by G Mend-Ooyo
1
The Mongol people adapted the Uigur script to their own
language a thousand years ago and, in the thirteenth century, Chinggis
Haan made it the official national script. Thus for over a thousand
years, our cultural heritage was created through the medium of the
Mongol Uigur script. The development of this valuable intellectual
legacy ceased, however, during the twentieth century.
Mongolia
was, for some three hundred years, under the control of the Manchu, from
whom they gained their freedom only at the beginning of the twentieth
century. During the 1930s, after the estalishment of the socialist
state, pressure from Stalin led to the destruction of the intellectual
literary culture and, after 1940, the official script in Mongolia was
changed to the Russian Cyrillic. In this way, during the twentieth
century, the Mongolian people were split away from their own cultural
and historical roots and, following this change in script, those who
wrote and spoke about these ancient Mongol roots and traditions, and
about the Chinggisid empire and its history were accused of having
nationalist sympathies.
I graduated from high school in 1960, and
from then until the 1980s, my intellectual development was controlled,
the Mongolian people were led by the Mongolian Revolutionary Communist
parts and were expected thereby to mimic Russian Soviet communism, and
such were the standards by which young intellectuals were to be
evaluated.
