Editing Russia and the Soviet Union (section)

=== Institutional history: congresses, the "golden age," and repression ===

The renovationists' declarations of loyalty produced, through the early 1920s, a genuine institutional settlement, one facilitated by the broader Soviet project of transcultural, post-imperial governance in the Baikal-Mongolian borderlands: Ivan Sablin credits Dorzhiev with playing "an important role in rallying official support for the Buryat-Mongol Republic and securing special status for Buddhism" within the new BMASSR, established in 1923 as a nominally national but in practice religiously and politically negotiated autonomy.<ref>Sablin (2016), ''Governing Post-Imperial Siberia'', p. 4.</ref> The First Spiritual Congress of Buryat Buddhists convened at the Atsagat datsan in October 1922 under renovationist leadership, adopting the "Regulation on the Administration of the Affairs of the Siberian Buddhist Clergy" and the "Statute on the Internal Life of Monastics in the Siberian Buddhist Hides," and a Congress of Kalmyk clergy followed in July 1923, at which reformers unsuccessfully proposed extending decision-making power over monastic finances to an assembly of clergy and laity, a democratizing move that alarmed the security services as a possible parallel to contemporary reforms within the Russian Orthodox Church.<ref>Tsyrempilov (2019), "Сангха в эпоху упадка", p. 362; Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 154.</ref> Because Buddhism now carried the enhanced legal status of a "national minority" religion, the 1918 Soviet decree separating church and state was not extended to Buryatia, an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic from 1923, until December 1925.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 65.</ref> This period, up to 1925, has been described as the "golden age of Buddhism in Russia," or a "religious NEP," marked by a genuine flourishing of religious construction and institutional life, and by Moscow's hope of using Buddhist intermediaries to extend Soviet influence across Buddhist Asia.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 65.</ref> The characterization has not gone unchallenged: Sipeykin argues that the relationship of these years is better described not as a "golden age" or honeymoon but as a symbiosis in which each side sought to use the other for its own ends, while Tsyrempilov characterizes the same period as one of "saṅgha in decline," with institutional weakening already under way well before the repression of the late 1920s and 1930s set in.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 152; Tsyrempilov (2019), "Сангха в эпоху упадка", p. 363.</ref> By 1925, Buryatia counted 7,628 registered clergy and 44 datsans, and Kalmykia 1,904 clergy and 45 khuruls.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 65.</ref>

The All-Union Congress of Buddhists, held in Moscow in January 1927 with 48 delegates and representatives of the Soviet secret police in attendance, confirmed the renovationists' victory on nearly every disputed question, adopted a renovationist-inspired statute, and established an All-Union Spiritual Council as the confession's supreme governing body.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 67–68.</ref> By 1927–1928, Buryatia had 48 datsans and up to 9,100 lamas, and the number of Kalmyk khuruls had actually risen, from 45 to 61, since 1925.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 68.</ref>

The turn toward repression began in 1925 and accelerated sharply after 1929. Two external factors contributed alongside domestic ones: the failure of the Soviet diplomatic mission to Tibet in 1924–1925, and the redirection of Soviet revolutionary hopes toward China, both of which reduced the strategic value of the "Buddhist factor" that had underwritten the renovationists' leverage with Moscow.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 65–66; Andreyev (2003), ''Soviet Russia and Tibet'', pp. 162, 293.</ref> Internal OGPU directives from this period instructed Soviet agents to "cautiously induce the renovationists themselves to bring about the separation of laypeople from the clergy," treating the renovationists' own reform program as a tool for splitting and ultimately discrediting the saṅgha as a whole, a strategy that closely paralleled the contemporaneous Soviet management of the Russian Orthodox "Living Church" movement.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 155.</ref> Stalin himself denounced what he called "the absurd theory of the identity of the Communist and Buddhist doctrines" in the party press in January 1929, closing off the ideological space the renovationists had been trying to hold open; a Society of the Militant Godless established a Buryat-Mongol branch the same year and, together with a wave of new taxes and building-material denials, forced the closure of the first datsan, at Alar, before 1929 was out.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', p. 234.</ref> Clergy were stripped of land-use rights, religious communities lost the status of legal persons, and forced collectivization from 1929 brought the confrontation to a head; lamas in some areas participated in armed resistance, and some monasteries were found to be sheltering weapons and maintaining contact with anti-Soviet forces abroad.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 70–71.</ref>

Economic strangulation proved as effective as outright prohibition. Clergy of every rank were subjected to punitive taxation regardless of actual income, with minimum assessments in Buryatia reaching 100 rubles by 1932 and wealthier lamas taxed at 600–700 rubles, sums that, if unpaid, resulted in the forced sale of a household's entire property "down to the bed and dwelling"; men of religious status were additionally conscripted for unpaid road repair and logging duties into their fifties and sixties, and temple xylograph printing blocks and manuscripts, some containing unique Tibetan and Mongolian texts, were requisitioned by Red Army units billeted on former monastery land and burned for fuel or torn up for cigarette paper.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", pp. 155–156.</ref> Dorzhiev's own Ацагатская medical school for Tibetan medicine, which he had tried to shield by proposing its transfer to the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad, was finally shut down in 1932 after the discovery of an alleged "counter-revolutionary group" there; the number of practicing Tibetan-medicine physicians in Buryatia, which Dorzhiev put at some 300 in the mid-1920s, had fallen to roughly 200 by 1931 and to no more than 40 across the entire republic within another year.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", pp. 156–157.</ref> Dorzhiev repeatedly petitioned the authorities against these measures, addressing memoranda to People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin and to Pyotr Smidovich, chairman of the VTsIK's Special Commission on Cult Affairs, protesting that the destruction of Buddhist libraries and the impoverishment of the clergy amounted to religious persecution in violation of the freedom of conscience the Soviet constitution nominally guaranteed.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", pp. 156–157.</ref> In 1933, recognizing that the internal split had become a liability rather than an asset, Dorzhiev dispatched couriers from Leningrad to several Transbaikal datsans with a directive calling on renovationists and conservatives alike to set aside their disputes, unite their remaining forces, and abandon any open resistance to Soviet power; OGPU informants also recorded him privately lamenting, in these last years, that the party's youthful new cadres had betrayed Lenin's own more moderate testament and were provoking a popular backlash through their heavy-handed treatment of believers and peasants alike.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", pp. 157–159.</ref> A returning pilgrim, the lama Gatapov, reported to the OGPU around the same time that the Thirteenth Dalai Lama continued to hold Dorzhiev in the highest esteem for his historical role in preserving Tibetan independence, even as the Soviet "Buddhist factor" that had once made such ties an asset had turned them into a liability in the eyes of his own government.<ref>Sipeykin (2024), "Агван Доржиев и конец", p. 159.</ref>

The heaviest wave of repression followed the December 1934 assassination of Sergei Kirov, after which the destruction of Buddhist institutions in Buryatia and Kalmykia proceeded with little further restraint.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', p. 248.</ref> In August and November 1937, NKVD units raided the Leningrad Buddhist temple that Dorzhiev had built, arresting and summarily shooting the handful of lamas still resident there, including Dorzhiev's personal physician, Balzhir Zodboev; the temple itself was confiscated by the state the following year.<ref>Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', pp. 247–249.</ref> By the late 1930s the state had turned to outright terror. In Buryatia, 1,701 Buddhist clergy were repressed between 1917 and 1941, of whom 520 were sentenced to death; more than 1,500 clergy were repressed in Kalmykia, and every Buddhist monastery and temple in the USSR was closed, many of them destroyed outright.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 73.</ref> Soviet Buddhologists, including scholars associated with Fyodor Stcherbatsky, were repressed alongside the clergy they studied, among them Andrey Vostrikov, a specialist in Tibetan literature arrested in April 1937 and shot the same year, and Tsyben Zhamtsarano, who had helped found the Buryat-Mongol autonomy in 1917 and later worked at Leningrad's Institute of Oriental Studies before his own arrest in 1937.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", p. 74; Snelling (1993), ''Buddhism in Russia'', pp. 248–249.</ref> Soviet authorities justified the particular severity of the anti-Buddhist campaign partly on geopolitical grounds, citing the confession's foreign spiritual center in British-influenced Tibet and suspected Japanese exploitation of the "Buddhist factor" in East Asia.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Советское государство и буддисты", pp. 74–75.</ref>