Editing Mongolia (section)

=== The destruction of Mongolian Buddhism, 1937–1939 ===

With Genden removed and his successors, first A. Amar and then, from March 1939, Kh. Choibalsan, willing to implement Soviet policy without reservation, the destruction of Mongolian Buddhism proceeded rapidly. Show trials of alleged "lama counter-revolutionary organizations" provided legal cover for mass execution of senior clergy; in October 1937, nineteen of twenty-three defendants tried alongside the Yonzon Khamba were sentenced to death.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", pp. 68–69.</ref> Between 1936 and 1938, some 50 monasteries were relocated away from the country's eastern and southern borders and approximately 30,000 lamas left monastic life under official pressure; roughly 70 monasteries remained by 1938, and by 1939 the Buddhist establishment had been effectively liquidated, with some 18,000 lamas executed in total.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", p. 71.</ref> Kaplonski's figures for the monastic population illustrate the speed of the collapse still more starkly: 83,203 lamas were still recorded living in monasteries in September 1937, a number that had fallen to 562 by 25 July 1938, with most executions of lamas concentrated in the months up to that point.<ref>Kaplonski (2015), "Criminal Lamas", pp. 243–244.</ref> Only the Gandantegchinlen monastery in Ulaanbaatar was permitted to survive, reopening in 1944 as a wartime concession to Buddhist sentiment; it remained the sole officially functioning Buddhist monastery in the country until 1990.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", p. 71.</ref>

Alongside the mass killings, the terror continued to be administered, at least formally, through legal channels: a second Special Commission, operating from October 1937 to April 1939 specifically to handle cases connected to the trial of the Yonzon Khamba, sentenced close to 26,000 people in some fifty sessions, of whom 20,474 were shot, though it remains unclear how many of these were lamas.<ref>Kaplonski (2015), "Criminal Lamas", pp. 248–249.</ref> Kaplonski argues that this persistence of legal form alongside mass killing was not incidental: the emphasis on courts, sentencing procedures, and specific criminal charges (most often tax evasion rather than religious activity as such) functioned as a performance of state sovereignty by a government that could not afford to be seen suspending the rule of law it was simultaneously trying to establish.<ref>Kaplonski (2015), "Criminal Lamas", pp. 245–246.</ref> He further argues that the cumulative campaign against the lamas meets the definition of genocide set out in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a characterization intended to underline the severity of the destruction rather than to displace the more common Mongolian historiographical framing of the period as political terror.<ref>Kaplonski (2015), "Criminal Lamas", pp. 244–245.</ref> The legal tightening around the clergy had in fact begun before the terror: a 1934 revision of the law separating religion and state confirmed the 1929 ban on recognizing reincarnations and newly restricted entry into the monkhood to one son in three per family, and only from the age of eighteen, before the 1937–1938 measures went further still and prohibited new ordinations outright.<ref>Kaplonski (2015), "Criminal Lamas", p. 250; Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", p. 68.</ref>

Sinitsyn draws an explicit comparison with the [[Russia and the Soviet Union|Soviet case]]: in Buryatia and Kalmykia, some alternative to Buddhism existed, in the form of secular institutions, an atheist stratum of the population, and open antireligious propaganda, whereas in Mongolia none of these conditions held, and even party members and soldiers remained believers throughout.<ref>Sinitsyn (2013), "Положение буддийской конфессии", p. 72.</ref> As a result, the campaign against Mongolian Buddhism achieved its final results only through mass repression by the security services directly, rather than through the gradual institutional decay that had been the original Soviet plan.

The last assault was made on the cultural front. The Tibetan and Mongolian writing systems, long the basic means of Buddhist instruction, were targeted for replacement on the theory that they tied readers to concepts the revolutionaries considered incapable of expressing modern, secular content; in March 1941 the Central Committee of the MPRP announced the adoption of Cyrillic as the new Mongolian alphabet, a step crucial to the formation of a secular, Soviet-style educational system.<ref>Morozova (2003), "Revolutionary Mongols", p. 25.</ref> It had taken the revolutionaries roughly twenty years, from 1921 to 1941, to dismantle the great and powerful Buddhist sangha of Outer Mongolia.