Sosorbaram
Basic information
Interviewee ID: 990489
Name: Sosorbaram
Parent's name: Luvsantseren
Ovog: Borjigon
Sex: f
Year of Birth: 1933
Ethnicity: Halh
Additional Information
Education: none
Notes on education:
Work: retired
Belief: Buddhist
Born in: [None Given] sum, Bayanhongor aimag
Lives in: Bayanhongor sum (or part of UB), Bayanhongor aimag
Mother's profession: herder
Father's profession: herder
Themes for this interview are:
(Please click on a theme to see more interviews on that topic)
life in wartime
collectivization
cultural campaigns
belief
democracy
Alternative keywords suggested by readers for this interview are: (Please click on a keyword to see more interviews, if any, on that topic)
mother - father
collectivization
official regulations
cultural campaigns
changes in household culture
highwayman
herder's life before collectivization
funeral rituals
belief
men and women
nature and environment
red injection
consumer goods
To read a full interview with Sosorbaram please click on the Interview ID below.
Summary of Interview 091208A with Sosorbaram
Sosorburam was born in 1938 in a place called Nuramt a little before Duntii hill of Bayanhongor aimag. There are two children in the family. She never attended school. Her parents were herders and come from a family of herders. During the war, things were scare. Whenever a castrated rams was found, it was given to Russia as aid. People used to say that the airplane was called 'erplan' [that is, using the English name, not the Mongolian one ] and at its sound the animals got frightened, the yaks lost their way and the dogs barked. If a person with sharp black boots and a chin-like hat visited them, the people got scared and shuddered. [This is presumably a reference to the secret police]
During the collectivization movement the livestock were classified and norms and plans were based on 500. Initially, relatively few people joined the negdels, but in the end they all joined under pressure. The herders didn't have the right to slaughter the livestock and they did it only with a written permission. The plan meant if you had 100 sheep this year and were short 20, 30 sheep the following year, you had to pay their wool and milk taxes. The countryside people had 50 head of livestock; they gave any over that amount to the negdel. If you hid livestock, you'd be punished.
The cultural campaigns meant thirty-something kinds of items, like a linen cupboard, a blanket for guests, a hand towel and a towel for cups etc. At that time dried dung was burnt on an open fire and livestock were brought into the ger. Hence there was much dust that piled up until it became a black thing that we used to get rid of, using a horse or cow tail to sweep it. During the cultural campaigns the stoves with stovepipes were created in order to be clean and neat. They used to give people assignments and told the people to fulfill them and they checked it in a few days time. If it wasn't done well, they would have been written about on the picture of a pig that was hung on a notice board.
When Sosoburam was small, she used to hear that the old lamas were arrested and killed, the edge of their sutras had been burned, and their lamps had been buried in the ground. If you had the Buddhas and relics openly displayed, the party cell darga seized them. Later, she took her parents’ religious items to Gandan. From the 1990s it was possible to worship Buddha.
There used to be waterfalls from each mountain valley. Today we don’t have such a thing. There’s the so-called Höh Burd in the north. Reeds grew on the both sides of it and the blue flower of iris grew there, too. The schoolchildren were assigned to mow those plants. Today we don’t have those plants. Who knows, are there many people who are ignorant or those who are aware. The seniors used to talk among each other, “The regime is a bad, useless meeting of a thousand. There had been a regime of a red man, and a regime of a blue man will come out, which means a there will be a regime of the blue man instead of the one of the red man”. So, we now observe the meeting and think that perhaps it is the regime they talked about.
