Novye Issledovaniâ Tuvy (Sep 2016)
The sangha and the politics of People’s Republic of Tuva
Abstract
Under the People’s Republic of Tuva (PRT, 1921-1944) reforming the Buddhist religious community took shape of ‘modernization’ (obnovlenchestvo), just as it also happened in the Buddhist-dominated regions of the USSR and Mongolian People’s Republic. Such an approach to the ‘lama issue’ was taken under pressure from the Soviet leadership, who tried to use the ‘modernizers’ against the influence of the Buddhist clergy. Thus the modernization was initiated from outside and was motivated by political considerations, although endorsed by several authoritative lamas. Radical political change in Tuva during the 1930s stopped the religious modernization in its tracks. The statistics we cite shows that the welfare of the Buddhist community directly depended on the internal policy of the PRT: from relative well-being in mid-1920s it went to a sharp decline in the clergy and monastic communities during the first wave of punitive policy and repressions (late 1920s – early 1930s), then to a somewhat relaxed policy that led to the revival of the sangha during the ‘new deal’, and to a new low during the repressions of the later 1930s. The Tuva uprisings of 1924 and 1932 (with the latter made still more important by the large uprising in Mongolia) led to a certain easing of the repressive state policy on religion. On the whole, the main features of the religious policy in the PRT, as well as the timing of their implementation, coincide with the analogous developments in Buryatia, Kalmykia and Mongolian People’s Republic. We can conclude that the radical solution to the Buddhist issue in Tuva was chosen as early as at the start of the 1930s due to the relatively small number of monastic communities and lamas living therein. The crushing blow on the sanghas of other Buddhist regions was dealt at the end of the same decade. Our study made use of archival sources from the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (RGASPI), including some previously unpublished.
