The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia

Chapter 2. Stalinism in Buryatia

CHAPTER 2 Stalinism in Buryatia During the 1920s, authorities in Buryatia espoused atheism, promoted communal farms, and encouraged Buryats to become workers and local government bureaucrats. Although some Buryats answered these calls, the majority did not. Instead, the everyday life of most continued much as it had before the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War. The majority of Buryats lived privately off the land and had minimal contact with the government. This changed, however, when in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin chose to forcibly collectivize the country’s agriculture, rapidly industrialize, and centralize economic decision-making. These policies ended the government’s more relaxed attitudes toward religion, nomadism, and Buryat culture. However, it was collectivization, more than any previous tsarist or Soviet government policy that profoundly affected the majority of Buryats. Settling the Buryats on collective farms changed their economy and it brought them under the strictest government control in their history. Settled communal life, as well as increasing urbanization, also exposed the Buryats more regularly to Soviet institutions that brought greater cultural homogenization and European influence. Many Buryats did not simply accept collectivization. They rebelled , slaughtered their animals rather than hand them over to collective farms, or moved to China or Mongolia. However, for authorities in Moscow, the policy of collectivization was final and there were to be no alternatives. Therefore by the end of the 1930s, the majority of rural Buryats had either joined the collective farms, 62 The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia died resisting, or had fled the country. Their plight was exacerbated by the elimination of native Buryat elites. Stalin’s economic policies were coupled with the use of purges and terror to destroy former , and even contemporary, elites, who were accused of threatening Soviet power or hindering the country’s modernizing goals. In Buryatia, local officials, as well as outsiders, worked to remove the Buryat noyon (the traditional ruling class), lamas, shamans, prerevolutionary Buryat intellectuals, and even members of the recently created young communist Buryat elite. Many were publicly denounced, arrested, sent to labor camps, or executed. Others joined collective farms, accepted demotions, or changed their professions. While collectivization, purges, and terror did not completely wipe out the Buryat leadership that had existed in the 1930s, they did narrow the options for what type of person from then on officially served as an elite. Elites were no longer to be noyon, high lamas, or pan-Mongolist intellectuals. Instead, the new Buryat elite needed to be useful to the country’s modernizing projects. For that, they needed to be Soviet-educated, Russian speaking, professional, and often urban. Authorities wanted educators, scholars, writers, bureaucrats, journalists, and many others to design and build a new Buryat society that was modern and Soviet, but that also retained certain acceptable elements that were distinctly Buryat meant to show the regime’s magnanimity. For that reason, officials sought to replace old elites with new, more supposedly loyal and reliable leaders. Building new institutions was crucial to this process. For example, the Buryat-Mongolian Writers’ Union and the Buryat-Mongolian Pedagogical Institute helped to educate and grow a new generation of Soviet Buryat leaders. This chapter focuses on the foundation of such institutions in Buryatia during the 1930s, as well as Stalin’s harsh policies of collectivization, terror, and purges. Stalinism dictated the parameters within which the Buryats could negotiate and navigate towards group and personal fulfillment. While opportunities to shape or influence the direction of this were vastly reduced, the foundation of new institutions did create, for some, favorable circumstances. Like chapter one, this chapter serves as a background to the more detailed study of the Buryat postwar transformation in the chapters that follow. Stalinism in Buryatia 63 Collectivization and the End of Nomadism At the end of the 1920s, Stalin concluded that the country must immediately modernize. He decided that the New Economic Policy (NEP), a program designed by Lenin that allowed for a mixed system of capitalism and socialism, was not working. Instead, the country needed to fully eliminate capitalism and build a truly socialist economy. The collectivization of agriculture became a key component of this plan. Authorities argued that if the government seized the land and settled rural residents on collective farms, it could control the economic output in the countryside, sell the surplus abroad, and use the money to finance rapid industrialization. It was especially crucial to industrialize because Stalin believed that the...