The Buddhist Corner of Europe: 7 Facts about Kalmykia

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1. The Republic of Kalmykia is a federal subject of Russia.

2. Kalmyks are a Mongolian Buddhist people originally from Central Asia that migrated to the Volga-Caspian Sea region in the 17th century to escape wars in their former home, western Mongolia. Kalmyks were originally part of Oirat tribe that lived in an area that extended from Siberia and western China. They migrated westward in the 1630s and settled near the Volga River. By 1680 there were 300,000 of them settled in 70,000 tents and they were a powerful political and military force. They fought continuously with their neighbors: Nogays, Tatars, Cossacks, Russians, Ukrainians and Kazakhs. They formed an alliance with Peter the Great and were given a homeland in the southern near-desert steppe.

3. The territory of Kalmykia is unique in that it has been the home in successive periods to many major world religions and ideologies. Prehistoric paganism and shamanism gave way to Judaism with the Khazars. This was succeeded by Islam with the Alans while the Mongol hordes brought Tengriism, and the later Nogais were Muslims, before their replacement by the present-day Buddhist Oirats/Kalmyks. With the annexation of the territory by the Russian Empire, Christianity arrived with Slavic settlers, before all religion was suppressed after the Russian Revolution. Shamanism has in all probability remained a constant, often hidden, substrate of folk-practice, as it is today.

4. Kalmykia is the only region in Europe where Buddhism is the most practiced religion, with Buddhists constituting a plurality of the population.

5. The fact that Kalmyks are a minority population in their own "republic" is a result of their forced deportation, en masse and virtually overnight, to the farthest regions of Siberia in the winter of 1943. As many as two-thirds of the population may have perished during this episode, since most were transported in unheated cattle cars. Those who survived the ordeal and those born in exile were not allowed to return until 1957. They have not yet recovered their pre-deportation numbers, and to date, there has not been one ruble paid to the Kalmyks as reparations for the attempted genocide inflicted upon them.

6. Elista, the capital of the republic, has of late, gained an international reputation for international chess competitions.

7. In the following years bad planning of agricultural and irrigation projects resulted in widespread desertification. On orders from Moscow, sheep production increased beyond levels that the fragile steppe could sustain, resulting in 1.4 million acres of man-made desert.

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