Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Mongols are an East Asian ethnic group native to Mongolia and China, as well as the republics of Buryatia and Kalmykia in Russia. Their ancestry is traced to the Donghu, a nomadic confederation occupying eastern Mongolia and Manchuria, recorded in Chinese historical texts as early as 699-632 BCE. The word "Mongol" first appeared in 8th century Tang dynasty records as the name of a single Shiwei tribe.
In January 1771, approximately 170,000-200,000 Kalmyks began a mass migration from the Volga River toward Dzungaria to escape Russian encroachments on their autonomy. After seven months of travel through hostile territories, only 66,073 of the original group reached their destination. About 100,000-150,000 Kalmyks who lived on the western bank of the Volga could not join because the river failed to freeze that winter.
The Qing dynasty conquered the Dzungar Khanate in 1755-1758. Scholars estimate that approximately 80% of the Dzungar population was destroyed by a combination of warfare and disease during this period. The Dzungar population had stood at around 600,000 in 1755. Historian Mark Levene described the extermination as "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence."
Yes. The 4th Dalai Lama, Yonten Gyatso, who lived 1589-1617, was a Mongol and is recognized as the only non-Tibetan Dalai Lama. The word "dalai" itself comes from the Mongolian word meaning "ocean."
Between 22,000 and 33,000 Mongols were shot dead under Soviet orders during the Stalinist repressions in Mongolia, representing 3-5% of the total population at the time. The overall population of the Mongolian People's Republic in the late 1930s was only about 700,000 to 900,000 people. Some authors offer higher estimates, up to 100,000 victims.
Mongolian is the official provincial language of China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, where at least 4.1 million ethnic Mongols live. Across all of China, the language is spoken by roughly half of the country's 5.8 million ethnic Mongols. The language has experienced multiple cycles of decline and revival in Inner Mongolia, with the most recent decline recorded between 1995 and 2012.