PSCRP-BESA Reports No 26 (January 7, 2024)
Although religion is nominally separate from the state in the Russian Federation, de facto religious structures have become an integral part of the state apparatus. Russia’s top Orthodox and Muslim clergy unequivocally supported the unleashing of full-scale aggression against Ukraine in 2022. As for Judaism, the head of the CIS rabbinical court, Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt of Moscow, representing the Congress of the Jewish Religious Organizations and Associations, openly opposed this aggression. He called on Jews to leave Russia and went to Israel himself. However, the Chief Rabbi of Russia (HABAD) Berel Lazar and the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, which he heads, took a much more cautious position on this issue.
But the situation with Buddhism in Russia (where Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelug school is widespread in a number of regions) was fundamentally different: Telo Tulku Rinpoche (Erdni Ombadykov), the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia and the official representative in the CIS and Mongolia of the spiritual leader of the followers of Tibetan Buddhism, Dalai Lama XIV, openly condemned the Russian aggression and declared his support for Ukraine. There were no other such precedents among the top clergy of any denomination in the Russian Federation.
Political contradictions within the organized Buddhist community
There is no single structure uniting all Buddhist communities in Russia. Each of the three autonomous republics whose indigenous populations are traditionally Buddhist – Kalmykia, Tuva and Buryatia – has its own structure of Buddhist clergy. The Russian authorities de facto favor the Buryat organization “Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia” (sangha means community in Sanskrit), which is the successor to the Soviet (since 1946) structure of the “Central Spiritual Administration of Buddhists”, whose head resided in the Ivolginsky datsan, the only Buddhist religious institution that has survived in the Buryat ASSR and one of two such institutions that survived in the USSR (the other is the Aginsky datsan located in the Aginsky Buryat National District). In Kalmykia and Tuva, by the end of the Soviet period, the Buddhist clergy had been almost completely wiped out, and no legal Buddhist institutions remained. Only at the height of perestroika, in 1988, was the Association of Buddhists of Kalmykia officially registered.
Buddhists of Kalmykia
Unlike the Buryat “Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia”, the Association of Buddhists of Kalmykia unequivocally considers Dalai Lama XIV, who has never been granted an entry visa to the country by the Russian authorities since 2004, to be its highest spiritual authority. It is indicative that even the appointment of Mutul Ovyanov (Tenzin Choidak) as the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, who was elected to this position under pressure from the Russian authorities after Telu Tulko Riponche had been declared a foreign agent, was approved by the Dalai Lama.
At present there are dozens of Buddhist communities in the republic. However, many young Kalmyks who are not actively involved in the activities of these communities also consider Buddhism to be an integral part of their identity and can react very aggressively to the desecration of its shrines. For example, after Said Osmanov, a Dagestani who came to Elista in 2016 as part of a sports delegation, was caught on video desecrating a Buddha statue, a crowd of outraged Kalmyks dragged him out of his hotel and forced him to kneel in front of the statue and apologize. Moreover, Abdusamad Gamidov, head of the government of the predominantly Muslim Republic of Dagestan, had to come to Kalmykia to apologize for his compatriot.
Since 1995, the Central Spiritual Administration of Buddhists, later renamed the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia, has been headed by Damba Ayushev, who has been a member of the presidium of the Interreligious Council of Russia since 1998. However, even in Buryatia, not to mention Kalmykia and Tuva, not all Buddhist communities support him. The Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, Telo Tulku Riponche, has also publicly criticized Damba Ayushev’s political activities. Telo Tulku Riponche was born in 1972 in the United States and came to Kalmykia in 1991 as part of a delegation led by Dalai Lama XIV. A year later he was elected as the Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, as he was the only ethnic Kalmyk with a full-fledged Buddhist education at the time.
The consistently pro-government policy of the head of the Buddhist Traditional Sangha of Russia was also manifested in the fact that he supported the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the mobilization to participate in this war and declared participation in it a “sacred duty of Russian Buddhists.”.
The Supreme Lama of Kalmykia, Telo Tulku Riponche, took a different stance. During the first months of the war, the Supreme Lama refrained from making public statements about the war. In mid-June 2022, he made an anti-war statement in an address on the occasion of Buddha’s birthday, but did not link it to the Ukrainian events. However, in late September of that year, when mobilization for the so-called “Special Military Operation” (SMO) was announced in Russia, Telo Tulku Riponche recorded and published an official address in which he explicitly said:
“I think it is wrong, this war is not necessary. Moreover, we live in the XXI century — everyone wants to live peacefully, calmly, every country wants to progress… I think that the Ukrainian side, of course, is actually right — it is defending its country, its land, its truth, its Constitution, its people. It is very difficult to say and accept that Russia is right. It’s very hard to say, I can’t do that.” The Supreme Lama of Kalmykia emphasized that he had not previously commented on the war in Ukraine because he “did not want to spoil the relations between the authorities and our Buddhists”. He added, clearly referring to Dambu Ayushev and his supporters, that the leaders of Buddhist communities in Russia who are in favor of military aggression “hardly think so sincerely if they are real Buddhists”.
After the Russian authorities declared the Supreme Lama Rinpoche a “foreign agent”, he was forced to move to Mongolia, where he began helping Kalmyks who had left the Russian Federation because of disagreement with its aggressive and anti-democratic policies.
The importance of Buddhism as the national religion of Kalmyks is also well understood by the pro-Russian leadership of the Republic of Kalmykia, which supports the Russian aggression against Ukraine and tries, like the leadership of other subjects of the federation, to act as patrons of their fellow countrymen participating in the so-called SMO. In this sense, a report published in December 2022 on the Kalmyk pro-government website “Teegin zyang — The Steppe News” is illustrative. It emphasizes that the Kalmyks fighting in Ukraine “were not left without Zul, a holiday dear to every resident of Kalmykia” — the new year according to the Buddhist calendar. At the same time, the official Kalmyk website calls it the “Kalmyk New Year”, thus emphasizing the national character of this holiday. The report goes on to say that volunteers and Buddhist monks arriving from Kalmykia have built a temporary Buddhist shrine in the town of Armyansk in the north of occupied Crimea to “support our [emphasized by the author] fighters.” Notably, the phrase “our fighters” does not refer to all Russian servicemen, but specifically to Kalmyks. The report constantly emphasizes the ethnic and religious specificity of Kalmykia: “Volunteers fed the fighters with homemade food, including djomba and bortsoks, which are a must for any Kalmyk festivity. (…) while monks from the Golden Abode of the Buddha Shakyamuni khurul (monastery) conducted a longevity ritual called Nasn utdullhn for the fighters.” And this is by no means an accident, but part of a well-thought-out policy of the local authorities to maintain the “national spirit”.
Given the poverty of the bulk of the Kalmyks and the mobilization efforts of the Russian authorities, aimed primarily at representatives of national minorities and people living in the provinces, the number of Kalmyk servicemen who visited the improvised Buddhist sanctuary in Armyansk, the “more than a hundred fellow countrymen” referred to in the report, is not too high. The number 20 is even less impressive. This is the number of fighters of the Kalmyk volunteer unit “Bars-4”, who participated in the war in Ukraine, according to the Russian media. However, the pro-Russian authorities of the Republic of Kalmykia are making great efforts to popularize the participation of Kalmyks in this war. In particular, this is the goal of the pro-government Kalmyk YouTube channel “Warriors of the Steppe. Kalmyks in the SMO”.
There is no reason to doubt that the pro-Russian authorities of Kalmykia, like the pro-Russian authorities of other national republics of the Russian Federation, seek primarily to gain the Kremlin’s favor by demonstrating their republics’ contribution to mobilization efforts.
In this context, the use of elements of the traditional ethnic and religious culture of the Kalmyks has a dual purpose: to promote participation in the SMO among the population of Kalmykia and to demonstrate specifically the Kalmyk contribution to the war on the federal level. Using Kalmyk customs and rituals as a bright national ornament, the local authorities want to stand out against the general bleak backdrop.
A side, but potentially very significant effect of this policy, apparently approved at this stage by the federal authorities, is the formation in the mass consciousness of the notion that there are “their own”, in this case Kalmyk servicemen, different from Russian servicemen in general.