Schools named after Mongolian heroes in the USSR and Russia: from socialist internationalism to subnationalization of memory and sociocultural amnesia

The subject of research is the transformation of symbolic memory politics in the post-Soviet space, which remains one of the key areas of study in collective memory and commemorative practices. In this context, the fate of memorials formed within the framework of the Soviet project of socialist internationalism is of particular interest. During the Soviet period, the names of foreign revolutionary figures were actively incorporated into the system of educational commemoration; however, in the post-Soviet era, many of these symbols have been displaced from the public and institutional memory space. The aim of the research is to identify the mechanisms of institutionalization and subsequent deinstitutionalization of memory about the Mongolian heroes of the Mongolian People's Revolution in the educational space of the USSR and Russia, using the example of schools named after D. Sukhe-Bator and K. Choybalsan. The empirical basis of the research consists of archival documents, regulatory acts, materials from school museums, publications from regional media, and field interviews with school graduates, which helped reconstruct the history of four educational institutions in Moscow, Barnaul, Gorno-Altaisk, and Kyakhta. The study is based on classical principles established in key works on commemorative naming, toponymic policy, and the transmission of historical memory in the educational space. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the identification of several models of memorial transformation: administrative neutralization, subnationalization of memory, military resemanticization, and symbolic capitalization. The results demonstrate that the stability of commemorative names directly depends on the degree of their social rootedness and inclusion in local memory practices. In a broader context, the identified processes reflect a shift from an internationalist model of symbolic politics to nationally and locally oriented heroic narratives, accompanied by a partial sociocultural amnesia of transnational socialist heritage. Thus, the work demonstrates how the transformation of school names reflects deeply rooted processes of defragmentation and redistribution of collective memory. The disappearing commemoration of Mongolian heroes represents a symptom of the redefinition of the boundaries of "own" and "other" in Russian historical consciousness. The prospects for further research are related to expanding the comparative field, analyzing other cases of transnational memorials in the educational environment, as well as contrasting Russian processes with similar transformations in other post-socialist countries. This will allow for the determination of the mechanisms of institutionalization and loss of memory in the context of changing ideological and political paradigms.