At eighty-nine, the Dalai Lama fairly recently made global headlines again—this time with a striking declaration in his new book, Voice for the Voiceless, denouncing the Chinese government’s ongoing attempts to dictate the terms of his next reincarnation. The irony ofan officially atheist regime meddling in matters of deep spiritual significance is glaring enough. But even more troubling is the broader context: over seven decades of systematic repression of Tibetan Buddhism under Communist rule. Yet this repression is only one part of a much larger, often overlooked narrative. The sustained assault on Buddhism by Communist regimes—within Tibet and far beyond—remains one of the most underreported tragedies of the modern era. The release of the Dalai Lama’s book offers a timely opportunity to revisit this grim history, take stock of its global dimensions, and reflect on its enduring significance.
While Westerners often associate modernity with the victory of secularism over past religious violence, many Asian Buddhists offer a different narrative: the repression of religion by governments committed to putatively progressive Marxist-Leninist and Maoist ideologies, even as the same governments claimed to respect religious freedom. The story begins in the former Soviet Union, which inherited imperial Russia’s vast multiethnic domains, including the small, traditionally Buddhist areas of Kalmykia (north of the Caspian Sea) and Buryatia (near Lake Baikal). It later added Tuva (near China),another Buddhist enclave. These areas were spared persecution in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, but the situation changed dramatically in the late 1920s and 1930s. While some Buddhists argued that their belief system was more a philosophy (even an atheistic one) than a religion, diehard Marxist-Leninists begged to differ. “Buddhist atheism has nothing to do with militant atheism based on the Marxist appraisal of the laws of nature and society,” a writer in the quasi-official journal Godless pointedly asserted in 1930. Buddhism encourages “social passivity and…aloofness from the concrete historical situation,” chided the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
Such judgments signaled a new era of repression. In all three areas, Buddhist temples and monasteries were either destroyed or repurposed for non-religious functions; one was even turned into a “museum of atheism” in the city of Ulan Ude, where it portrayed Buddhism (and other religions) as an “opium of the people.” High-ranking lamas and monks regularly faced harassment, deportation to the gulag, or execution. For itsintransigence during World War II, Stalin had the entire population of Kalmykia deported to Siberia or Central Asia in 1943, leading to the deaths of around 28,000 people out of a population of 134,000. Soviet officials later had the name Kalmykia removed from the map, adding cartographic to demographic decimation.
Hardly a “single memorial remains” of Buddhism, as one visitor to Soviet Buddhist regions observed in 1958: “In Asia Minor and Greece the ruins of ancient temples have been preserved, making it possible to study the ancient culture of Hellas. Nothing remains of Buddhist temples in Buryatia and Kalmykia. The fate of Lamaism in the USSR deserves attention as an example of the complete destruction of a religion and the destruction of a religious group as a group.” “Temples, spiritual literature, priceless treasures of the datsans [monasteries] were destroyed, plundered,” the Soviet Buddhist leader Lama Munko Tsybikov wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union, surveying the earlier Soviet carnage; “Religious figures were persecuted; thousands of lamas went through the torments of the Gulag.”
To read the rest of this essay, please go here to Commonweal magazine where it first appeared.
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