Buddhists, Shamans, and Soviets

In the Republic of Buryatia today, as in many post-Soviet societies, the present is disconnected from any definite past. After the Russian-Qing Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689) and then the Treaty of Kyakhta (1727), certain northerly Mongol groups, including the Buryats, discovered that they were citizens of imperial Russia. For centuries thereafter, Buryats on the eastern shores of Lake Baikal weathered Slavic migration, the weight of Orthodox Christianity, and ever-changing imperial strategies to centralize and consolidate the Siberian frontier. By the turn of the eighteenth century, emerging institutional, intellectual, and religious ties to Tibetan Buddhist monastic culture further re-organized Buryats into longstanding interactions with Géluk-sect “mother monasteries,” pilgrimage routes, ritual traditions, and scholastic cultures spread across the Tibetan plateau, Mongol lands, and the Qing imperium. Acknowledging Buryatia (and Kalmykia) as a strategic intersection of the Tsarist empire with the stretches of Tibetan cultural world, Catherine the Great recognized their Buddhism as...

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