Editing Russia and the Soviet Union (section)

=== The Kalmyks ===

Not all Kalmyk Buddhist leaders followed the renovationist strategy, but its most prominent Kalmyk exponent, shadjin-lama Sharab Tepkin (Ш. Тепкин), a graduate of Petrograd's Institute of Living Oriental Languages and, from September 1925, elected head of the Kalmyk clergy at the Third Congress of Kalmyk Clergy,<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 65; Andreyev (2003), ''Soviet Russia and Tibet'', p. 159.</ref> pursued accommodation with Soviet power with particular persistence, traveling across Kalmykia during the years of collectivization to urge lamas to return to their monasteries and preserve the community's institutional presence, and championing the consolidation of small khuruls into fewer, better-staffed monasteries: their number fell from 76 to 40 by 1926, before popular protest at the resulting travel distances to the nearest khurul forced a partial reversal, to 47 monasteries by early 1927.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 155.</ref> Tepkin was arrested in 1931, charged among other things with opposing collectivization, and later died in exile in Kazakhstan, where he continued to perform religious services for deported fellow believers until his death.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 70, 75.</ref> In 1934, thirty-one Kalmyk clergy and laypeople linked to Dorzhiev's Leningrad circle were arrested in the fabricated "Khambo" case, accused of forming a "counter-revolutionary insurgent group" on his instructions; several of the accused had visited him in Leningrad repeatedly, and one Kalmyk lama, Chagdyr Erdniev, was arrested in Leningrad itself the same year for allegedly maintaining the liaison between Dorzhiev and the group.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", pp. 157–158.</ref>

The catastrophe that befell the Kalmyks went beyond the destruction of their religious institutions. In 1943, the Soviet state deported the entire Kalmyk people to Siberia and the Urals on the accusation of collaboration with the German occupation, abolishing the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic and dispersing the population across the USSR; most Buddhist cult objects were lost in the process, and the social space in which Buddhist ritual could function contracted to the purely domestic sphere for more than a decade.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 75.</ref>

The 1943 deportation was not the end of the story. Some Kalmyks — many of them already anti-Communist as former White Russian soldiers or their descendants — had volunteered for the German-organized Kalmyk Cavalry Corps after the Wehrmacht reached Kalmykia in 1942, and it was this collaboration that Stalin cited in ordering the deportation.<ref>Lopez, Donald S. (2025). ''Buddhism: A Journey Through History''. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 404–405.</ref> Retreating westward with the German army after Stalingrad, a group of Kalmyks eventually surrendered to American forces in Austria in 1945 and spent six years in a displaced-persons camp in Bavaria; barred from the United States under the 1948 Displaced Persons Act because they were not classified as European, they were admitted only after Alexandra Tolstoy intervened on their behalf, and in 1951 some two hundred Kalmyks settled in Freewood Acres, New Jersey, where they converted a garage into what is considered the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in North America. Four years later the Kalmyk monk Geshe Wangyal (1901–1983) arrived as temple priest; he went on to train Robert Thurman and Jeffrey Hopkins among the first generation of American Buddhist Studies scholars and to arrange the Dalai Lama's first visit to the United States in 1979 — an unlikely legacy of the Soviet destruction of Kalmyk Buddhism.<ref>Lopez (2025), ''Buddhism: A Journey Through History'', pp. 413–414.</ref>