Russian Buddhists in Tibet, from the end of the nineteenth century – 1930

Abstract

The article offers a survey of religious contacts maintained between Tibet and Russian Buddhists, the ethnic Buryats and Kalmyks, from the late 19th C. to the 1930s. Chronologically, the story falls into two parts, the dividing point being the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The focus in the first portion is on the Russian Buddhist colony in Lhasa centred around the Gomang Datsang (school) of the Drepung monastery, its emergence and growth in the early 20th C., in the wake of Russo-Tibetan rapprochement brought about by a Buryat scholar-monk and adviser of the 13th Dalai Lama, Agvan Dorjiev. The tsarist government tried to use their Buddhist connection with Lhasa to political ends – in January 1904, shortly after the beginning of the British military invasion of Tibet, they sent a secret Kalmyk reconnaissance mission to Lhasa under a Cossack subaltern, Naran Ulanov, assisted by a cleric (bakshi) Dambo Ulianov. The latter part of the article concentrates on the dramatic post-revolutionary period. It begins with the story of the Kalmyk refugees in Turkey and their abortive attempt to emigrate to Tibet. There's also a detailed discussion of the endeavours by Soviet leaders to win the Dalai Lama over, by employing the loyal Buryats and Kalmyks for their secret missions to the Potala. The key figures behind this scheme were the Soviet foreign minister, G. V. Chicherin, and the same Agvan Dorjiev, posing as the Dalai Lama's representative in the USSR. As a result of the Bolshevik propaganda, many of the Buryat and Kalmyk residents in Lhasa began to return to their homeland in the 1920s. The crackdown on Buddhism in Soviet Russia put an end to the Moscow–Lhasa political dialogue. Hence all connections between the Buryat and Kalmyk Buddhists and their religious “Mecca” were deliberately cut by the Soviet authorities by 1930.