Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum

The little-known Victims of Political Persecution Memorial Museum consists of a series of haunting displays chronicling the bloody communist purges of the 1930s - an aggressive campaign to eliminate 'counter-revolutionaries'. During the campaign, intellectuals were arrested and put on trial, sent to Siberian labour camps or shot. Mongolia lost top writers, scientists and thinkers. One hall reveals this tragedy most vividly with a display of human skulls pierced with bullet holes.

The museum was inspired by the deeds of former prime minister P Genden, who was executed in Moscow by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB; Committee for State Security) in 1937 for refusing Stalin's orders to carry out the purge. Stalin found a more willing puppet in Marshall Choibalsan, whose purge ended in the deaths of more than 28,000 Mongolians, mostly lamas. The house containing the museum once belonged to Genden and it was his daughter, Tserendulam, who converted it into a museum in 1996.