Russia and the Soviet Union

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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. 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 and the Soviet Union

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.

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. During the Civil War, part of the Buryat clergy took an actively anti-Soviet position: lamas participated in the 1919 Chita congress of pan-Mongolists, and the lama L.-S. Tsydenov led a theocratic quasi-state in the Khori steppe from 1919 to 1922 that was hostile to both Reds and Whites alike. Among the Kalmyks, the head of the Buddhist community, shadjin-lama Ch. Baldanov, supported the White movement outright, and Kalmyk émigrés later founded a "Union for the Aid of Buddhists in Russia" in Istanbul.

Most clergy, however, took no side in the war, and a current within Buddhist leadership, the renovationist movement, chose instead to declare its support for Soviet power, 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 former tutor and diplomatic envoy of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama who became 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's arrest and death in Stalinist custody in 1937–1938.

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. A close associate of Dorzhiev, Damdin Munkozharov (Дамдин Мүнхэжаргал / Мүнхэжапов), served as pandido-khambo-lama, the senior office of the Buryat Buddhist community, from 1925 to 1932, and led the Buryat saṅgha through the increasingly difficult final years of the "golden age."

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.

The Kalmyks

Not all Kalmyk Buddhist leaders followed the renovationist strategy, but its most prominent Kalmyk exponent, shadjin-lama L. Tepkin (Л. Тепкин), elected head of the Kalmyk clergy at the Third Congress of Kalmyk Clergy in September 1925, 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. He 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.

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.

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

The renovationists' declarations of loyalty produced, through the early 1920s, a genuine institutional settlement. The First Spiritual Congress of Buryat Buddhists convened at the Atsagat datsan in October 1922 under renovationist leadership, and a Congress of Kalmyk clergy followed in July 1923 with the direct support of the Soviet Commissariats for Foreign Affairs and for Nationalities, which granted Dorzhiev a formal mandate of protection. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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

• Kaplonski, Christopher (2014). The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. [Concerns Mongolia rather than Russia directly, but provides essential comparative context for the destruction of Buddhist institutions elsewhere in the Soviet orbit; see the companion entry Mongolia.]
• 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.]
• 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 1926 written theses in translation and offering a detailed narrative of the renovationist movement's rise and destruction.]

Literature in Russian

• Sipeykin, A. 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.]
• 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 most of the institutional and statistical detail in this entry.]
• Tsyrempilov, N. (Цыремпилов Н.) (2019). "Сангха в период упадка. Реакции российских буддистов на Русскую революцию и Гражданскую войну" [Saṅgha in Decline: Russian Buddhist Responses to the Russian Revolution and Civil War]. Государство. Религия. Церковь 1/2(37): 347–370. [Challenges the "golden age" framing of early Soviet Buddhist policy, arguing for a reading of institutional decline already under way in the 1920s.]
• 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 24 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Russia_and_the_Soviet_Union.