Mongolia

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Mongolia entered the twentieth century as, in all likelihood, the most thoroughly Buddhist country on earth: in the 1920s, Buddhist monks made up over a quarter of the adult male population, and the Buddhist establishment's annual income rivaled that of the state itself. When the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) took power in 1921 with Soviet backing, it inherited a country in which Buddhism was not a religion competing among others but the entire framework of political legitimacy, healthcare, and education. The result was a decade and a half in which the "Buddhist question" was arguably the central problem of Mongolian internal life, and in which figures inside and outside the party attempted to negotiate, resist, or reconcile the revolutionary order with the Buddhist establishment, before that establishment was almost entirely destroyed between 1937 and 1939.

Buddhism in Mongolia

Tibetan Buddhism spread among the Mongols from the sixteenth century onward, eventually displacing earlier shamanic practice as the dominant religious framework of the Mongolian steppe. By the early twentieth century, Buddhist monasteries functioned as the country's schools, hospitals, libraries, and courts, and monastic education was, for most Mongolian men, the only education available. At the apex of this system stood the Bogd Gegeen (Jebtsundamba Khutuktu), the line of reincarnate lamas who had served as Mongolia's religious leaders since the late seventeenth century. The Eighth Bogd Gegeen (1869–1924) proclaimed Mongolian independence from Qing China in 1911 and ruled as head of state until 1921, when the revolutionary government reduced him to a constitutional monarch under MPRP supervision; he retained that ceremonial role until his death in 1924.

Population figures from the interwar period illustrate the scale of the institution. In 1914, out of a total population of 611,098, some 128,428 people were lamas. By 1921 there were approximately 150 monasteries and 115,000 lamas in the country, of whom about 40,000 lived permanently within monastery walls. By 1926, lamas numbered 91,650 and made up 13.4 percent of the total population and more than a quarter of the male population. As late as 1935, monks still constituted roughly 48 percent of the adult male population, and the annual income of the Buddhist church nearly equaled that of the Mongolian state itself.

Because Buddhism had no rival tradition in Mongolia, whether in the form of another confession, a secular philosophical school, or an atheist intelligentsia, the country presented Soviet-aligned authorities with a religious landscape unlike any other in the socialist world. Soviet diplomats surveying Mongolia in the 1920s observed that no record of a native tradition of freethought or unbelief could be found there. This near-total religious homogeneity, combined with the institutional centrality of the monasteries to Mongolian civic life, meant that any attempt to reform, restrict, or eliminate Buddhism in Mongolia was necessarily an attempt to remake the country's entire social order, not merely to discipline a religious minority.

Radical Buddhism in Mongolia

"Radical Buddhism" in the Mongolian context refers to the efforts of clergy, political figures, and laypeople either to argue for the compatibility of Buddhism with the revolutionary order of the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR), or to resist the Soviet-directed campaign against the Buddhist establishment, whether through theological argument, political negotiation, or armed uprising. These efforts unfolded between the 1921 revolution and the near-total destruction of Mongolian Buddhism in 1937–1939.

Buddhism within the revolutionary elite

One of the more striking features of early Mongolian revolutionary politics is the degree to which Buddhist belief extended into the leadership of the MPRP itself. Party congresses in the 1920s recorded declarations that the party, "like the people, reveres religion." A. Amar, Minister of the National Economy, was a sincere Buddhist who argued for granting the clergy political rights and opposed radical religious change. Ts. Zh. Zhamtsarano warned against the persecution of monasteries, and E.-D. Rinchino argued sharply against what he called "storming the lamas." The government's own Religious Affairs Administration, tasked with managing state-church relations, included eight lamas and five lay believers, several of them senior party figures; Soviet diplomats complained that these representatives "solidarized" with the clergy rather than restraining them. Officials sent their own children to monasteries for education, and there were documented cases of ministers, including the Minister of War and the Minister of Internal Affairs, entering the monkhood.

The campaign for the Ninth Bogd Gegeen

The most significant political action of the Buddhist clergy in the mid-1920s was the campaign to recognize a ninth reincarnation of the Bogd Gegeen following the death of the eighth in 1924. From the summer of 1926, word spread of a candidate found near the Iroi monastery, and the campaign in his favor gained considerable popular support. The Mongolian leadership was divided: Prime Minister Ts. Dambadorj opposed recognition, while Amar held that the government could not refuse it, since the people would not tolerate a denial. The compromise reached at a July 1926 MPRP Central Committee session referred the question to the Dalai Lama, a solution Dambadorj privately welcomed because he expected the resulting delay to give the government time to implement its program of splitting the clergy and conducting antireligious agitation. The Fifth MPRP Congress, in October 1926, cited a prophetic tradition holding that there would be no ninth reincarnation of the Bogd, a notable instance of a Soviet-aligned party congress deploying Buddhist doctrinal argument to settle a political question. The question was formally shelved, though rumors of new candidates recurred for years.

The progressivist strategy

From the mid-1920s, Soviet advisers pressed Mongolian authorities to cultivate a "progressivist," or renovationist, current within Mongolian Buddhism, modeled on the renovationist movement Soviet officials were simultaneously promoting among Buddhists in Buryatia and Kalmykia. (See. Russia and the Soviet Union.) The strategy called for a reform movement that would advocate the voluntary renunciation of private property by lamas, stricter monastic discipline, the abolition of honorary titles and hierarchical privilege, and the abolition of the institution of reincarnate lamas, while declaring solidarity with the existing political order. The long-term plan was cynical: once such a reform movement had gained influence, the government could gradually withdraw its support and transition from a platform of "improving religion" to open antireligious propaganda.

In practice, the strategy achieved little, because Mongolia had no secular intellectual tradition, no atheist population, and no antireligious press to draw on; even antireligious propaganda had to be disguised as religious content. The clearest example is the so-called Lama Journal, launched in June 1936 under the nominal auspices of a renovationist current but in reality edited under the control of the Secret-Political Department of the Mongolian Interior Ministry's security service, with Soviet specialists exercising the actual editorial control. Its stated purpose was to promote "the purity of religion," while its real purpose was to divide the clergy and encourage submission to state authority; conservative lamas suspected a trap immediately, while middle and lower clergy responded somewhat more favorably.

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. 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.

The most serious expression of Buddhist-led resistance was the Khubsugul Uprising of April–October 1932, which spread across much of the country and drew in not only lamas and feudal lords but ordinary herders, some collective farm members, and even MPRP and Revolutionary Youth League members. Its immediate cause was the "left excesses" of the preceding years, above all forced collectivization. The Mongolian army itself proved unreliable, and some units defected to the rebels; Soviet advisers warned Moscow that soldiers could not be relied upon to march against the lamas. Suppressing the uprising required direct Soviet military intervention, including mechanized units, aviation, and a Red Army cavalry division.

Peljidiin Genden and the defense of the church

The Khubsugul Uprising brought down the "left" leadership responsible for the preceding years' forced collectivization and religious suppression, and brought to power Peljidiin Genden (Пэлжидийн Гэндэн; 1892/1895–1937), who served as Mongolian Prime Minister from July 1932 until March 1936. Genden had risen through the Revolutionary Youth League and the MPRP to become a leading figure of the party's "Countryside Faction" by the late 1920s, and he had participated, without particular enthusiasm, in the leftist assault on monastic property earlier in his career; on this point he was no different from the rest of the party leadership, which by the late 1920s was united in treating the lamas as a problem requiring a solution, even if its members disagreed sharply on the remedy. What distinguished him from his colleagues was not doctrine but origin and instinct: born to a herder family and raised in a religiously observant household, he retained throughout his political life what his biographer describes as an inherited reverence for religion and respect for the clergy. Kaplonski describes Genden's public conduct across these years as "chameleon-like," moving between the roles of young radical, property-confiscating leftist, and protector of the church without any single role exhausting his character. Genden left no philosophical writings and made no systematic argument for the compatibility of Buddhism and Marxism-Leninism; his defense of the church was political and instinctive rather than theoretical.

Genden's own acquiescence in the anti-religious campaigns of the "left" period, prior to his premiership, is described by his biographer as "a deal with his conscience": he held private reservations about the pace of collectivization and religious suppression from at least October 1930, but conformed publicly with the majority position at the Eighth MPRP Congress that year. By the time of his election as Prime Minister in July 1932, he had become, in his biographer's assessment, "the most stable and robust politician" of the period and the informal leader of internal opposition to the leftist line.

As Prime Minister, Genden ended the forced laicization of monks, adopted a more differentiated policy toward different strata of the clergy, and had the state declare that it renounced interference in religious affairs on the sole condition that the church not interfere in the affairs of state. The party's own rules were amended to remove the requirement of Marxist-Leninist ideological conformity and to explicitly permit members "free conscience in matters of belief," including the making of voluntary offerings to lamas. Under this more tolerant policy, the monastic population rebounded sharply from the depleted levels of the "left" period: to 82,529 lamas in 1933, 87,774 by early 1934, and roughly 90,000 by the middle of the decade, with some 18,000 men, including 441 demobilized soldiers and officers, entering the monkhood in 1933 alone.

Between December 1932 and January 1936, Genden met with Stalin seven times in Moscow, and the surviving record of these meetings documents his sustained resistance to Soviet pressure on the "lama question." At a December 1933 meeting, Stalin characterized the Buddhist clergy as a "state within a state" that no sovereign government could tolerate, and at a November 1934 meeting he proposed a strategy of gradual "encirclement" of clerical influence through secular schools and medical services rather than frontal assault. By December 1935, the confrontation had sharpened into open accusation, with Stalin framing the issue as a stark choice between the lamas and Mongolian national independence, a framing Genden's four years in office had consistently refused to accept as a genuine either/or. At a final meeting on January 7, 1936, Genden appeared to abandon open resistance, and that same evening, at a reception at the Mongolian legation in Moscow, an argument broke out between Genden and Stalin so heated that it gave rise to a persistent story, still repeated today, that Genden smashed Stalin's pipe or struck him outright. Both Roshchin and Kaplonski treat the story with considerable skepticism, Roshchin concluding that it is "probably a literary hyperbole, an invention, a legend," and Kaplonski identifying it simply as "Mongolian political folklore." Genden was removed from office in March 1936, ostensibly for reasons of ill health, and was arrested by the Soviet secret police in Sochi in July 1937. He was executed in Moscow that November. Genden's removal opened the way to the final destruction of the Mongolian church over the following three years: Bawden judges bluntly that his fall "opened the way to the final solution," and Kaplonski treats it as one of the clearest instances of direct Soviet intervention in Mongolian domestic political life.

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 Enzön-Khambo, the head abbot of Ulaanbaatar's monasteries, were sentenced to death. 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. 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.

Sinitsyn draws an explicit comparison with the 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. 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.

Literature in English

• Kaplonski, Christopher (2014). The Lama Question: Violence, Sovereignty, and Exception in Early Socialist Mongolia. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. [A monograph-length study of the Mongolian state's campaign against the Buddhist clergy in the 1930s, with particular attention to the legal and bureaucratic mechanisms of the purges and to Genden's political trajectory.]
• Bawden, C. R. (1968). The Modern History of Mongolia (Kegan Paul International, 2nd ed. 1989). New York: Praeger. [The standard general history of twentieth-century Mongolia in English; provides the fullest English-language narrative context for the MPRP's religious policy and Genden's tenure as Prime Minister.]

Literature in Russian

• Sinitsyn, Fedor L. (Синицын Ф.Л.) (2013). "Положение буддийской конфессии в Монголии в 1924–1944 гг." [The Position of the Buddhist Confession in Mongolia, 1924–1944]. In: Popova, I. F., & Skrynnikova, T. D. (Eds), Страны и народы Востока [Countries and Peoples of the East], Вып. XXXIV: Центральная Азия и Дальний Восток [Central Asia and the Far East]: 49–72. Moscow: Vostochnaya Literatura. [The principal archival study of Soviet-Mongolian religious policy in this period, drawing extensively on Soviet foreign-ministry records; the source for most of the statistical and institutional detail in this entry.]
• Roshchin, Sergei K. (Рощин С.К.) (2008). П. Гэндэн. Монгольский национальный лидер. Штрихи биографии [P. Genden: Mongolian National Leader — Biographical Sketches]. Moscow: Institut Vostokovedeniya RAN. [The fullest available biography of Genden, reconstructing his seven meetings with Stalin from Soviet archival minutes and offering the most detailed account of his defense of the Buddhist establishment.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Mongolia." The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 24 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Mongolia.