In Russia’s Buryatia, authorities have revived a search for ‘separatists’ first launched under Stalin

In late December, Alexey Tsydenov, the governor of Russia’s Republic of Buryatia, created a brand-new agency aimed at preventing “separatism and nationalism” in the region. While the office is the first of its kind in Buryatia’s modern history, it’s not unprecedented: the Soviet authorities took measures to combat potential Buryat separatist movements in the 1930s, referring to these efforts as the “fight against pan-Mongolism.” In reality, there was no “pan-Mongol conspiracy” during the Stalin era, and the regime’s search for one led to mass repressions. Less than a generation earlier, however, there had been three real attempts to secure greater autonomy for the Buryat people. The outlet People of Baikal recently looked back at this rarely-discussed history. Meduza shares an English-language adaption of the article.

The girl from the photo

The image was ubiquitous in the latter half of the Stalin era: the mustachioed leader grinning and holding a large bouquet of flowers while a young Buryat girl embraced him. Its intended message was clear: Soviet children were happy, and they had Stalin to thank.

The child in the photo, which was taken in 1936, was seven-year-old Engelsina Markizova, and her father, Ardan Markizov, was the People’s Commissar for Agriculture of the Buryat-Mongol ASSR. Engelsina had traveled to Moscow with her parents, who were representing Buryat-Mongolia as part of a delegation. Rumor had it among the delegates that Stalin planned to announce that their home republic would be upgraded from an autonomous republic within the Russian SFSR to a constituent republic of the USSR itself. In reality, however, the Soviet leader just wanted to share some reports on the state of the economy.

Engelsina would later recount how, overcome by boredom during one of Stalin’s speeches, she stood up, walked through the entire assembly hall, and handed the leader a bouquet that her parents had brought. “This is for you from the children of the Buryat-Mongol Republic,” she said, before giving him a kiss. Stalin then picked her up and placed her on the table in front of him; it was then that the famous photo was taken. In the weeks that followed, the picture would appear in millions of newspapers, and Engelsina would become an overnight symbol of a happy childhood for millions of Soviet citizens.

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The following year, Stalin launched the Great Terror, and Engelsina’s father was charged with orchestrating an “anti-Soviet, pan-Mongol conspiracy.” His military service in the Russian Civil War, his long career as a loyal Communist Party official, and his daughter made famous by Soviet propaganda weren’t enough to save him.

Even a letter from Engelsina assuring Stalin that her father was not a Japanese spy did nothing to sway the authorities. Ardan Markizov was shot in 1938, but his family wasn’t informed; instead, they were told that he’d been sentenced to 10 years in prison without right of correspondence.

Engelsina’s mother spent a year in prison, after which she and both of her children were exiled to Central Asia as relatives of an “enemy of the people.” A few years later, she would be found dead. It’s unclear to this day whether it was suicide or murder.

A ‘pan-Mongol conspiracy’

Engelsina Markizova’s father was far from the only victim of the Soviet authorities’ paranoia about a “pan-Mongol conspiracy.” An additional 141 people were arrested under the same criminal case, including other officials, writers, scientists, spiritual leaders, and farmers. Altogether, more than 2,000 people were charged with supporting “pan-Mongolism.” Some of the suspects were shot, while others were sent to prison camps.

The official allegation against these purge victims was that they were working to separate the Buryat-Mongol ASSR from the USSR and make it a part of Mongolia. During this period, Japan was trying to incorporate Mongolia into its sphere of influence, hence the claim that Engelsina’s father was spying for Tokyo. According to the authorities, the suspected “pan-Mongolists” had organized secret rebel units, armed themselves, and poisoned the livestock and crops of Buryatian collective farms to cause famine and sow anti-Soviet sentiments. All of this was purportedly done on the instructions of Japanese intelligence services in the interests of global imperialism. After Stalin’s death, all of the suspects would be rehabilitated and declared victims of Stalin’s repressions, and the state would acknowledge that the charges were unfounded.

In 1937, the Soviet authorities reduced the size of the Buryat-Mongol ASSR by about a third, allocating some of its territory to the Agin Buryat-Mongol National Okrug within the Chita region and some to the Ust-Orda Buryat-Mongol National Okrug within the Irkutsk region. This left Buryats spread across three different national subjects within the Russian SFSR.

Two decades later, in 1958, the Buryat-Mongol ASSR was renamed the Buryat ASSR. In 2008, after a referendum, the Ust-Orda Buryat Autonomous Okrug and the Agin-Buryat Autonomous Okrug lost their status as independent federal subjects and were fully incorporated into modern Russia’s Irkutsk and Zabaykalsky regions, respectively.

State archives list the names of 12,753 people in Buryatia who were executed by the Stalin regime in the 1930s, including 4,020 Buryats and 6,206 Russians.

Three bids for greater autonomy

The victims of the Stalin regime’s “pan-Mongolism” case were never actually planning to seek Buryatia’s secession from the USSR. But less than two decades earlier, there had been several real attempts to create an independent Buryatian state outside of the Soviet system.

The first of these projects was the State of Buryat-Mongolia, which formally existed from April 1917 to April 1920. Despite including the word “state” in its name, this entity was initially created as an “autonomous” constituent of Russia that included the lands of Buryat tribes on either side of Lake Baikal but excluded the land of Russian farmers.

Because Russian and Buryat villages were interspersed, Buryat-Mongolia was not a single unified territory. Officially led by Buryat historian Mikhail Bogdanov, it had a multi-party parliament and pursued its own independent taxation and cultural policies, often making decisions even amid the power vacuum of Civil War-era Russia.

Buryat-Mongolia managed to maneuver between the Whites and the Reds with varying degrees of success until 1920, when the Bolsheviks, having defeated the White Army, proceeded to dissolve the buffer state, dividing its territory in half. To the west of Baikal, they created the Mongol-Buryat Autonomous Region, and to the east, they formed the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Oblast within the Far Eastern Republic. These territories were reunited in 1923 when the Soviet government created the Buryat-Mongol ASSR.

The second short-lived Buryat state was called the Kodun State and existed for about three weeks in the spring of 1919 on the territory of what is now the Kizhinginsky district in the southern part of modern Buryatia. A theocracy modeled after Tibet, the Kodun State was led by Buddhist lama Lubsan Tsydenov, who declared himself the “tsar of all worlds.” The state’s creation was spurred by the White Army’s attempt to draft local Buryats into the military.

Lama Tsydenov called on Buryats to ignore the mobilization, separate from Buryat-Mongolia, and build a new society based on Buddhist teachings, though without seceding from Russia. An assembly of elders supported the idea. However, Cossack Ataman Grigory Semyonov’s White Army troops quickly dissolved the Kodun State and took Lama Tsydenov captive. Although they soon released him, declaring him mentally unstable, he nonetheless spent most of the remaining three years of his life in prisons in the Far Eastern Republic.

The third attempt at lasting Buryat statehood was the Great Mongol State, which was initiated by Semyonov himself, with backing from Japan. In February 1919, Semyonov convened a congress of pan-Mongolists, where he declared the creation of a state that would include the territories of Mongolia, China’s Inner Mongolia, Manchuria, Tuva, and the lands inhabited by Buryats around Lake Baikal.

The Transbaikal Railway’s Dauriya Station was chosen as the temporary location for the Great Mongol State’s government. A native of Inner Mongolia named Nichi Toin Mendebair was elected as its head, and Semyonov himself was chosen to lead its armed forces. However, the initiative was opposed by both the Chinese government and then-White Army admiral Alexander Kolchak, who advocated for a “united and indivisible” Russia. By the fall of 1919, the Great Mongol State had collapsed under pressure from pro-Bolshevik partisans. Mendebair fled to Mongolia, where he was captured and executed by the Chinese authorities.