Kalmykia

• 1. Introduction

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  Kalmykia is the only place in Europe where Buddhism is the majority religion. Tucked into the steppes of southern Russia, this republic of roughly 275,000 people traces its spiritual life not to Rome or Constantinople but to Tibet. How did a people of Mongolian origin come to hold their ground on the edge of the European continent, carrying Vajrayana Buddhism across centuries of displacement, forced exile, and near-cultural extinction? The answers stretch from the Irtysh River to the Black Sea, from the Kremlin to the streets of New Jersey.

  The capital, Elista, sits in a landscape that descends as low as 27 meters below sea level. The Caspian Depression sprawls across most of the republic, and temperatures swing from an average January low of -5 degrees Celsius to a July average of 24 degrees. On the 12th of July 2010, during a nationwide heatwave, the small town of Utta recorded an all-time Russian high of 45.4 degrees Celsius. Kalmykia is a place of extremes, in climate, in history, and in survival.

• 2. Arrival on the Volga

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  The ancestors of the Kalmyks were Oirat Mongols, nomadic herders who had lived on the steppes of southern Siberia along the banks of the Irtysh River. By the early 17th century they had pushed westward, and by around 1630 they reached the Lower Volga. Historians have offered several reasons for the migration, but the most widely accepted is straightforward: the Kalmyks were looking for better pasture for their herds. A secondary pressure may have been the growing power of the neighboring Dzungar Mongol tribe.

  The land they arrived in was not empty. It was home to the Nogai Horde, a confederation of Turkic-speaking nomadic tribes. The Kalmyks expelled the Nogais, who fled to the Caucasian plains and toward the Crimean Khanate, then broadly under Ottoman influence. Some Nogai groups sought refuge at the Russian garrison at Astrakhan. The Kalmyks spread across a vast territory stretching from Saratov in the north down to Astrakhan on the Volga delta in the south, and from the Don River in the west to the Ural River in the east.

  Within about 25 years of that arrival, the Kalmyks became nominal subjects of the Russian Tsar. In exchange for guarding Russia's southern frontier, they were promised annual payments and access to Russian border markets. The arrangement was meant to reduce raiding on both sides, but it rarely worked that cleanly. Kalmyk allegiance remained loose. Their Khans governed by their own legal code, which they called the Great Code of the Nomads, or Iki Tsaadzhin Bichig.

• 3. Peak Power: Ayuka Khan

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  The Kalmyk Khanate reached the height of its influence under Ayuka Khan, who ruled from 1672 to 1724 and held the title of Khan from 1690 onward. Under his leadership the Khanate carried out its border-protection duties while also launching successful military campaigns against Turkic-speaking neighbors and in the Caucasus. The economy grew through free trade with Russian border towns, with China, with Tibet, and with Muslim neighbors.

  Ayuka Khan also kept direct ties with the Oirat kinsmen remaining in Dzungaria and maintained contact with the Dalai Lama in Tibet. Those spiritual and political connections to Central Asia remained central to Kalmyk identity. The writer Thomas De Quincey later documented this era in a narrative written in 1837, covering events that came to a head in 1771, when a large portion of the Kalmyk population made the dramatic decision to migrate back east toward Dzhungaria. The word "Kalmyk" itself, according to one interpretation, means "those who remained" - referring to those who stayed behind after that 18th-century departure.

• 4. Revolution, Famine, and Deportation

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  On the 4th of November 1920, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee formally established the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast. Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin had issued an appeal to the Kalmyk people in July 1919, promising sufficient land in exchange for support of the Red Army. Fifteen years later, on the 22nd of October 1935, the Oblast was elevated to the Kalmyk Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

  The Soviet period brought devastating losses. On the 22nd of January 1922, Mongolia offered to help resettle Kalmyks during a famine; Russia refused outside assistance. Between 71,000 and 72,000 Kalmyks died in that famine. Revolts followed in 1926 and 1930. In March 1927, Soviet authorities deported 20,000 Kalmyks to the tundras of Siberia and Karelia. Buddhist temples and monasteries were burned, the traditional Todo Bichig vertical script was replaced by Cyrillic, and the collectivization drive seized grain and livestock.

  The worst came on the 27th of December 1943. Soviet authorities declared that "many Kalmyks" had collaborated with the German Army - which had captured Elista as early as the 12th of August 1942 - and used that as justification to deport the entire Kalmyk population, including the approximately 8,000 who had been decorated for service in the Soviet Red Army, among them 21 recognized as Heroes of the Soviet Union. The Kalmyk ASSR was abolished, its towns renamed, and its people scattered across Central Asia and Siberia. Nikita Khrushchev finally permitted their return in 1957, but the returnees found their homes and land occupied by Russians and Ukrainians who had been settled there. On the 9th of January 1957, Kalmykia became an autonomous oblast again, and on the 29th of July 1958, an autonomous republic within the Russian SFSR.

• 5. Chess, Power, and a Murdered Journalist

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  From 1993 to 2010, Kalmykia was governed by Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who simultaneously served as president of the world chess organization FIDE until 2018. Ilyumzhinov made chess a compulsory subject in all primary schools in Kalmykia and used personal funds to promote the game internationally. Elista hosted several major international chess tournaments, including the 2006 World Chess Championship between Veselin Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik.

  The chess spending became controversial. The opposition newspaper in Elista, Sovietskaya Kalmykia, published allegations in the late 1990s that the government was diverting public money into chess projects. Larisa Yudina, the journalist who had investigated those accusations, was kidnapped and murdered in 1998. Two men were charged with her killing: Sergei Vaskin and Tyurbi Boskomdzhiv, both of whom had worked in the local civil service, with one being a former presidential bodyguard. Both were found guilty and jailed. Investigators found no evidence linking Ilyumzhinov personally to the crime.

  On the 24th of October 2010, Alexey Orlov replaced Ilyumzhinov as Head of Kalmykia. Since September 2019, Batu Khasikov has served as acting president.

• 6. Buddhist Identity in Europe

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  A 2012 survey found that 47.6 percent of Kalmykia's population identified as Buddhist - the highest share of any polity in Europe. Russian Orthodox Christianity accounted for 18 percent, Islam for 4.8 percent, and Tengrism or Kalmyk shamanism for 3 percent. A further 8.2 percent described themselves as spiritual but not religious, and 8 percent as atheist.

  The Kalmyk people belong predominantly to the Gelug and Kagyu lineages of Vajrayana Tibetan Buddhism. They recognize Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, as their spiritual leader; the Dalai Lama has visited Elista on multiple occasions. They also recognize Erdne Ombadykow, a Kalmyk American, as the supreme lama of the Kalmyk people. In Kalmykia itself, the Gelugpa Order has built numerous Buddhist temples with government support.

  The religion survived diaspora as well. The Kalmyk refugees who fled Russia in 1920 built a Buddhist temple in Belgrade in 1929. Today, the largest concentration of American Kalmyks lives in Monmouth County, New Jersey, where several Kalmyk Buddhist temples stand alongside a Tibetan Buddhist Learning Center and monastery in Washington Township. Many older members of that diaspora community are fluent in German, French, and Serbo-Croatian - languages picked up during decades of passage through Europe before reaching the United States. The 2021 Census recorded Kalmyks as comprising 62.5 percent of the republic's population, with Russians at 25.7 percent and Dargins at 2.8 percent.