Editing Mongolia (section)

=== Armed resistance ===

Buddhist communities in Mongolia did not respond to encroaching state control passively. When authorities attempted to collect a livestock tax from the San-Beise monastery in August 1926, monks stormed the local administrative offices; troops opened fire on the assembled lamas, killing two and wounding about ten, and the episode's ringleaders were executed.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", pp. 54–55.</ref> Soviet diplomats reported with satisfaction that the incident had undermined clerical authority and demonstrated that the party and government were stronger than the lamas, but the episode also shocked the country, since Mongolian soldiers had never before fired on Mongolian monks.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", p. 55.</ref>

The far more serious crisis came with the forced collectivization campaigns of 1929–1932, above all the ''jas'' campaign that confiscated the livestock and property of monasteries and nobles between 1930 and 1932.<ref>Morozova (2003), "Revolutionary Mongols", p. 25.</ref> Local party enthusiasts acted largely on their own initiative, seizing monastic herds by force and profaning objects of Buddhist worship; Morozova estimates that the resulting revolts, which began in March 1930, drew in around seventy percent of the population before Soviet military intervention suppressed them by October 1932, at a cost of roughly ten thousand lives.<ref>Morozova (2003), "Revolutionary Mongols", p. 25.</ref> The largest single rising, centered on the western provinces of Arkhangai and Khövsgöl and often called the Khövsgöl Uprising, broke out in April 1932 and amounted in practice to a civil war rather than a purely religious revolt: lamas goaded into action by radical socialist activists provided much of its early leadership, but ordinary herders, some collective-farm members, and even MPRP and Revolutionary Youth League members joined the fighting, and some army units defected to the rebels.<ref>Kaplonski, Christopher (2014). ''The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia''. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, pp. 38–39.</ref> Reviewing the official Mongolian and Soviet historiography that blamed the rising on the scheming of reactionary lamas and nobles, Bawden argued instead that it was above all the misery and muddle into which Mongolia had been plunged by the party's own policies that accounts for the scale of the uprisings, and that the revolt owed nothing to foreign instigation.<ref>Bawden (1968), ''The Modern History of Mongolia'', pp. 314–315.</ref> Suppressing the revolt nonetheless required direct Soviet military intervention, including mechanized units, aviation, and a Red Army cavalry division, and its leaders were tried and, unlike many later victims of the terror, remain unrehabilitated in Mongolia to this day.<ref>Kaplonski (2014), ''The Lama Question'', pp. 38–39, 87.</ref>

The main goal of the ''jas'' campaign had been to destroy the monasteries' corporate economic structure and replace it with local party organs; although this aim was achieved to a considerable extent, the cultural authority of the clergy proved harder to dislodge, and Mongolian herders continued through the 1930s to treat lamas as their teachers, doctors, and craftsmen.<ref>Morozova (2003), "Revolutionary Mongols", p. 25.</ref> The years 1933–1935 brought a short and relative economic relief after the collectivization drive: the monastic population rebounded, party membership itself contracted sharply as the MPRP retrenched from the overreach of the preceding years, and lamas briefly regained titles, built new temples, and increased in number, before the state again tightened its taxation of the monasteries and interference in the appointment of Buddhist hierarchs.<ref>Morozova (2003), "Revolutionary Mongols", p. 25; Kaplonski (2014), ''The Lama Question'', pp. 39–40.</ref>