Russia and the Soviet Union

⚠  Awaiting Peer Review  ⚠ This encyclopedia entry is complete but has not yet undergone review by an area specialist.

At first glance, "Russia and the Soviet Union" may seem an unlikely entry for a project concerned with Buddhism. In fact, this article concerns two Mongolian Buddhist peoples incorporated into the Russian state: the Buryats of Transbaikalia, around Lake Baikal, and the Kalmyks of the lower Volga steppe, a Western Mongol people whose ancestors migrated there in the seventeenth century. Buddhism had been an officially recognized confession of the Russian Empire since 1741, and by the early twentieth century it remained the central institutional and intellectual framework of Buryat and Kalmyk life, with the two communities together numbering just over half a million believers on the eve of the Revolution. Radical Buddhism in this setting took the form of the renovationist movement (обновленческое движение), led above all by the Buryat monk Agvan Dorzhiev (Агван Доржиев), which argued for the compatibility of Buddhist teaching with Soviet power and briefly secured official toleration before being destroyed, along with the rest of Soviet Buddhism, in the Stalinist terror of the late 1930s.

Buddhism in Russia before the October Revolution

Buddhism was formally recognized as a legitimate faith of the Russian Empire's eastern subjects by imperial rescript of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna in 1741. By the early twentieth century it was deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and intellectual life of both the Buryats and the Kalmyks, each of whom maintained extensive networks of monasteries, Buryat datsans and Kalmyk khuruls, respectively, a substantial clerical class, and traditions of Buddhist scholarship conducted in Tibetan and Mongolian. By 1917, there were more than 11,000 Buddhist clergy in Buryatia and more than 2,000 in Kalmykia, although John Snelling's account of the same period gives a somewhat different figure of roughly 16,000 lamas in some 36 Buryat datsans in 1916, a discrepancy that illustrates how unevenly the confession's demographic history has been documented.

Buddhism's institutional position among the Buryats had been shaped for more than a century and a half by tsarist policies of simultaneous toleration and control. In 1764 Catherine the Great created the elective office of Pandido Khambo Lama as supreme religious authority of the Transbaikal Buddhists, formally severing their subordination to the foreign hierarchs of the Jebtsundamba Khutuktu in Mongolia and the Dalai Lama in Tibet, and, on pain of death, forbidding contact between Buryat monks and their coreligionists abroad. These arrangements were codified in the 1853 "Regulation on the Lamaist Clergy" (Положение о ламайском духовенстве), which additionally imposed strict quotas on the number of monks, monasteries, and temples, and restricted monks' movement, public ritual, and religious publishing. The 1905 Revolution brought a surge of Buryat political activism, both secular and clerical: congresses held that year in Chita and Irkutsk demanded, among other things, that the demeaning term "lamaism" be replaced with "Buddhism" and that the discriminatory 1853 Regulation be repealed. The Tsarist government's Manifesto on Religious Toleration of 1905 granted the first demand, but repeated attempts by a Special Conference on Religious Affairs to revise the 1853 Regulation stalled and never resulted in new legislation. A comparable liberalizing proposal drafted by Buryat lay and clerical activists, including Dorzhiev, immediately after the February Revolution of 1917 met the same fate, overtaken by the October Revolution and the Civil War before it could be enacted.

In the absence of secular scientific, educational, medical, and cultural institutions suited to nomadic pastoral life, the Buddhist clergy functioned as something close to a national intelligentsia for both peoples, and monasteries served as the only permanent centers of intellectual and spiritual life. Soviet diplomats and ethnographers of the 1920s, examining this situation with some bewilderment, described the Buryats' relationship to Buddhism as "not only a national faith, but an attractive calling that elevates a simple person to a height unattainable in other circumstances." Buddhist belief permeated Kalmyk daily life to a comparable degree; a Kalmyk congress in 1917 declared that Buddhist teaching helped ordinary Kalmyks make sense of their lives.

Before the October Revolution, no antireligious propaganda had been conducted in the traditionally Buddhist regions of the empire, and no antibuddhist literature existed. As in Mongolia, the near-total absence of any rival confession, secular philosophical tradition, or antireligious current meant that Buddhism was not merely the dominant religion among the Buryats and Kalmyks but the entire institutional and intellectual framework of their societies, a fact that would decisively shape both the possibilities and the limits of accommodation with Soviet power after 1917.

Buddhism in the Soviet Union

The October Revolution confronted Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhist leaders with an acute dilemma, since the new Soviet state was formally committed to atheism and to the eventual abolition of organized religion. The secular and religious segments of Buryat society reacted to the fall of the monarchy in strikingly different ways. Buryat national activists, who had organized two pan-Buryat congresses already in 1917, welcomed the collapse of the empire as an opening toward national autonomy and had little sympathy for monarchist restoration. The official Buddhist hierarchy, by contrast, retained a deep attachment to the older model of a sacralizing autocrat who patronized and protected the faith, and consequently gravitated toward the Civil War's counter-revolutionary forces. In July 1919 a congress of Buryat clergy and laity in Chita, convened to select a new Pandido Khambo Lama, sent an effusive telegram of loyalty to Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak as Supreme Ruler; Kolchak, for his part, went so far as to assume the traditionally monarchical prerogative of confirming Khambo Lamas, and in December 1919 created a parallel office for the Buddhists of Uryankhai (Tuva). In eastern Transbaikalia, the warlord Ataman Grigory Semyonov likewise cultivated Buddhist clergy and Buddhist symbolism in support of his pan-Mongolist ambitions, as did his ally Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, who styled himself defender of the "Yellow Faith."

A more radical response to the crisis came from Lubsan-Samdan Tsydenov (Лубсан-Самдан Цыденов), abbot of the Kudun datsan, who in January 1919 proclaimed himself "Dharmaraja of the Three Worlds" and divine theocratic ruler of a short-lived Buddhist state in the Khudun valley of central Transbaikalia, known as the Balagat theocracy. Modeled on a constitutional republic, with an elected president, a legislative assembly (the Bolshoi Suglan), and suffrage from the age of fifteen, the state consciously renounced any standing army as an instrument of violence; it was crushed in turn by Semyonov's forces and then by the Bolsheviks, and Tsydenov himself died in exile in Novonikolaevsk (Novosibirsk) in May 1922. Ivan Sablin's cartographic reconstruction of the period situates the Balagat theocracy among a whole series of competing post-imperial state projects in the Baikal-Mongolian borderlands, of which the Soviet-sponsored Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (BMASSR), established in 1923, would be the only one to endure.

Most clergy, however, took no side in the war, and among the Kalmyks the head of the Buddhist community, shadjin-lama Ch. Baldanov, supported the White movement outright, prompting Kalmyk émigrés to later found a "Union for the Aid of Buddhists in Russia" in Istanbul. It was only once the Bolsheviks had firmly re-established control over Transbaikalia in 1920 that a current within Buddhist leadership, the renovationist movement, chose to declare its support for Soviet power instead, hoping that the Revolution's national-liberation, anti-imperialist character would extend Soviet patronage to the religions of national minorities.

Agvan Dorzhiev

➣ Main article: Agvan Dorzhiev

The central figure of Russian radical Buddhism was Agvan Lobsan Dorzhiev (Агван Лобсан Доржиев; c. 1853–1938), a Buryat monk who trained at the Gomang datsang of Drepung monastery in Lhasa and rose to become tutor and diplomatic envoy of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, and later the leading figure of the Buddhist renovationist movement after 1917. Dorzhiev and his associates argued, in written theses and in oral addresses to Buddhist congregations, that Buddhism was compatible with, and in some formulations equivalent to, the Marxist-Leninist worldview: both rejected a creator God, both preached the liberation of the oppressed, and the saṅgha prefigured the socialist commune. These arguments secured the movement a real, if temporary, institutional purchase with Soviet authorities during the 1920s, before Dorzhiev was arrested at the Atsagat datsan on 13 November 1937 and died in the prison hospital of Ulan-Ude on 29 January 1938; his case was formally dropped for lack of evidence in 1956.

The Buryats

Among the Buryats, the renovationist current had roots predating the Revolution, and had already split the community by the late nineteenth century between reformers seeking a return to what they described as the original moral purity of early Buddhist teaching and conservatives defending existing monastic practice. Dorzhiev formalized the movement at a Buddhist Council held at the Atsagat datsan in October 1922, where reformers committed themselves to giving up material luxury, tightening monastic discipline, centralizing the administration of monastery funds, and organizing communal agricultural labor so that monks would cease to be a burden on the laboring population; opponents, who called themselves "conservatives," denounced Dorzhiev as the "Red Gushri Khan" for what they saw as his willful distortion of the Dharma. The security services took a close interest in this rivalry: internal OGPU reports from Buryat-Mongolia meticulously catalogued the mutual denunciations exchanged by renovationists and conservatives, who accused each other by turns of counter-revolutionary sympathies, illegal emigration agitation, and even sorcery, "hadkha," blamed by conservative lamas for the deaths and illnesses of renovationist opponents; the renovationist leader Sh. Dugarzhapov was murdered by conservative partisans at the Aginsky datsan during this factional strife. Renovationist lamas went so far as to bake ritual gurons in the shape of stars, hammers, and sickles, to mark the anniversary of the October Revolution in their datsans, and, in at least one recorded instance, to redecorate a monastic office with portraits of Bolshevik leaders and antireligious slogans, telling puzzled visitors simply that "such is now required, this is no longer Nicholas's time."

The Buryat Buddhist community proved remarkably resilient in the face of mounting Soviet pressure. Soviet authorities complained by the late 1920s that in some districts of Buryatia the Buddhist clergy was stronger than the local Soviet apparatus "not only quantitatively, but qualitatively," and noted with some alarm that lamas' work among the population was livelier and more engaging than official Soviet cultural events, drawing in communists and Komsomol members themselves. Buddhist clergy made up as much as 10 percent of the adult population in some eastern districts of Buryatia, and the republic ranked first in the entire USSR for religiosity. Even after antireligious campaigns intensified, officials had to concede that such propaganda had "almost no effect on the lamas," and when Buddhist leaders called on lamas who had left their monasteries under pressure to return, most did so. Renovationist and conservative lamas were, moreover, not permanently locked into their factional identities: by 1929, faced with mounting state pressure, the renovationist clergy of the Tsugol datsan abandoned reform altogether and openly re-aligned with their former conservative rivals in common resistance to Soviet power, to the visible dismay of the OGPU officers who had counted on the split to endure.

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, 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. By 1925, Buryatia counted 7,628 registered clergy and 44 datsans, and Kalmykia 1,904 clergy and 45 khuruls.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Wartime revival and partial restoration, 1941–1946

The Great Patriotic War brought an abrupt suspension of antireligious persecution, as the Soviet state chose to mobilize the religious convictions of its citizens in defense of the country. Surviving Buryat Buddhist leaders, including the former dyd-khambo-lama Kh. Galsanov and the young Bidya Dandaron (Бидия Дандарон, 1914–1974), a son of a prominent renovationist lama, became active again, and itinerant lamas traveled the Buddhist regions performing rites for believers. In 1944, Galsanov organized a collection among Buryat Buddhists for the Soviet Defense Fund, contributing 34,000 rubles of his own money toward a total Buddhist donation of roughly one million rubles, for which more than ten Buryat lamas received personal thanks from Stalin.

In 1945, Galsanov and his associates traveled to Moscow to petition for the reopening of a datsan in the Buryat-Mongolian ASSR; the Ivolginsk Datsan opened that year, followed by the Aginsky Datsan in 1946. In May 1946, a state-sanctioned Congress of Buddhist clergy in Ulan-Ude, attended by 43 clergy and lay delegates, elected a Provisional Central Spiritual Administration of Buddhists and adopted a statute modeled directly on the renovationist statutes of the 1920s. This restoration was entirely state-controlled, and only two monasteries were reopened out of the dozens that had existed before the purges; nonetheless, popular Buddhist religiosity survived underground, making possible the fuller revival of Buddhist institutional life in Russia that began at the end of the 1980s.

Literature in English

• Sablin, Ivan (2016). Governing Post-Imperial Siberia and Mongolia, 1911–1924: Buddhism, Socialism, and Nationalism in State and Autonomy Building. Abingdon: Routledge. [A transcultural political history of the Baikal-Mongolian borderlands that situates Dorzhiev and Buryat Buddhist institutions within the wider, contested field of post-imperial state- and autonomy-building projects, including the rival Buddhist theocracy of Lubsan-Samdan Tsydenov and Baron Ungern's pan-Asian schemes.]
• Andreyev, Alexandre (2003). Soviet Russia and Tibet: The Debacle of Secret Diplomacy, 1918–1930s. Leiden: Brill. [A detailed diplomatic history of Soviet-Tibetan relations that situates Dorzhiev's activity within the broader context of Soviet Central Asian strategy; the fullest English-language account of the geopolitical calculations behind Soviet tolerance of the renovationist movement, and of the 1922 Atsagat Council that launched it.]
• Snelling, John (1993). Buddhism in Russia: The Story of Agvan Dorzhiev, Lhasa's Emissary to the Tsar. Shaftesbury: Element Books. [The standard English-language biography of Dorzhiev, reproducing his written theses in translation and offering a detailed narrative of the renovationist movement's rise and destruction, including archival detail on Dorzhiev's 1937 arrest and 1938 death.]

Literature in Russian

• Sipeykin, Alexander V. (Сипейкин А.В.) (2024). "Агван Доржиев и конец «золотого века» буддизма в Советской России" [Agvan Dorzhiev and the End of the "Golden Age" of Buddhism in Soviet Russia]. Российская история 1: 149–160. [A recent archival study, drawing on OGPU documents, that reassesses the so-called "golden age" of Soviet Buddhism as a mutual instrumentalization rather than genuine tolerance, and traces the security services' management and eventual abandonment of the renovationist movement, along with the movement's economic strangulation and its leaders' private disillusionment.]
• Sinitsyn, Fedor L. (Синицын Ф.Л.) (2013). "Советское государство и буддисты (1917–1946 гг.)" [The Soviet State and the Buddhists, 1917–1946]. Российская история 1: 62–76. [The principal archival survey of Soviet religious policy toward Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists across the entire period; the source for much of the institutional and statistical detail in this entry, though its figures should be read alongside Sipeykin (2024) and Tsyrempilov (2019).]
• Tsyrempilov, Nikolay (Цыремпилов Н.) (2019). "Сангха в эпоху упадка. Реакции российских буддистов на Русскую революцию и Гражданскую войну" [The Sangha in the Age of Degradation: Responses of the Russian Buddhists to the Russian Revolution and Civil War]. Государство. Религия. Церковь в России и за рубежом 37(1/2): 347–370. [Challenges the "golden age" framing of early Soviet Buddhist policy and provides the fullest account of the Civil War-era divergence between secular Buryat nationalists and the official clergy, including the latter's support for Kolchak and Tsydenov's short-lived Balagat theocracy.]
• Andreyev, A. I. (Андреев А.И.) (2004). Храм Будды в Северной столице [The Temple of Buddha in the Northern Capital]. St. Petersburg: Nartang. [A dedicated history of the St. Petersburg Buddhist temple that Dorzhiev built, tracing its role as an institutional base for the renovationist movement through its 1938 closure.]
• Damdinov, A. V. (Дамдинов А.В.) (1997). "Агван Доржиев в обновленческом движении бурятского буддийского духовенства" [Agvan Dorzhiev in the Renovationist Movement of the Buryat Buddhist Clergy]. In: Бурятский буддизм: история и идеология [Buryat Buddhism: History and Ideology]. Ulan-Ude. [Traces the pre-revolutionary origins of the Buryat renovationist current and Dorzhiev's role within it before 1917.]
• Andreyev, A. I. (Андреев А.И.) (1992). "Агван Доржиев и судьбы буддийской религии в СССР" [Agvan Dorzhiev and the Fate of Buddhism in the USSR]. Реверс: Философско-религиозный и литературный альманах. St. Petersburg, pp. 193ff. [An early post-Soviet reassessment of Dorzhiev's strategy, drawing on newly accessible archival material.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Russia and the Soviet Union". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union.