A Chicken Is Not a Bird, Mongolia Is Not Abroad: Late Socialist Mongolia in the Soviet Geographical Imagination

Abstract

As the Mongolian People’s Republic became increasingly important to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy goals in the second half of the twentieth century, many Soviet specialists found themselves living and working in Mongolia for considerable amounts of time. Though this was technically a foreign posting, those specialists often did not consider it as such. As a then-popular saying put it, “a chicken is not a bird, Mongolia is not abroad” (kuritsa ne ptitsa, Mongolia ne zagranitsa). In this paper, I will use Soviet accounts of life in late socialist Mongolia to interrogate Soviet ideas of “the abroad”, placing Mongolia in a broader imagined geography of the socialist world and beyond. After surveying the meanings that the idea of “the abroad” (zagranitsa) held for Soviet citizens, I will show that Mongolia was simultaneously too familiar and too foreign in all the wrong ways to be classified as true zagranitsa. Drawing from the memoirs of Soviet expatriates living in a country that was separated from the USSR by an international border yet hauntingly familiar, I will explore the ways in which Soviet citizens’ imaginations of foreignness and distance diverged from those imposed by officially designated borders.