In 1927, two years at er his trip to Lhasa, Borisov revealed the details of this second Tibetan venture in a talk at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV), which trained revolutionary activists for Eastern countries. Shumatsky, who headed this university in 1926–
27, invited his old comrade-in-arms to share his experiences. Borisov stressed that, besides his attempts to draw the Dalai Lama to the Bolsheviks’ side, he tried to court monks from several large monasteries 146
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that openly challenged Lhasa’s modernization ef orts. It was not a totally l awed strategy. Aside from the Panchen Lama’s Tashilumpho, the hub of separatism that numbered four thousand monks, there were three other major monasteries, Drepung, Sero, and Ganden, that did not want to pay taxes either and hated to lose their privileged status.
h is conservative priesthood refused to cooperate with the Lhasa government, pointing out to His Holiness that universal taxation, the army reform, and the opening of an English school and a power station went against traditional Buddhism. 25
Borisov found this monastery-grounded opposition very useful for the Bolsheviks: “Some of these heretical spiritual movements sometimes move as far as rejecting the holiness of the Dalai Lama. h ese lingering sentiments always existed, and monks are very susceptible to them.” Under these circumstances, continued the Red Oirot, “the only thing that remains to be done is to make sure these sentiments move in an appropriate direction, become organized, and develop along revolutionary lines.” 26 Borisov believed that planting revolutionary cells among junior-rank lamas was the way to organize them. In fact, he attempted to wiggle into the Drepung monastery, which had a large Buryat-Kalmyk colony with pro-Russian sentiments. h e plan was to
turn the monastery into a base for future Bolshevik operations.
h e Borisov expedition let the Mongol capital at the end of January 1924 and at er a long six-month trip i nally reached Lhasa. Despite their Buddhist disguise, English intelligence agents quickly spotted and i gured out the Red pilgrims through their own Kalmyk agents. At er Khomutnikov’s cavalier attempt to sway the Dalai Lama to the Bolsheviks’ side, the English had become paranoid and started to monitor visitors coming from Red Mongolia. h e person assigned to ward of Red pilgrims from this area was British intelligence agent Lt. Colonel Frederick Bailey, Political Oi cer in Sikkim from 1921 to 1928. h e man was perfectly cut for this type of job. A l uent speaker of Tibetan and basic Russian, he was a born explorer and a daring adventurer. Among his hobbies were mountain climbing and butterl y collecting. In fact, 147
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he immortalized his name by discovering during his Asian ventures a few unknown specimens of butterl ies. All in all, Bailey was a classical gentleman spy of the Victorian Age. A seasoned shadow warrior, he had already rubbed shoulders with his Moscow opponents, penetrating Russian Central Asia right at er the 1917 revolution to i nd out what was going in the Bolsheviks’ backyard. Bailey did not restrict himself to gathering intelligence, but also took part in organizing White resistance to the Reds. At one point, playing with i re, through a trusted contact he was even able to get taken on as an agent for the Bolshevik secret police and was sent on a clandestine mission to Bukhara, a Muslim i efdom challenging the Bolsheviks. One of his assignments was searching for the whereabouts of the English spy Bailey! 27
Like his predecessor, upon arrival in Lhasa Borisov showered the Dalai Lama with various git s: porcelain vases, golden cups, silver plates, and many other items. Although Tibetan authorities realized the party was not true Buddhist pilgrims, they let the visitors wander around, take hundreds of pictures, and i lm military installations, gun work-shops, communications, and other strategic places. h e Dalai Lama did not mind playing the Russian card for a short while to tease his English neighbors a bit. He even called these “pilgrims” harmless. Worried about such a reckless attitude, Bailey worked hard, trying to use his intelligence information to wake up the Lhasa ruler to the danger. But the Dalai Lama had his own game to play. He received the Bolshevik ambassadors, smiled at them, assured his friendship, and gave numerous promises, but he did not bind himself by any agreement establishing military ties, as the Red Russians hoped. h us, despite his long stay
in Lhasa and persistent attempts to tie His Holiness to Moscow, Borisov returned to Moscow empty-handed in May of 1925.
It was obvious that the Dalai Lama’s sympathy for Soviet Russia and the revolutionary potential of the Forbidden Kingdom were the Bolsheviks’ wishful thinking. His Holiness, who never trusted the Red Russians, simply used them as a counterbalance to British and Chinese advances.
Strange as it may sound, some in Moscow continued to believe in the 148
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Dalai Lama’s friendly disposition to the very end of the 1920s. In a 1928
memo the chief of the Eastern Department of the OGPU secret police still insisted that the “masses of Tibetan population” and their ruler looked favorably at Russia and Mongolia. 28
“Mongol Embassy” to Lhasa and Cold Reception In 1925, the Dalai Lama dismissed his war secretary, Tsarong Shape, head of the pro-English military faction, and several of his associates whom His Holiness suspected of plotting a conspiracy. h is gave the
Bolsheviks a second wind, and they were ready to continue their Tibetan advances. Chicherin optimistically predicted “the defeat of the Anglophile clique” and hoped that this time the Soviets would sway the Lhasa ruler to their side. To take advantage of the favorable political situation, a third mission would be sent to Tibet. Chicherin did not want to pro-crastinate with this project. h
e timing was too good to be missed: “An uprising has erupted in Tibet against the Anglophile clique which seized all power in the country. If we don’t hurry up, some more developments might take place, so that Britain, by means of bribes and by attracting the material interests of the [Tibetans], can usurp power again.” 29
Learning from the previous experience of poor disguises, Chicherin and Borisov wanted to play it safe, keeping Red Russia out of the picture. Now, instead of playing Buddhist pilgrims from Siberia, the Bolsheviks were to become a Mongol religious mission sent to establish an embassy in Lhasa and discuss an important theological issue. h e plan
was to obtain Lhasa’s permission to open a Mongol embassy, which the Bolsheviks could later use to organize a shipment of military hardware and to gradually hijack the Tibetan army by ini ltrating it with loyal Kalmyk, Buryat, and Mongol advisors.
To lead this 1927 expedition, Chicherin and Borisov chose Arashi Chapchaev (1890–1938), a Kalmyk schoolteacher and recent graduate of the three-year Marxist program at the Communist Academy. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin personally approved this choice. Since the Kalmyk 149
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Bolshevik was an educator, he would pose as a Buddhist teacher under the assumed name Tsepag Dorji. Dressed in a red robe, he was to travel with his lama apprentice—the role assigned to another Kalmyk Bolshevik, Matstak Bimbaev. h e party, which numbered i t een people, included several other “Mongols,” among them Jigme-Dorji Barduev, a Buryat lama priest who had taken part in the Borisov expedition, and Shagdur Landukov, a Kalmyk military advisor to the Mongol Red Army. At the same time, a few genuine Red Mongol fellow travelers with a good knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism were added to make the mission more credible.
A formal cover for the Mongol embassy was found in the important theological issue of recognizing a new reincarnation of the Bogdo-gegen, head of the Mongol Tibetan Buddhists. When the old Bogdo had died from old age and numerous ailments in 1924, the Red Mongols and their Moscow patrons immediately sensed that this was a perfect occasion to end the Buddhist theocracy in Mongolia and replace it with a normal Red dictatorship. h ey forbade the search for a new reincarnation: lamas and the nomadic populace were surprised to i nd out that the deceased reincarnation was to be the last. h e Red Mongols explained that Bogdo was now reborn as a great general in Shambhala, and there was no point in searching for a new reincarnation since henceforth Bogdo’s permanent adobe would be this magic kingdom, not the earthly realm. 30 Shrewd Red Mongols like Rinchino were not convinced their magic trick would work. Not wishing to completely antagonize the populace and the large number of lamas, they suggested an option to resolve the issue. Since all Bogdo’s earlier reincarnations were traditionally found in Tibet and approved by the Dalai Lama, they would go to Lhasa and discuss this important matter with His Holiness.
h e Mongol embassy delegation headed by Chapchaev pursued this theological scheme when they arrived in Lhasa in April 1927. When the l attered Dalai Lama, who did not care much anyway about his junior counterpart (the deceased Bogdo had lived a rowdy life as a heavy drinker and womanizer), seemed to welcome this plan, the Bolsheviks 150
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thought they might kill two birds with one stone: pacifying Buddhist clerics in Mongolia and simultaneously receiving another chance to get a foothold in the Forbidden Kingdom.
h e Lhasa ruler expected genuine religious pilgrims but, to his dismay, found out from his own sources and from Bailey that this group of pilgrims armed with twenty ril es and two Lewis machine guns were not even Mongols but once again Bolsheviks from Russia. Infuriated, the Dalai Lama at i rst refused to give Chapchaev a formal reception.
h e Red pilgrims were kept under constant surveillance and could not even relieve themselves without being watched. All their movements were now monitored by a double spy ring: the Dalai Lama’s agents and Bailey’s Kalmyk and Tibetan spies.
h
e situation was even worse than with the Borisov party. It did not help that the atheist Chapchaev and his friends were particularly lousy actors. Lhasa monks noticed that the visitors had a hard time following tedious Buddhist rituals. 31 Yet it was not entirely bad acting that showed up their Mongol disguise. One of them, Gomojitshin, a Buryat from Siberia working for the Mongol Department of Foreign Af airs, began having doubts about the Red cause. Disgusted with their pathetic Buddhist masquerade, he solicited and received a secret private audience with the Dalai Lama, during which he revealed the covert goals of the embassy. 32
To make things worse, the most devastating and unexpected blow to the Bolshevik scheme was leveled by Dorzhiev, the Tibetan ambassador to Russia, whom both Chicherin and OGPU considered a loyal Bolshevik fellow traveler. By the mid-1920s, this old lama with sad eyes who dreamed about a vast Buddhist theocracy under Soviet protection, had become increasingly frustrated with the Bolsheviks. For a short while, he had allied himself with them, hoping Communism could help return Buddhism to its original roots. Yet quite soon Dorzhiev saw that his faith did not gain anything from this alliance. Tibetan Buddhism in Russia was on the decline, and Bolshevik authorities in Siberia constantly harassed his brethren. Realizing that the Bolsheviks were simply using him to split the Buddhist community in Russia, the old monk 151
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started a double game. While still pretending to be loyal to the Bolsheviks, Dorzhiev secretly decided to do everything to safeguard his fellow believers in Tibet from Soviet advances.
In his formal letter introducing Chapchaev, Dorzhiev praised Russia and Mongolia for their treatment of Buddhists and asked the Dalai Lama to give the “Mongol pilgrims” the best treatment. Yet simultaneously, through a trusted merchant, he smuggled to His Holiness another letter in which he wrote: “I am an old man and will die very soon. Mongolia is not a peaceful country as it was formerly. h e government is deadly against religions and monks, and they are helpless. Please don’t have anything to do with the mission. I had to write a letter at their dictation to Your Holiness for these Bolshevik agents to take with them, but please do not take any notice of that letter.” 33
Although the Dalai Lama was angry, he did not dismiss Chapchaev and his company right away but, as always, played a good diplomat. Af-ter all, he did not want endanger the large Tibetan community in Mongolia. Besides, the Lhasa ruler still held a large amount of money in the Mongol central bank and did not want to lose it. Still refusing to receive Chapchaev, the Dalai Lama nevertheless allowed the visitors to wander around, gather intelligence, and socialize with local Mongol and Buryat monks. Yet all their movements were monitored. Finally, the Mongol diplomats were permitted to have an audience with His Holiness. But in exchange for this favor, as the stunned visitors learned, they were to promise to leave Lhasa immediately at er they i nished their talk.
During this meeting, the Lhasa ruler played his favorite game of expressing friendship without promising anything. Trade between Mongolia and Tibet? Sure, let us trade; we might buy Mongol horses, they will be good for our cavalry. We Tibetans might even want to buy gunpowder from you. Opening a permanent Mongol mission in Lhasa? We would like to do it, but England, which does not have an embassy either, might be mad. Let us continue talking about it, and we will see.
Chapchaev tried this and that, but he was not able to accomplish the major goal of the expedition—opening a permanent Mongol embassy.
