ULAN BATOR, Mongolia -- Call him Cosmos, General Cosmos.
In 1981, Guragchaa took an eight-day ride on a Soviet spaceship and into the history books, becoming Mongolia's first and only cosmonaut. Earlier this year, the bearish-looking voyager had another rendezvous with destiny. He chose his family's last name. Guragchaa picked "Sansar," the Mongolian word for the cosmos.
"It made sense," said the 54-year-old military officer, dressed in starched combat fatigues and a pair of worn brown loafers, his uniform as the Mongolian air force chief of staff. "I tried to find my family's original name, but I couldn't. I consulted on the cosmos choice with my family. My friends and colleagues also approved."
Mongolians have regained much since the fall of Communist rule here 10 years ago. Herders who had been forced to give up their animals to state-controlled trading companies got their herds back. Buddhist temples, shuttered for decades, have reopened. Seventy percent of the economy has been transferred to the private sector. But perhaps the most significant benefit to the 2.4 million people scattered across this vast, proud land has been this: Mongolians are reclaiming their names and with them their history.
Mongolia's Communist rulers attacked the hereditary aristocracy in 1921, killing tens of thousands of princes and princesses. Four years later, as the revolution intensified, the Communists banned last names. The intention was for people to forget which class they belonged to, forget that the state killed their relatives, forget Mongolia's past.
Mongolia became a land in which most people not only had no personal property but had no last name. Visiting foreigners were told the use of only one name was a tradition; Mongolians themselves forgot that the tradition was new.
"People didn't even know 1921 happened. They didn't even know they had lost their names," said Serjee Zhambaldorjiin, director of the State Central Library and an expert on modern Mongolian history, who like many other Mongolians f and Russians f uses a second name based on his father's given name. "It was a way to eliminate the influence of the nobles and princes. This was a wiping out of nobility in Mongolia."
But with the collapse of Communism over the last decade has come a cultural rebirth. Old heroes, once banned, are now feted. For the first time in almost 400 years, Mongolia is neither a Chinese colony nor a Soviet satellite. It is independent and at least somewhat free to determine its own fate.
In 1991, Mongolia's then president, Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat, broached the subject of last names, calling for legislation allowing families to reclaim them. In 1995, the Great Hural, or parliament, obliged by passing a law reinstituting last names. Late last year, Mongolia began issuing identity cards with last names.
The reason was three-fold, legislators argued. First, Mongolia deserved to reclaim its past. Second, under communist rule, Mongolians were barred from moving and because nobody knew to whom they were related after 1921, the potential for inbreeding was high.
"We had big troubles with that in the 1970s," said Naranchimeg, director of a radio station in the southern Gobi Desert along the Chinese border. "People were marrying their relatives without knowing it. A few men were mating with different women. Now things are getting better because we are again allowed to know who our ancestors are."
A third reason was that many people in cities had the same name. In the capital, Ulan Bator, with a population of just 770,000, 10,000 women were named "golden flower." This is rough on the phone company, which still organizes the phone book by first names.
Soon after the president's speech on names, Serjee began amassing a genealogical encyclopedia of Mongolian tribal names, spending hours in his office in the national library. . Traditionally, last names were passed down orally, with each family member required to memorize seven generations of a clan's genealogical chart.
Some went further. For instance, the family tree of a descendant of Genghis Khan, Sholoi Khan, stretched back 350 years and contained 11,960 people. But after the revolution, many family trees were destroyed or forgotten, especially in the cities. Serjee estimates that as many as 60 percent of Mongolia's people, including cosmonaut Guragchaa, do not know their last names. Those in the countryside fare better, he said.
"Herders in the countryside know two things well," he said. "They have a keen eye for animals; they know which one belongs to whom. And they know people. Who was this son, where he was born and what he did. Not like a lot of intellectuals who went to school and have problems with memory and eyesight."
Serjee's job was archaeology of sorts. He traveled to all of Mongolia's counties and provinces, checking local records and conferring with elders. After seven years of work, he retrieved 1,260 last names. When he published a small booklet last year with advice on picking a last name, it sold out immediately.
Serjee said it took him a long time to discover his own family's name. His parents did not know. He traveled to his hometown and asked the elderly there. He finally found it: Besud.
Some popular last names these days, Serjee said, are clan names f the eagle clan, the crow clan, the camel breeder clan, along with clan names for doctors, teachers and hunters.
But the big winner so far is Borjigin, the tribal name of Genghis Khan. It means "master of the blue wolf," a reference to Mongolia's creation myth in which a blue wolf mated with a fallow deer to give birth to the first Mongolian. Up to 80 percent of Mongolians so far are claiming that name, Serjee said.