians.

Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum

Why Go: The most historically significant museum in Ulaanbaatar

Continent: Asia

Country/Region: Mongolia

Province/State: Ulaanbaatar

City: Ulaanbaatar