—Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati, 1770s
Six
Red Prophecy on the March:
Mongolia to Tibet
On October 29, 1920, in Irkutsk, Southern Siberia, in a thick cloud of cheap tobacco smoke in a spacious downtown house, a group of young people, mostly former students in their twenties, was making a revolution. h e house, recently coni scated from a rich lady merchant, accommodated the headquarters of the Siberian branch of the Bolshevik Party, which set aside a few rooms for its Eastern Secretariat, a bureaucratic structure ai liated with Comintern. h e secretariat was a motley crowd of Jewish, native Siberian, and Russian revolutionaries working to incite the Asian masses to revolt against colonial oppression and then to turn them toward Communism.
For the whole day, the group had been struggling to i gure out how to bring Communism to Mongolia. h ey wanted to make sure the Mongol nomads themselves took an active part in the enterprise, knowing all too well they could not just impose their secular ideology on that country. Fortunately, there was a good opportunity to rally the nomads around the Bolshevik cause. Mongolia was occupied by Chinese troops, and the runaway White general Roman von Ungern-Sternberg threatened an invasion. So i rst the revolutionaries would help the nomads liberate Mongolia. h en they would link their cause to the religion of Buddha to reach out to illiterate shepherds and lamas, and bring this backward country into the golden age of Communism.
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Like many other revolutionaries, those present liked to talk, dreaming aloud about how they would build the commonwealth of free toilers of the Orient. h e talks went on and on; it was getting dark, and they could not come to a conclusion of what would be a better option: to storm into Mongolia right away before Ungern took it over or to wait and see when the nomads were ripe for a revolt.
It was time to wrap up the debates. Naum Burtman, a dropout student who had just returned from a reconnaissance trip to Mongolia and was chairing the meeting, had to interrupt one speaker at er another. He was nervously playing with an empty pistol, tossing it like a top. At least everybody agreed that the liberation of the country should be done with as much Mongol involvement as possible. h at was the key to success.
h e most l amboyant speaker, who dominated the podium, was Sergei Borisov, a leader of the secretariat’s Mongol-Tibetan Section. h is Figure 6.1. Sergei Borisov, head of the Mongol-Tibetan Section of Comintern. In 1925, disguised as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, he ventured into Tibet, trying to woo the thirteenth Dalai Lama to Red Russia’s side.
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intelligent tough-looking man with Asiatic features was the son of a famous Christian missionary priest, Stephan Borisov. He had come from the Altai, land of the Oirot, to study at Irkutsk State University. Yet, like many of his comrades, he quickly caught the revolutionary fever and dropped out, devoting his life to bringing paradise on earth to the common people. Now, dressed in a working man’s blouse, Borisov, whose incipient baldness made him look older than his peers, insisted that they should immediately send Red Army troops to storm Mongolia before the counterrevolutionary Ungern snatched it.
Finally, around midnight, Burtman stepped in: “I ask all present to ask questions. Any questions? No questions. Do we consider it necessary to send the troops? Everybody agrees with the stipulation. Who is against it? Nobody. I suggest that Comrade Borisov, who came up with this idea in the i rst place, outline clearly the best way to bring the troops to Mongolia.” Borisov explained that the invasion was to be presented as an indigenous Mongolian project and that the Mongols were to be an essential part. To accomplish this goal, the secretariat agreed to set up a Mongolian autonomous government and to mute for a while all talk about Communism, focusing instead on national liberation. Burtman again stepped in and i nalized the debate in a high-pitched voice:
“h
us, we all agree it is necessary to establish a provisional government from inl uential Mongols even though they are nationalists.” 1
Bolshevik Plans for Red Mongolia
In 1920 when the Reds were freely advancing through Siberia, i nishing of pockets of the crumbling White resistance, the revolutionary frenzy among the Bolsheviks was so high that they were ready to roll immediately beyond Russian borders to liberate all Oriental people. h e Eastern Secretariat set up by Boris Shumatsky and his Bolshevik brethren was the product of this revolutionary idealism. Soon this impromptu project of Siberian Bolsheviks was merged with Comintern and began to receive orders from Moscow. Four sections established within the 129
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new bureaucratic structure—Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Mongol-Tibetan—were entrusted with igniting revolutionary i res in their respective regions.
h e guidelines of the Mongol-Tibetan Section were clear: radicalizing the Mongol-Tibetan masses, extending the inl uence of Soviet Russia on those masses, and involving them in the struggle in Asia with world imperialism. Yet the same guidelines prescribed that the section’s agents take into consideration cultures and traditions of the area. Since social and class sentiments were still dormant in these remote areas, Communism was not an immediate item on the Bolshevik agenda; Comintern agents were instructed to play on nationalism. h e i rst task was hijacking national liberation movements to help oppressed nationalities win their freedom, to educate them, and to build up their industries. Only then would it be possible to turn the populace toward Communism.
h e short-term goal for Mongolia was to “master ideologically the national movement of the Mongol popular masses, safeguarding and cleansing it of harmful layers that might shadow its social side.” Mut-ing their Communist zeal and restricting themselves to the national liberation of the Mongols from the Chinese and White Russians, Comintern agents were not to antagonize Mongol princes and especially lamas. Only when the country was free would Bolshevik fellow travelers step in and empower themselves by rallying common people and simultaneously phasing out princes and rich lamas. In the meantime, agents of the Mongol-Tibetan Section were to travel all over Mongolia and Tibet, educating people about the revolutionary prophecy from the north, building the network of Comintern cells, and recruiting new adepts. 2
Elbek-Dorji Rinchino and Borisov, who ran this section, were socialists, but i rst of all they were ardent nationalists who dreamed about the liberation of their own people. When they realized that the Reds were winning and were promising self-determination for indigenous people, they cast their lot with the Bolsheviks and evolved from loyal fellow 130
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travelers into full-l edged revolutionaries. Rinchino, a Buryat intellectual with a law degree from St. Petersburg University, dreamed of uniting the Buryat and Mongols, who spoke similar languages and shared a similar culture, into a vast pan-Mongol socialist republic that would be a beacon for all Buddhists. In fact, he was the one who had created the Mongol-Tibetan Section, bringing along his friend Borisov. Rinchino would become the i rst Red dictator of Mongolia, and Borisov, who joined the Bolshevik party in 1920, became deputy chair of the Eastern Section of Chicherin’s Commissariat for Foreign Af airs.
h e third leading member of the section, and the only one with hands-on knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism, was Choibalsan, deputy chair of the section and the only leading Mongol in Comintern at that time. As someone who knew how to read and write Mongol and could also speak Russian, this plump twenty-i ve year-old was an excellent middleman and a great asset to the Bolshevik cause. Along with his partner Sukhe-Bator, Choibalsan was responsible for propaganda and publishing and was working closely with Rinchino and Borisov to recruit nomads to Red Russia’s side.
Choibalsan had apprenticed to a lama as a teenager but tired of the drudgery of monastery life and escaped into the wider world, wandering into Urga, capital of Mongolia. h ere, by chance, a few compassionate Russians noticed his skill for languages and had him enrolled in the school for interpreters. h e youth did not waste this opportunity and worked hard, and he was then sent to the Siberian city of Irkutsk to continue his education. Between 1914 and 1917 in Irkutsk, Choibalsan rubbed shoulders with Let ist students and eventually became close to them. By 1920 he was one of the two most important Mongol revolutionaries. h e other was his friend Sukhe-Bator, a l amboyant show-of military man who was banding the nomads into an organized army and liked to pose for Russian photographers artistically holding a cigarette in his long i ngers or sitting erect on his horse like an aristocrat observing his warriors from above.
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Figure 6.2. Sukhe-Bator, a prominent Bolshevik fellow traveler in Mongolia, 1921.
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Choibalsan did not do such foolish things, preferring to stay in the shadows. He still had things to learn from his Buryat, Jewish, and Russian comrades and would rather listen than talk. h e modesty played well.
His more l amboyant comrades felt it safe to make him a member of the Eastern Secretariat and deputy chief of the Mongol-Tibetan Section, which gave him the pleasant sense of a mission. 3 h e former apprentice lama still had a hard time processing what his educated friends Borisov and Rinchino called socialism and Communism, and he could not yet digest some of the books they were reading. But he i rmly grasped one simple truth: he was destined to help liberate his country from the hated Chinese and the Whites and then bring a new golden age of prosperity. Surely it would be a fuli llment of the glorious Shambhala prophecy that his monastery tutor had told him so much about. h is was enough for now to empower Choibalsan. h e details of what Lenin and Marx had to say about this new golden age he could learn later.
h e union between the Mongol nationalists and Red Russians was formally consummated in August 1920 when Rinchino brought his friends Sukhe-Bator, Choibalsan, Danzan, Bodo, and several other men to Irkutsk to meet the chief Siberian Bolsheviks, Boris Shumatsky and Phillip Gapon. With Shumatsky as their chaperon, the nomadic revolutionaries then boarded a train to Moscow, where Lenin, Commissar for Foreign Af airs Georgy Chicherin, and other Bolshevik dignitaries welcomed them, promising to back up their nationalism and to deliver arms and ammunition. h e visitors were pleasantly surprised when Chicherin greeted them wearing a traditional Mongol robe. h ese Bolsheviks surely could be good allies!
It was shortly at er this that the young Bolsheviks revolutionaries in Irkutsk, at Borisov’s instigation, voted to send Red troops into Mongolia. In the meantime, Rinchino and several other Comintern agents were already in the i eld contacting discontented Mongol nomads and lamas. When everything was set up for a quick invasion and liberation of Mongolia, Shumatsky, as head of the Eastern Secretariat the man who called the shots for all Siberian Bolsheviks, changed everything.
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