Buryat Intellectuals in Empire and Revolution

This book takes a deeper look at the history of the Russian Empire and the USSR from the perspective of ethno-national minorities. It focuses on Buryat intellectuals who traveled and worked across Eurasia, sometimes crossing international borders into Europe, China, Mongolia, and Tibet.

The chapters cover a wide geographic space and address broad themes such as nationalism, identity, modernity, Buddhism, Marxism, education, cultural institutions, language, imperialism, political transition, cultural change, and the consequences of economic and social development. Buryat intellectuals occupied prominent positions in political, cultural, and religious spheres during the late Russian Empire and the early years of the USSR, an intense period of Russification, Christianization, colonization, and modernization. Using unique primary sources, the contributors investigate how Buryat intellectuals responded to these transformative forces. The book shows that they created narratives that drew upon their own history, Mongolian-Tibetan written culture, and the Russian-European intellectual tradition. These intellectuals— from diplomats to scholars to Buddhist lamas—grappled with questions about their identity and role in a rapidly changing Russian/Soviet state. Some focused on how to preserve their traditional culture, others sought to create experimental hybrid forms of identity, and others joined the process of creating a new socialist nation that rejected the past.

A novel contribution to the literature on post-colonial/decolonial approaches to knowledge making, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of history, Russian studies, Mongolian studies, Central Eurasian studies, as well as intellectual history.