The horrific extermination of Buddhist monks in Mongolia should be remembered and studied to understand other Communist attempts at eradicating religion.
by Massimo Introvigne
Part 2 of 2. Read part 1.
Documents emerged in the last few years prove that Stalin considered the depopulated Mongolia a laboratory for social experiments to be repeated in case of success in Russia. Stalin experimented in Mongolia with the attempt to reach the utopian phase of Communism dreamed of by Karl Marx without passing through the intermediate phase of Socialism. The attempt required—unfortunately for Mongolians—the physical suppression of members of social classes considered structurally incompatible with Communism. The richest nomads, a large part of the Muslim minority, many members of the Buryat ethnic minority, the nobles and an important portion of the Buddhist monks were shot. The human cost of the experiment is estimated between 60,000 and 70,000 human lives, one tenth of the Mongolian population of the time. It would be like if in today’s Italy a regime decided to shoot six million people.
The fight against religion was not the only driving force behind this genocide. Stalin’s personal mistrust of the Buryats, the majority of whom lived in Russian Siberia, and internal struggles within the Mongolian Communist movement, whose factions tried to exterminate each other, also played a role. But it is certain that the anti-religious element was decisive and that, proportionally, it was the Buddhist monks who paid the highest price.
In 2014, I read the book The Lama Question (University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu 2014) by Cambridge University social anthropologist Christopher Kaplonski, and in 2015 I attended a debate on that study at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
Kaplonski tries to understand the motives of the Communists. His starting point is that a massacre of this magnitude—Kaplonski deals almost exclusively with the period 1937–1939, the worst, “an orgy of almost unimaginable violence,” when thirty-six thousand were shot—cannot result from irrational evil alone. He tries to explain the logic of the Mongolian Communists, who tried to eradicate Buddhism first with propaganda and then with legal and fiscal discrimination. To no avail, given the extraordinarily deep roots of the religion in the country. Only in a third phase did they decide to resort to extermination, which was not irrational and sporadic, but planned, with every person shot subjected to a trial—however hasty—and sentenced. According to Kaplonski, the strength of Buddhism in Mongolia was such that, if Communism had not destroyed religion, religion would have destroyed Communism.
In the last lines of the book, the anthropologist reveals how he realized all of a sudden that his anthropology took him too far, and he found himself in the same position as someone who “would try to understand why for the Nazis the Holocaust was a reasonable solution.” Kaplonski reports writing concerned emails to his colleagues, wondering what was happening to him, and struggling to regain a perspective where horror can be condemned without dismissing it as simply irrational.
Nevertheless, the description of the regime’s progression in three stages from one anti-religious “technology” to another remains interesting, and reminds me of the “Rome Model,” adopted, at my suggestion, by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) at the Rome conference on the discrimination of Christians in 2011, the year in which I served as the OSCE Representative for combating racism, xenophobia, and religious discrimination. According to the Rome model the fight against religion moves down on an inclined plane, starting from (cultural) intolerance, passing through (legal) discrimination, and arriving inexorably at persecution.
A salient aspect of Kaplonski’s work is the critique of the myth, which I also encountered in Mongolia, that everything was decided and planned by Stalin and if anything the Mongolian Communist authorities tried to stop or at least mitigate the repression. The anthropologist argues that this was not the case. Stalin gave contradictory directions, and some of the worst massacres were decided by Mongolian Communists, who were by no means mere puppets in the hands of the Soviets. Mongolian historians have responded that this is from the archives that Kaplonski explored, but the archives were manipulated by the Soviets, who also included false documents. Conspiracies aside, the discussion is important, and is reminiscent of similar ones in other countries. It is too convenient to attribute all the blame to one person, Stalin. Communist ideological hatred also contaminated local hierarchs, and they were no less guilty than the Soviets.
When I visited the Memorial Museums of the Victims of Political Repression in 2005, I was told there the story of its founder, Tserendulam Genden, who had died in 2003. A medical doctor who graduated in Moscow, she was the daughter of Peljidiin Genden, the first President of Communist Mongolia between 1924 and 1927, then its Prime Minister between 1932 and 1936. Certainly, Genden had his responsibilities in cooperating with Stalin, most notably in the persecution of the Buryats. However, he tried to resist Stalin’s order to exterminate the Buddhist monks, which led to the end of his political career and his life. The guide to the museum, a relative of Tserendulam, told me the family story that, when Peljidiin Genden refused for the third time to go on with the extermination of the monks, Stalin characteristically replied that he was “concerned with his health” and had him brought to Moscow for medical treatment generously offered by the Soviet Union. Instead, he was executed in 1937, and replaced in Mongolia by Choibalsan, the ex-monk who hated religion with a vengeance. The results soon became apparent.
In Mongolia in September 1937, there were 83,000 Buddhist monks, and the number had already been considerably reduced after the revolution of 1921. By the end of 1938, there were less than five hundred. Some had fled or self-reduced themselves to the secular state, but many had been killed. In Ulaanbaatar only, there were sixty active monasteries in 1937, none in 1939. The map of monasteries prepared by the regime to organize the repression has been lost, but in 1937 more than six hundred survived, reduced to two in 1939, which were kept alive mainly to be shown to foreign visitors as evidence of a supposed religious freedom in Mongolia. Despite protests from intellectuals, including local and even Soviet Communists, many works of art were burned, and the majority of the monasteries razed, often using them as targets for bombing or artillery tests.
The cultural genocide was certainly part of a larger, physical genocide. The numbers fully justify calling it such.
I had some correspondence with the museum after 2005, but lost contact recently. I hope Tserendulam’s son, who was criticized for allowing the historical building to be destroyed, would make good on his promise to open a new museum with his mother’s collection.. There are so many lessons we can learn from the genocide of the Mongolian monks.