A Closer Union

Abstract

The Great Repression left Mongolian letters without many of its leading voices, but this also enabled the Party to revive literature in a way more favorable to its ideological trajectory. The first Congress of Mongolian Writers, held in the spring of 1948, was the culmination of a decade’s political development in which writers were encouraged to write about the benefit of labor (D. Sengee’s ‘The Shock Workers’ [Udarnik, 1941] and Ts. Damdinsüren’s ‘How Soli Changed’ [Soli solison ni, 1945]) and so develop a Mongolian Socialist Realism. Through a closer connection with Soviet policy, helped by Mongolia’s moral and practical support of the Soviet Union during the Great Patriotic War, the Writers’ Congress helped to define the ideological basis for Mongolian literature for the next three decades.