We study the effect of Feigin’s flat degeneration of the type \(\text {A}\) flag variety on the defining ideals of its Schubert varieties. In particular, we describe two classes of Schubert varieties which stay irreducible under the degenerations and in several cases we are able to encode reducibility of the degenerations in terms of symmetric group combinatorics. As a side result, we obtain an identification of some degenerate Schubert varieties (i.e. the vanishing sets of initial ideals of the ideals of Schubert varieties with respect to Feigin’s Gröbner degeneration) with Richardson varieties in higher rank partial flag varieties.
