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 Pre-Revolutionary 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, becoming head of an unusual theocratic autonomy that was itself only one of several competing state projects debated for the region in the years around the collapse of the Qing and Russian empires. He 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; some estimates for the same period put the proportion of lamas among adult Mongolian men as high as one in three. 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.

Buddhism in Revolutionary and Socialist Mongolia

Between the 1921 revolution and the near-total destruction of the Buddhist establishment in 1937–1939, the "question of the lamas" (lam naryn asuudal) dominated Mongolian internal politics. Clergy, political figures, and laypeople variously argued for the compatibility of Buddhism with the revolutionary order, negotiated an uneasy modus vivendi with the new state, or resisted the Soviet-directed campaign against the monasteries outright, whether through theological argument, political maneuvering, or armed uprising. Morozova divides the process into five successive phases: a tactical alliance between revolutionaries and lamas from 1921 to 1924; the political neutralization of the clergy from 1925 to 1928; forced economic collectivization from 1929 to 1932, which provoked mass revolt; a short-lived relaxation from 1933 to 1935; and, from 1936, the terror that liquidated the sangha entirely.

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. In the early 1920s, the revolutionaries still depended on the lamas' administrative experience and could not yet operate without their support in popular campaigns; many lamas occupied key government posts, and some even sat on the party's Central Committee. 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 death of the Eighth Bogd Gegeen in 1924 opened a protracted contest over whether a ninth reincarnation would be recognized. According to Bawden, a child candidate was found in north Mongolia almost immediately, and lamas of the late Khutuktu's own household began instructing the boy's mother in the details of the previous incarnation's life so that the child could pass the traditional tests; wary of a Mongolian-born rallying point for restorationist sentiment, the party's Central Committee ruled in July 1925 that there were insufficient grounds to accept the candidacy and dispatched a special commission to close the matter down. Popular agitation for a search continued, and by the summer of 1926 word had spread of a new candidate near the Iroi monastery, with the campaign in his favor gaining considerable support; Prime Minister Ts. Dambadorj opposed recognition, while Amar held that the government could not refuse it outright, 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. When the Fifth MPRP Congress and the National Assembly took up the matter that autumn, they cited a supposed prophetic tradition holding that the Eighth Khutuktu would not be reincarnated but reborn instead as a general of the mythical realm of Shambala, a notable instance of a Soviet-aligned body deploying Buddhist doctrinal argument, embedded in an official resolution, to settle a political question. Bawden notes that no such tradition appears anywhere in the Church's own official biographies of the Khutuktus, and suggests the party was instead exploiting a folk anxiety, already visible after the death of the sixth incarnation in 1848, that each new death might mark the end of the line. The question was formally shelved rather than settled, and sources differ slightly on when it was finally closed by decree: Morozova dates the outright ban on seeking reincarnations to 1928, while Bawden places the categorical prohibition in February 1929, after the Seventh Party Congress had expelled the party's right wing. Rumors of new candidates recurred even after this, and in 1930 a group of lamas and nobles were convicted in a major treason trial for having pursued the search in league with Japanese agents and the exiled Panchen Lama.

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 far more serious crisis came with the forced collectivization campaigns of 1929–1932, above all the jas campaign that confiscated the livestock and property of monasteries and nobles between 1930 and 1932. Local party enthusiasts acted largely on their own initiative, seizing monastic herds by force and profaning objects of Buddhist worship; Morozova estimates that the resulting revolts, which began in March 1930, drew in around seventy percent of the population before Soviet military intervention suppressed them by October 1932, at a cost of roughly ten thousand lives. The largest single rising, centered on the western provinces of Arkhangai and Khövsgöl and often called the Khövsgöl Uprising, broke out in April 1932 and amounted in practice to a civil war rather than a purely religious revolt: lamas goaded into action by radical socialist activists provided much of its early leadership, but ordinary herders, some collective-farm members, and even MPRP and Revolutionary Youth League members joined the fighting, and some army units defected to the rebels. Reviewing the official Mongolian and Soviet historiography that blamed the rising on the scheming of reactionary lamas and nobles, Bawden argued instead that it was above all the misery and muddle into which Mongolia had been plunged by the party's own policies that accounts for the scale of the uprisings, and that the revolt owed nothing to foreign instigation. Suppressing the revolt nonetheless required direct Soviet military intervention, including mechanized units, aviation, and a Red Army cavalry division, and its leaders were tried and, unlike many later victims of the terror, remain unrehabilitated in Mongolia to this day.

The main goal of the jas campaign had been to destroy the monasteries' corporate economic structure and replace it with local party organs; although this aim was achieved to a considerable extent, the cultural authority of the clergy proved harder to dislodge, and Mongolian herders continued through the 1930s to treat lamas as their teachers, doctors, and craftsmen. The years 1933–1935 brought a short and relative economic relief after the collectivization drive: the monastic population rebounded, party membership itself contracted sharply as the MPRP retrenched from the overreach of the preceding years, and lamas briefly regained titles, built new temples, and increased in number, before the state again tightened its taxation of the monasteries and interference in the appointment of Buddhist hierarchs.

Peljidiin Genden and the defense of the church

The Khubsugul (Khövsgöl) 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 October 1937 show trial that formally opened the terror against the sangha named Genden, in absentia, alongside the Yonzon Khamba (the country's most senior lama and head abbot of Ulaanbaatar's monasteries), the Khamba's deputy Damdin, and the former Minister of War Demid, as co-defendants in a single case.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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.

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. It had taken the revolutionaries roughly twenty years, from 1921 to 1941, to dismantle the great and powerful Buddhist sangha of Outer Mongolia.

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 study of the competing state and autonomy projects proposed for Mongolia and the Buryat-Mongol borderlands between the fall of the Qing and Russian empires and the founding of the MPR, situating the 1911 Bogd Gegeen theocracy among several rival post-imperial governance models.]
• Kaplonski, Christopher (2015). "Criminal Lamas: Court Cases against Buddhist Monks in Early Socialist Mongolia". In: Wallace, Vesna A. (Ed.), Buddhism in Mongolian History, Culture, and Society: 243–260. New York: Oxford University Press. [An archivally grounded study of how the socialist state used ordinary criminal courts and Special Commissions, alongside outright terror, against the clergy; provides precise monastic population figures and the fullest account of the legal apparatus underlying the destruction of the sangha.]
• 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.]
• Morozova, Irina (2003). "Revolutionary Mongols, Lamas and Buddhism (1921–1941)". IIAS Newsletter 31: 24–25. [A concise open-access overview, based on newly opened Mongolian and Russian archives, periodizing Soviet-Mongolian religious policy into five phases and providing the fullest short account of the 1930–1932 revolts and the jas collectivization campaign.]
• 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, the Ninth Bogd Gegeen affair, the 1932 uprisings, 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 fine-grained 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 27 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Mongolia.