Stalin and the Blue Elephant: Paranoia and Complicity in Postcommunist Metahistories

1. The story-tellers included a Buddhist lama, an old women, and villagers from Alhana in the Aga District, Chita Oblast, Russian Federation. Several younger people from Ulan-Ude also Inew this story. The conver sations were in Buryat. A considerable proportion of Buryats use only Russian. It is probable that these reincarnation stories are not known among Russian-only speakers. In Inner Mongolia too, discussions of history evoked the reincarnation stories. Buryats in general are now actively reconfirming their adherence to Buddhism. Buddhism has acquired a strong position as a quasi-national religion in the 1990s, albeit with an uneasy relation to the government, which is dominated by Russians (Namsaraeva 1998).

2. Mongols living in China share the idiom and say amongst themselves that many political leaders, including Yuan Shikai, Mao Zedong, Jiang Jieshi, Jiang Qing, Liu Shaoqi, Hua Guofeng and Hu Yaobang, were reincarnations. Ulaanhüü, the communist leader of Inner Mongolia during the 1950s-70s, was the most salient political figure for the Mongols and the architect of numerous repressions. He like Stalin is said to have been the reincarnation of the Blue Elephant (in Inner Mongolia known as the Blue Bull). At the same time there is an expectancy in the air that certain mighty historical figures like Chinggis Khan will be reborn. The reincarnation idea is not limited to Asian figures: Buryats also say that Bill Clinton, 'because he is a friend of the Dalai Lama and Buddhism', is a reincarnation of the Günchin Lama of Lhabrang Monastery in Gansu province of China, and several high Tibetan and Mongolian lamas are said to have been reborn as Russians.

3. 'A striking and generally observed feature of the behaviour of paranoics in that they attach the greatest significance to the minor details of other people's behaviour which we ordinarily neglect, interpret them and make them the basis of far-reaching conclusions'. In this kind of misrecognition, the paranoic is like the superstitious person. If the superstitious person is one who does not understand the motivation of his own actions and re-allocates it to the external world in terms of events rather than thoughts, with the paranoic this projection onto the external world amounts to the construction of a predetermined supernatural reality (Freud 1960: 255, 257-9).

4. They included the destruction of Buddhism in both countries, the relocation of communities, the purging of almost the entire Buryat Party leadership in 1937, the administrative cutting-up and isolating of Buryat and Mongol populations, the physical elimination of around a quarter of Buryat intellectuals in the 1930s-40s, and the genocidal violence against Mongolians in China during the Cultural Revolution.

5. This song may have been composed specially for people subject to exile and punishment.