A brief romance of Red Russia with Tibetan Buddhism in the 1920s was part of these ef orts to woo Eastern masses to the Bolshevik side.

Historian Emanuel Sarkisyanz explored in detail how Bolsheviks linked their prophecy to messianic expectations of the Eastern populace. He was the i rst to note that, to anchor themselves in Tibetan Buddhist areas, Red Russia and her indigenous allies plugged into such popular local prophecies as Shambhala, Geser, Oirot, and Amursana. In fact, as early as the 1920s, Alexandra David-Neel, the i rst Western woman to go native Tibetan Buddhist, noted with amazement that bits and pieces of the faraway Bolshevik gospel had somehow trickled down into Tibetan oral culture. Moreover, several lamas she talked to identii ed 107

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Shambhala with Red Russia. h ey also argued that Geser Khan, an epic hero-redeemer from Tibetan, Mongolian, and Buryat folklore, was already reborn in Russia and ready for action. 7

While persecuting Russian Orthodox Christianity, the major ideological enemy of the Bolsheviks, Lenin and his comrades did not at i rst assault Tibetan Buddhism, which was treated as a religion of formerly oppressed people. In August 1919, the Bolsheviks even sponsored an exhibition of Buddhist art, a revolutionary act that simultaneously attacked Christianity and reached out to Buddhists. Introducing the exhibit, Sergei Oldenburg, the chief administrator of Russian/Soviet humanities at that time, linked Tibetan Buddhism to Communism by saying that Buddha’s teaching had promoted the brotherhood of nations and would certainly help advance the Communist cause in Asia. 8

h e chief spearhead of the dialogue between the Bolsheviks and Tibetan Buddhism was the Buryat monk Agvan Dorzhiev (1858–1938). At the very end of the nineteenth century, this prominent Buddhist served as the chief tutor of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, then a young adult.

In the early 1900s, Dorzhiev became His Holiness’s ambassador to the court of the Russian tsar. An ardent advocate of the unity of all Tibetan Buddhist people, Dorzhiev concluded that faraway Russia did not represent a threat to Tibet and could be easily manipulated against China and England to protect the sovereignty of the Forbidden Kingdom.

h e Buryat lama began to spread word among his fellow believers and in the St. Petersburg court that the Russian Empire was destined to become the legendary northern Shambhala and that the Russia tsar was in fact the reincarnate Shambhala king who would come and save Tibetan Buddhists from advances by the Chinese and English. In his dreams, Dorzhiev began to picture a vast pan-Buddhist state under the protection of the tsar and stretching from Siberia to the Himalayas.

Russian monarchs were certainly l attered by these divine references, but they were not too eager to extend their patronage so far southward in fear of antagonizing the English. When in the 1890s Emperor Alexander III read about the project of expanding Russian inl uence into 108

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Figure 5.2. Agvan Dorzhiev in his Buddhist Kalachakra temple in St. Petersburg.

Inner Asia by using the Shambhala prophecy, he remarked in the mar-gins, “All this is so new, so unusual and fantastic, that it is dii cult to believe in its success.” 9

Moscow’s Liberation Theology:

Political Flirtation With Tibetan Buddhism Unlike the tsars, the early Bolsheviks, who lived by the maxim “We are born to make a fairy tale into reality,” never thought it was too fantastic to use popular lore to promote their agenda. So they eagerly plugged themselves into existing Buddhist prophecies, eventually benei ting from some of them. Red Russia inherited Dorzhiev from the old regime as the Tibetan ambassador and was glad to use him to reach out to 109

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the Tibetan Buddhist masses. Dorzhiev was at i rst equally enthusiastic about working with the Communists. Although later he became frustrated with them, for a short while in the early 1920s he tied his geopolitical dreams to the advancement of Red Russia’s interests in Mongolia and Tibet.

h is Buryat lama did not approve of the luxurious lifestyle and elitism of some of his fellow Buddhists and also hoped to use the advent of Communism to humble the rich and privileged in monastic communities. Driven by this noble goal, Dorzhiev launched a religious reform among the Buddhist clergy in Siberia, advertising it as a return to the original teaching of Buddha and as a way to maintain a dialogue with the Bolsheviks. In fact, he went quite far, trying to remodel Tibetan Buddhism in Russia according to Communist principles. h e Buddhist

congresses he organized to promote his reform split the faithful into progressives and conservatives. In progressive monasteries that accepted Dorzhiev’s norms, all private possessions were coni scated and turned into collective assets. Clergy ranks were also eliminated, and all monks were obligated to perform productive labor. Instead of silk (a symbol of luxury), monks’ robes were to be manufactured from simple fabric—

an ef ort designed to draw the clergy closer to the masses. Moreover, to eradicate elitism followers of Dorzhiev dropped the veneration of monks who were considered reincarnations. 10 h e chief goal, as Dorzhiev spelled out, was “to cleanse monasteries of all lazy bums and free-loaders, who have nothing to do with Buddha’s teaching.” 11

Bolshevik authorities, particularly the secret police, welcomed these ef orts, which in fact replicated the oi cial reform movement the Bolsheviks themselves pursued in the 1920s in their relations with all de-nominations. h eir long-term goal was to split Christians, Judaists, Moslems, and Buddhists into rival groups and gradually phase them out. 12 A lingering problem for the Bolsheviks working in Tibetan Buddhist areas was a chronic lack of literate people that they could use to do propaganda work and promote the Communist cause. Laboring folk—common nomads and shepherds—were certainly comrades 110

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through and through, but they were all too illiterate to be used as an intellectual resource. h at was how the Bolsheviks and their fellow travelers decided to gamble on low-ranking monks, many of whom had at least an elementary education. Viewed by the Bolsheviks as oppressed by the elite of Buddhist monasteries, junior monks could be well incorporated into the Marxist scheme as wretched of the earth with a good revolutionary potential.

Given that the number of monks in the world of Tibetan Buddhism reached 30 percent of the male population, they were not a small force.

One of Chicherin’s diplomats, a future Soviet ambassador to Mongolia, once remarked, “h is is a formidable force, and it is so formidable that even monks themselves do not quite realize it.” 13 In all fairness, the Bolshevik strategy to woo low-ranking lamas to their side was not totally l awed. In Tibetan Buddhist monasteries people were not equal, and there was a large class of disgruntled monks whose discontent could grow if properly stimulated. h

ere were rich monks who owned vast

estates and cattle and lived in private cells, receiving better food. At the same time, most of the clergy remained humble temple servants throughout their lives, apprenticing with and serving the privileged ones. 14 If circumstances were right, the grudge some of these people might have harbored against their well-to-do brethren could be converted into a rebellion. In the 1920s, Bolsheviks successfully instigated such class warfare in Mongolia, where many low-ranking lamas empowered themselves by joining the ranks of revolutionary bureaucracy and then harassing the ones who stayed loyal to their monastic communities.

h e spearhead of the Communist advance in Inner Asia was Bolshevik indigenous fellow travelers from the Buryat and Kalmyk, two Tibetan Buddhists groups residing within the former Russian Empire.

h e Buryat, an of shoot of the Mongols, lived in southern Siberia on the Russian-Mongolian border. h e Kalmyk, splinters of the glorious Oirot nomadic confederation who escaped from Chinese genocide to Russia in the 1600s, settled northeast of the Caspian Sea in the area where Asia meets Europe. Many Buryat and Kalmyk lamas routinely apprenticed 111

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in Mongol and Tibetan monasteries and frequented Lhasa on religious pilgrimages. Since the 1700s, tsars incorporated many males from these two borderland groups into the ranks of the Cossacks. h is paramilitary class was specially formed from former runaway Russian serfs and non-Russian nationalities residing on southern and eastern borders to protect the frontiers of the empire. Since most Kalmyk and Buryat spoke at least basic Russian, they served as convenient middlemen, building cultural bridges between Russia and the Buddhist populace of Inner Asia.

In the early 1900s, several dozens of these indigenous folk were able to graduate from Russian universities, where they were injected with popular ideas of socialism, anarchism, Marxism, and Siberian autonomy.

Figure 5.3. Buryat pilgrims en route from Siberia to Mongolia. h e Buryat, Tibetan Buddhist people from Siberia, were used by the Bolsheviks as middlemen to propagate the Communist liberation prophecy in Inner Asia.

In 1919, writer Anton Amur-Sanan and teacher Arashi Chapchaev, two Kalmyk intellectuals who joined the Bolshevik cause, wrote directly to Lenin suggesting their kinfolk be used to advance Communism among the “Mongol-Buddhist tribes.” Particularly, they came up with 112

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an attractive project to send to the Tibetan-Indian border an armed Red Army cavalry unit staf ed with Kalmyk disguised as Buddhist pilgrims. h e goal was to raise havoc in the very backyard of British imperialism. Lenin was very enthusiastic about this idea but had to put it on hold because the unfolding Civil War temporarily cut European Russia of from Siberia and Inner Asia. 15 h is cavalier scheme rel ected well the revolutionary idealism of the early Bolsheviks, who aspired to liberate the whole earth and lived in expectation of global revolutionary Armageddon that would cleanse the world from the rich oppressors and transport the poor into an earthly paradise. In fact, the same year, Red Army commander-in-chief Trotsky suggested that a Red Army cavalry corps be formed in the Ural Mountains and thrown into India and Afghanistan against Britain. In the Bolsheviks’ geopolitical plans, Central Asia and Tibetan Buddhist areas played an auxiliary role, designated to become highways to carry revolutionary ideas into India, crown jewel of English imperialism.

At the same time, despite their idealism, the Bolsheviks were apprehensive about building large anticolonial alliances involving people of the same religion and the same language family. It was one thing to call the Eastern folk to unite in a holy war against the West; it was a totally dif erent thing to handle large and motley coalitions that could be easily hijacked by enemies and turned against Red Russia. h is explained the Bolsheviks’ uneasiness about and even fear of such supranational units as pan-Mongolism, pan-Turkism, and pan-Buddhism. While working to anchor themselves in Asia, they were ready to tolerate such coalitions for a short while as an unavoidable evil. But as a permanent solution they were totally unacceptable.

For example, when in 1923 Red leaders of Tuva suggested to the neighboring Oirot Autonomous Region in the Altai that they merge into a united Soviet republic, the Moscow authorities were furious. 16

Paranoid about the specter of pan-Turkism, they placed the Tuvan fellow travelers who initiated this scheme on the secret police close-watch list. h e Bolshevik leaders were equally mad the following year when 113

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several Tuvan revolutionary leaders suggested they join Red Mongolia.

At er all, before the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1911, Tuva was formally part of Mongolia. A similar paranoia about pan-Mongolism drove Khoren Petrosian, deputy chief of the Eastern Division of OGPU, to treat with suspicion the attempts of Red Mongols to enlarge their state—a project advocated by Elbek-Dorji Rinchino, a Buryat socialist intellectual who ruled Mongolia as a dictator on behalf of his Moscow patrons. In 1924, this Bolshevik fellow traveler with large revolutionary ambitions speculated that at er his country became totally Communist it should absorb the Buryat in Siberia and merge into a larger Soviet republic, with Tibet to be added later, upon conquest. h e ultimate result would be the emergence of a vast Mongol-Tibetan Communist state allied with Red Russia. Petrosian called this idea very dangerous, fearing that “reactionary forces in Buddhism” could easily use this large state against Red Russia. 17 Rinchino, who did admit that pan-Mongolism might be a double-edged sword, nevertheless stressed, “In our hands, the all-Mongol national idea could be a powerful and sharp revolutionary weapon. Under no circumstances are we going to surrender this weapon into the hands of Mongol feudal lords, Japanese militarists, and Russian bandits like Baron Ungern.” 18

Bolshevik Affi rmative-Action Empire Petrosian’s concerns notwithstanding, grand and ambitious pan-Mongol and pan-Buddhist projects such as Rinchino’s were l awed anyway. h ey were mostly products of indigenous intellectuals’ mind games. Ordinary people did not care about them whatsoever, if they heard about them at all. At er the fall of the Chinese and Russians empires, local and ethnic concerns were dearer to the hearts of the Mongols, Tibetans, Buryat, Tuvans, and Oirot. Not without dii culty, the Bolsheviks understood that and learned how to exploit this reality to their own benei t. But some Bolshevik fellow travelers and also their enemies simply could not get it. For example, i ghting for “united and indivisible”

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Russia, the White counterrevolutionaries opposing the Bolsheviks had no room for local ethnic and national sentiments of non-Russians and sought to suppress these feelings. In Siberia, the charismatic admiral Alexander Kolchak, who joined the White cause in 1918, crushed independence movements in the Altai Mountain and Trans-Baikal area by throwing their leaders into prison. Even in those rare instances, as in the case of Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, when the White cause temporarily matched that of indigenous people, the Whites did not tap local nationalisms as a resource. h e same situation existed in China, where, in the at ermath of the revolution, local warlords fought against Mongol and Tibetan sovereignty, trying to crush them and bring them back to China. h

us, in 1919, the Chinese reoccupied Mongolia and eliminated its sovereignty, which stirred the national liberation movement among the nomads.

In contrast, the Bolsheviks began to massage indigenous nationalism, not out of love for multiculturalism but out of necessity. At er all, the Reds were cosmopolitan and urban people who dreamed about building a working people’s paradise without borders, religions, and national loyalties. At the same time, they were a practical gang who knew well that if they wanted to succeed they had to bend temporarily to ethnic and national sentiments. Moreover, the Bolsheviks realized they could use these feelings to their own advantage. Nikolai Bukharin, a prominent Bolshevik theoretician in the 1920s, was very explicit about the opportunity presented by nationalism, which he called “water for our mill”: “If we propose the solution of the right of self-determination for the colonies, the Hottentots, the Negroes, the Indians, etc., we lose nothing by it. On the contrary, we gain, for the national gain as a whole will damage foreign imperialism.” 19

On the Marxist evolutionary scale of human development, nationalism was an unavoidable evil that all people had to go through before they merged into a global commonwealth of brothers and sisters. h e