Shagdarjavyn Natsagdorj was born in 1918 in Amgalanbaatar, near the Mongolian capital of
Ulaanbaatar. The
revolutionary socialist policies of the
Mongolian People's Republic (MPR), founded in 1924, compelled him to leave primary school in 1930; he returned to education in 1932, after
an armed uprising compelled the government to adopt the
New Turn Policy, a less hardline stance. In 1935, he was accepted as an apprentice in the Institute of History at the
Mongolian Academy of Sciences (MAS); two years later in 1937, he was appointed the institute's director. His early work concentrated on the life of the revolutionary hero
Damdin Sükhbaatar and culminated in a 1943 biography which received the first . A decade later in 1955,
Owen Lattimore and
Urgunge Onon published an English translation of this work—the first translation of a biography of a revolutionary figure, it would establish Natsagdorj's reputation in the English-speaking world. Although Natsagdorj initially wrote on both modern and pre-modern history, he increasingly came to focus on the latter. He was especially influential in reviving the study of the growth of the Mongolian independence movement, publishing works such as
The national freedom movement and anti-feudal movement in Khalkh Mongolia (1941). As an academic, Natsagdorj received his
doctorate in 1954 from the
National University of Mongolia; his dissertation discussed "the
Arat liberation movement in the
Khobdos region of
Outer Mongolia under the leadership of
Ayushi". In 1961, he was officially awarded the title of Academician, and he received his
habilitation in 1973. Lattimore praised Natsagdorj's
History of Khalka (1963) as "stand[ing] alone in the world of scholarship" on account of its exhaustive cross-comparison of decrees, orders, reports, and other documents in order to resolve historical disrepancies. In his official capacities, Natsagdorj worked to improve the resources and opportunities available to Mongolian historians. He established archives of original historical documents and made a number available for public consumption at the
National Library of Mongolia, while also helping to initiate journals on history, ethnography, and archaeology, and while supervising the research, protection, and restoration of cultural sites such as the
Erdene Zuu monastery near
Karakorum. His pioneer work on archiving the bureaucratic minutiae of
Qing-era Mongolia met with an eager welcome from Western scholars. Natsagdorj also made contributions to
Mongolian literature, becoming the chairman of the Mongolian Writers' Committee, in which capacity he strengthened the writers' union and encouraged the exploration of works motivated by artistic merit, even when this went against strict ideological conformity. He himself wrote short stories from 1944 onwards, releasing a collection in 1966, in addition to novels such as
Crystal Mirror and
Mandukhai Seten Khatan; the latter, about the life of the fifteenth-century queen
Mandukhai, was the basis of the popular 1988 film ''
. He even authored theatrical plays and screenplays, including Khongorzul
and The Epic of the Gobi''. Natsagdorj's international colleague
Igor de Rachewiltz noted that he risked the ire of the communist government, who appointed him a
State Great Khural deputy in the
1951 election, by not sticking to official positions on historical events. For instance, he was censured for failing to appropriately criticise
Genghis Khan in the foreword he wrote for
Tsendiin Damdinsüren's 1947 translation of the
Secret History of the Mongols. In 1957, he was appointed to write the chapters on the
Mongol Empire for the second edition of the
National History of Mongolia; the first edition, published two years previously, had been written by
Soviet scholars and was extremely prejudiced against Genghis Khan and his empire. Natsagdorj substantially neutralised the overt bias and subtly contradicted the arguments of prominent Soviet scholar
Ilya Petruchevsky, who had written the same chapters of the first edition. He also played a significant role in the
1962 Genghis Khan controversy, which arose when an Ulaanbaatar academic conference offered a primarily positive view of Genghis Khan. Natsagdorj was the second speaker, and concluded his remarks with the words "Genghis has been remembered as a figure of merit as the founder of the independent Mongolian nation." The MPR's leader
Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal took the chance to
purge those behind what the Soviet Union immediately condemned as "Mongolian nationalism", including his main rival
Daramyn Tömör-Ochir. The academics, including Natsagdorj, were fiercely criticized in the Mongolian state press. The controversy spiralled and, after Chinese historians intervened, exacerbated the
Sino-Soviet split. A year after the
Mongolian Revolution of 1990, Natsagdorj published the book
Ruling Principles of Genghis Khan, edited by his colleague and fellow Academician
Shagdaryn Bira, which offered original arguments. In 1998, he published a book on Genghis's grandson
Kublai Khan which concluded that no ruler in world history surpassed Kublai in terms of power and influence. Natsagdorj died in 2001. He was survived by his daughter, N. Ariungua. In a 2008 speech at a conference celebrating the 90th anniversary of Natsagdorj's birth, Ts. Ishdorj, a Mongolian historian and director of the , praised him as "the backbone of modern Mongolian historical science". ==References==