NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA AND PAOLO SARTORI (EDS.) ISLAM, …

NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA AND PAOLO SARTORI (EDS.)

ISLAM, SOCIETY AND STATES ACROSS THE QAZAQ STEPPE (18TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURIES)

ÖSTERREICHISCHE AKADEMIE DER WISSENSCHAFTENPHILOSOPHISCH-HISTORISCHE KLASSE

SITZUNGSBERICHTE, 844. BAND

VERÖFFENTLICHUNGEN ZUR IRANISTIKHERAUSGEGEBEN VON BERT G. FRAGNER UND FLORIAN SCHWARZ

NR. 72

NICCOLÒ PIANCIOLA AND PAOLO SARTORI (EDS.)

ISLAM, SOCIETY AND STATES ACROSS THE QAZAQ STEPPE

(18TH – EARLY 20TH CENTURIES)

Vorgelegt von w. M. BERT G. FRAGNERin der Sitzung am 14. Juni 2013

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Cover: "Volost administrators from the Ural'sk region withQazaq students of the Ural'sk secondary military school (1901)",

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................... 7

Niccolò Pianciola and Paolo Sartori Introduction: Towards a Connected History of the Qazaq Steppe ............................ 9

Devin DeWeese The Yasav Presence in the Dasht-i Qïpchaq from the 16th to 18th Century ............. 27

Alfrid Bustanov Notes on the Yasav ya and Naqshband ya in Western Siberia in the 17th – Early 20th Centuries ........................................................................................ 69

Tomohiko Uyama The Changing Religious Orientation of Qazaq Intellectuals in the Tsarist Period: Shar a, Secularism, and Ethics ................................................. 95

Paul W. Werth The Qazaq Steppe and Islamic Administrative Exceptionalism: A Comparison with Buddhism Among Buriats ...................................................... 119

Anna Afanasyeva Qazaq Religious Beliefs in the Writings of Russian Doctors during the Imperial Age (1731–1917) .................................................................... 143

Yuriy Malikov Disadvantaged Neophytes of the Privileged Religion: Why Qazaqs Did Not Become Christians .............................................................. 181

Allen J. Frank Sufis, Scholars, and Divanas of the Qazaq Middle Horde in the Works of Mäshhür Zhüsip Köpeyulï ...................................................................... 213

Bakhtiyar Babajanov and Sharifjon Islamov Shar a for the Bolsheviks? Fatv s on Land Reform in Early Soviet Central Asia ................................................................................................. 233

David Brophy Correcting Transgressions in the House of Islam: Yang Zengxin’s Buguozhai wendu on Xinjiang’s Muslims ................................... 267

Niccolò Pianciola Interpreting an Insurgency in Soviet Kazakhstan: The OGPU, Islam and Qazaq “Clans” in Suzak, 1930 .......................................... 297

Index ....................................................................................................................... 341

The Qazaq Steppe and Islamic Administrative Exceptionalism:

A Comparison with Buddhism Among Buriats

P A U L W . W E R T H *

Las Vegas Among the peculiarities of the Qazaq steppe in imperial Russia was the re-moval of its Islamic affairs from the general regulatory apparatus of the im-perial state in 1868. This adjustment, formalized in the permanent Steppe Statute of 1891, canceled the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Muslim Spiritual Assembly over the steppe and reduced (formal) state regulation of Islam in the region to a minimum. In this paper, I seek to situate the seemingly anom-alous character of imperial administration of Islam in the steppe in a broader comparative framework encompassing the Russian Empire as a whole. I seek first of all to establish that many other Muslim populations lacked a regula-tory apparatus akin to that of the Orenburg Assembly and thus to emphasize the regionally fractured character of Muslim administration in Russia. Sec-ondly, I compare the removal of the steppe from the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly to a similar exemption of the Buddhist population west of Lake Baikal from the spiritual authority of the Bandido Khambo Lama in 1889. This comparison suggests a more general imperial strategy by the late nineteenth century of separating certain population groups that were consid-ered amenable to Russian “civilization” and perhaps conversion to Ortho-doxy (e.g. Qazaqs and cis-Baikal Buriats) away from religions deemed “hos-tile” to Russian imperial pretensions (e.g., Islam and Buddhism). This com-parative discussion demonstrates the ways in which Qazaq religious experi-ence was both unique in the Russian Empire and reflective of broader pat-terns. * I express my sincere thanks to an anonymous external reviewer who provided an invalua-

ble critique of an earlier version of this essay. For support for the research leading to this article, I thank the International Research and Exchanges Board, the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center.

Paul W. Werth 120

My contribution rests on the premise that there is much to be gained from examining different regions of the Russian Empire in comparative perspec-tive. Indeed, here I would like to make a larger claim for the significance of comparative analysis within the Russian Empire, which permits us to discern broader patterns in religious experience and modes of imperial rule based on religious institutions.1 To be sure, many developments depended on local and regional circumstances and even on the outlooks of particular officials, religious elites, and local communities. The dictates of St. Petersburg were frequently altered or transformed in the process of implementation – or ig-nored altogether. Local initiative – emanating from administrators and sub-jects alike – was often crucial. From this perspective research on the local, the regional, and the particular will and should always occupy a fundamental place in the production of historical knowledge. Yet I propose that broader logics – based on shared imperial outlooks and bureaucratic cultures, struc-tural similarities between different regions of the empire, and larger impera-tives flowing from the empire’s necessary engagement with an emerging modernity – were also frequently at work. It is primarily these broader logics that I emphasize here – without, I hope, doing too much violence to the local and the particular.

The years from roughly 1720 to 1860 saw the creation of what I call im-perial Russia’s multiconfessional establishment of religion. By “establish-ment” I mean the ordering, regulating and upholding of the ordinances of a religion recognized by state power, as well as the conferring on a particular religious body the status of a state church.2 It is true, to cite the Law Digest of 1832, that Orthodoxy was the “ruling and predominant faith” of the Rus-sian Empire.3 Yet it should be noted that in particular regions of the empire – Finland, the Baltic region, and the Kingdom of Poland – other religions en-joyed explicit recognition as “ruling” faiths or other marks of preference

1 Such comparative analysis informs my own larger research agenda, for example with

regard to institutions and legal statutes produced by the imperial state for Russia’s diverse religions: “The Institutionalization of Confessional Difference: ‘Foreign Confessions’ in Imperial Russia, 1810–1857,” in: Defining Self: Essays on Emergent Identities in Russia, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Michael Branch (Helsinki, 2009), 152–172. Among the first to attempt such an analysis on such religious questions was Robert Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State: Islam and Religious Politics in Nineteenth-Century Russia,” American Historical Review 108/1 (Feb., 2003): 50–83.

2 These are definitions provided by the Oxford English Dictionary. 3 Svod zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1832), article 40.

The Qazaq Steppe and Islamic Administrative Exceptionalism 121

(though of course never at the expense of Orthodoxy itself). Furthermore, essentially all the recognized non-Orthodox religions of Russia were eventu-ally construed by the government as being state institutions, located under the jurisdiction of the interior ministry (by 1832) and charged with perform-ing significant administrative tasks, such as the maintenance of civil acts.4 Aside from those in certain distant and recently conquered regions, by the mid-nineteenth century the vast majority of Russian subjects were under the authority of religious bodies which had been created or legitimized by state power and were regulated by imperial statute. These laws and institutions defined the basic parameters of religious life in imperial Russia, and in this regard we may speak of the domestication of the so-called “foreign confes-sions.” This is not to deny that there was much unregulated religious activi-ty, involving Sufis, pilgrimages, and so on. Some of this activity is in fact described by other contributions to this volume.5 Nonetheless, this regulated sphere of religious activity needs to be included in our consideration, if only because it defined the parameters of the unregulated realm as well.

This process of establishment began with Orthodoxy itself and the crea-tion of the Holy Synod in place of the Patriarch in 1721. Subsequent decades saw the creation of consistories, as well as other measures designed to im-prove and standardize diocesan administration. This new ecclesiastical bu-reaucracy permitted stricter and more centralized Church control over local religious life, even though a coherent legal basis for its efficient functioning on the diocesan level appeared only with a statute on consistories in 1841.6 Historians differ about the degree of independence that the Orthodox Church was able to maintain in this process of bureaucratization. It seems fair to conclude that while the Church acquired an absolutized authority over a distinct “spiritual domain” and retained distinct institutional interests, the

4 Buddhists in eastern Siberia were transferred from the jurisdiction of the foreign ministry

to the interior ministry only in 1841, while Buddhist Kalmyks were under the ministry of state domains until 1902.

5 Consider also two recent documentary collections dealing with such cases: Marsil’ Nu-rullovich Farkhshatov, “Delo” sheikha Zainully Rasuleva (Ufa, 2009); Diliara Usmanova, Musul’manskoe “sektanstvo” v Rossiiskoi Imperii: “Vaisovskii Bozhii polk staroverov-musul’man,” 1862–1916 gg. (Kazan, 2009).

6 James Cracraft, The Church Reform of Peter the Great (New York, 1971); Gregory L. Freeze, The Russian Levites: Parish Clergy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA., 1977), 46–77; A. S. Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religiia v Rossii, 1700–1740 gg. (Moscow, 2000); T. V. Barsov O sobranii dukhovnykh zakonov (St. Petersburg, 1898), 52–65.

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Synod nonetheless evolved into something akin to a government ministry for the Orthodox religion by the nineteenth century.7

While this process occurred more slowly with respect to Russia’s non-Orthodox religions, by the mid to late eighteenth century several factors combined to place a premium on institution-building for the non-Orthodox religions. The acquisition of new territories from Poland rendered imperative the assertion of some state control over the affairs of Roman and Greek Catholics, especially in light of papal claims to spiritual authority over those populations. Further eastward, uprisings in 1755 and 1773–75, partly in re-sponse to violent missionary campaigns of the 1740s, convinced imperial officials that an accommodation with Islam was essential. This was all the more desirable after the treaty of Küçük Kanarc� of 1774, which recognized some spiritual authority for the Sultan beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire, most directly over Muslims in Crimea. 8 Finally, guided by Polizeistaat models of statecraft and Enlightenment conceptions of religious toleration, Catherine’s government came to recognize the utility of non-Orthodox religions as sources of order and stability.9 In this context it was logical for the state to seek to replicate, with appropriate modifications, the institutional and legal arrangement that had been set in place for Orthodoxy earlier in the century.

These modifications were significant, however, and the degree of replica-tion was conditioned by a series of theological, spatial, and (geo)political circumstances that limit our ability to generalize. It is possible nonetheless to assert that in the case of Christian confessions the state sought generally to unite religious affairs under a single institution or religious leader. True, in some cases this authority did not extend (at least immediately) to the King-dom of Poland or the Grand Duchy of Finland, each of which had its own

7 Gregory L. Freeze, “Institutionalizing Piety: The Church and Popular Religion, 1750–

1850,” in: Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, eds. Jane Burbank and David Ransel (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 210–249; Elena Vishlenkova, Zabotias' o dushakh pod-dannykh: religioznia politika v Rossii pervoi chetverti XIX veka (Saratov, 2002), 169–181; A. Iu. Polunov, “Ober-Prokuror sviateishego sinoda: Osnovnye etapy stanovleniia i razvitiia (XVIII - seredina XIX v.)” in: Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii: Sbornik statei i vospominanii k stoletiiu istorika (Moscow, 2008), 231–260.

8 D. Iu. Arapov, Sistema gosudarstvennogo regulirovania Islama v Rossiiskoi Imperii: Posledniaia tret' XVIII – nachalo XX vv. (Moscow, 2004), 45; Robert Crews, For Prophet and Tsar: Islam and Empire in Russia and Central Asia (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 39–45.

9 For a fuller elaboration, see Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State.”


laws and institutions. But a general tendency towards the concentration of spiritual power is clear. Thus, for example, the state recognized the authority of the Armenian Catholicos over all subjects of the Apostolic (Gregorian) confession within the Russian Empire – and also, for theological and geopo-litical reasons, even over that church’s adherents abroad.10 In the case of Roman Catholics, while admittedly trying to dilute the authority of the Pope, tsarist authorities nonetheless formally subordinated bishops within Russia to a single Archbishop and then Metropolitan,11 and in 1785 extended the authority of that figure even over Catholics of the eastern rite.12 The affairs of Lutherans were meanwhile concentrated in a General Consistory in St. Petersburg.

This tendency towards concentration was weaker for non-Christian reli-gions. In the case of Jews, despite the creation of a Rabbinical Commission in 1848, it is difficult to speak of any coherent and durable tendency towards spiritual centralization – though there was some limited discussion of this idea.13 For Buddhists a basic distinction emerged between Buriats and Kal-myks; each received its own statute and spiritual head, while Kalmyks were subdivided even further between Astrakhan’ province and the Don Region. For Muslims, too, territorial distinctions were crucial. The Orenburg Assem-bly was initially established for all of the empire’s Muslims, but from the very beginning an exception was made for Crimea, where in due course a

10 In this case Russian statesmen drew both on traditional claims to ecumenical authority on

the part of the Catholicos and on its aspirations to use that figure to influence Armenian communities in Persia and the Ottoman Empire. For details, see my article “Glava tserkvi, poddannyi imperatora: Armianskii Katolikos na perekrestke vnutrenei i vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Imperii, 1828–1914 gg.,” Ab Imperio 3 (2006): 99–138

11 This arrangement violated Catholic canonical standards positing the independent power of bishops within their own dioceses and their subordination directly to Rome without in-termediary instances. There was, accordingly, some resistance to this Archbish-op/Metropolitan.

12 Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Con-flict in 18th-century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb, IL, 2009), esp. 160–161, 165–167. In the longer term, of course, the fate of Greek Catholics (Uniates) was to be “reunion” with Orthodoxy.

13 Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossiiskoi Imperii, second series, vol. 23, no. 22276 (24.06.1848), 346–7; Iu. Gessen, “Ravvinat v Rossii,” Evreiskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 13 (1912), 227. The commission convened only six times over seventy years and could there-fore scarcely direct Jewish affairs in a highly organized fashion.

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separate muft and spiritual body appeared.14 When the muft of Orenburg proposed the creation of a central college for Muslim affairs in St. Peters-burg in 1804 – presumably on the model of the Roman Catholic College – this idea was rejected as entailing an excessive strengthening of spiritual authority over Muslims.15 Subsequently acquired territories were left beyond the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly. The state furthermore created separate institutional and statutory arrangements for Shias and Sunnis in the South Caucasus,16 while the North Caucasus featured a particular regime that aspired to restrict the role of Islamic clerics by supporting secular elites and traditional, non-Islamic law.17 The administration of Muslims was accord-ingly fractured throughout different parts of the empire, and across the nine-teenth century the state expressed growing opposition to any further centrali-zation in this regard. Indeed, government plans for reform of the Muslim administration almost always promoted further fragmentation, even as Mus-lims themselves frequently proposed greater unity and integration.18

Both Qazaqs and Buriats – my focus in this article – were brought into this general system of administration and indeed were arguably at the fore-

14 For the arrangements in Crimea, see Arapov, Sistema, 60–66; and Ivan Aleksandrov, “K

istorii uchrezhdeniia Tavricheskago Magometanskago Dukhovnago Pravleniia.” Izvestiia Tavricheskoi uchenoi arkhivnoi komissii 54 (1918), 316–355

15 Crews, For Prophet, 56–57; D. D. Azamatov, Orenburgskoe magometanskoe dukhovnoe sobranie v kontse XVIII - XIX vv. (Ufa, 1999), 31–32.

16 On tsarist administrators’ recognition of the importance of this distinction, see Koloni-al'naia politika rossiiskogo tsarizma v Azerbaidzhane v 20–60-x gg. XIX vv. (Moscow and Leningrad, 1937), 283, 396.

17 In actual practice, cooperation with loyal Muslim leaders and clerics proved more com-mon. On these arrangements and practices, see V. O. Bobrovnikov, Musul’mane severnogo Kavkaza: Obychai, pravo, nasilie (Moscow, 2002); and Timothy K. Blauvelt, “Military-Civil Administration and Islam in the North Caucasus, 1858–1883,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11/2 (2010): 221–255.

18 Consider, for example, the examination of this issue by a special commission in St. Pe-tersburg after the Revolution of 1905: Russian State Historical Archive (henceforth, RGIA), f. 1276, op. 2, d. 593, ll. 107–115ob. Greater unity was also characteristic of the requests of some Kalmyks concerning the administration of Buddhism. See S. G. Ryba-kov, “K voprosu ob ustroistve dukhovnogo byta buddistov v Rossii,” a memorandum produced after the February Revolution of 1917 and published in: Buddisty v Rossiiskoi Imperii v 1917 godu: Zakonodatel’stvo, opisaniia, eds. D. Iu. Arapov and E. V. Dorzhieva (Elista, 2004), 31. In his book Sistema, Dmitrii Arapov discusses a whole series of (large-ly unrealized) projects in the second half of the nineteenth century that would have further fragmented the administration of Muslims in the Empire.


front of its process of creation. As noted, the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly was initially conceived in the broadest possible terms (though of course the largely Muslim regions of the Caucasus and Central Asia had not yet been incorporated into the empire). As a result, the authority of the As-sembly and its muft extended well into the Qazaq steppe, and indeed – as numerous historians have noted – the imperial government actually facilitat-ed this extension.19 In fact, given that the state’s first efforts towards institu-tionalizing Islam occurred in Orenburg rather than in Muslim centers of the Russian interior (for example, Kazan’), and that in staffing the Orenburg Assembly the imperial government drew substantially on figures who had established reputations in steppe diplomacy, one may conclude that the Qazaq steppe was by no means peripheral to the concerns of state actors in establishing the Assembly.20

For several reasons, the situation for Buddhists was somewhat different, although certain similarities are nonetheless discernable.21 The circumstanc-es here were unusual in that Buddhism was still taking root in the trans-Baikal region as Russia gradually established its rule there. Even in neigh-boring Mongolia the kh n had converted to the Mahayana (great vehicle) form of Buddhism of the Gelugpa school – also referred to as “yellow hat” – only in 1578, while the first monastery in Mongolia appeared eight years later. Though there is evidence of Buddhism arriving in the Baikal region as early as the 1660s, the Soviet publication Lamaizm v Buriatii suggests that the first datsan (temple) appeared only in 1707,22 just as Russia was solidify-

19 Allen J. Frank, “Tatarskie mully sredi kazakhov i kirgizov v XVIII – XIX vekakh,” in

Kul’tura, iskusstvo tatarskogo naroda: Istoki, traditsii, vzaimosviazi (Kazan, 1993), 124–131; Gul’mira Sultangalieva, “‘Tatarskaia’ diaspora v konfessional’nykh sviaziakh ka-zakhskoi stepi, XVIII – XIX vv.,” Vestnik Evrazii 4 (2000): 20–36.

20 My line of argumentation here follows Allen Frank, “Islamic Transformation on the Ka-zakh Steppe, 1742–1917: Towards an Islamic History of Kazakhstan under Russian Rule,” in: The Construction and Deconstruction of National Histories in Slavic Eurasia, ed. Hayashi Tadayuki (Sapporo, 2003), 269–270.

21 For reasons having to do with the sources at my disposal, I focus here primarily on Bud-dhism among Buriats, while recognizing that the Kalmyk case certainly warrants more analysis. For broad introductions to the topic, see G. Sh. Dordzhieva, Buddizm i khristian-stvo v Kalmykii (Elista, 1995); and K. V. Orlova, Istoriia khristianizatsii kalmykov (Mos-cow, 2006).

22 On conversion see also Svat Soucek in A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, 2000), 167–169. On Buddhism in Siberia, see H. S. Hundley, “Defending the Periphery: Tsarist Man-agement of Buriat Buddhism,” Russian Review 69/2 (2010): 236–238.

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ing its control there. After concluding an initial treaty at Nerchinsk in 1689, Russia and China clarified their border and the subject status of the Mongo-lian tribes in the region in 1727. St. Petersburg now sought to restrict reli-giously motivated border crossings, and accordingly prohibited the move-ment of Buddhist lamas across the newly defined frontier.23 Indeed, the prin-cipal goal of the state’s religious policy in this region – at least until the mid-nineteenth century or even later – seems to have involved segregating its new Buddhist subjects from their counterparts across the border in Mongo-lia, and thus strengthening its claims to dominion in the recently acquired territory.

This aspiration in turn served as the principal catalyst in the state’s formal recognition and institutionalization of Buddhism in Russia. Lamas in Russia had initially been dependent on the authority of the Hutagt in Mongolia for initiation and spiritual guidance,24 but with the solidification of the border Russian authorities were determined to break this connection. In practice this meant encouraging the institutionalization of Buddhism in the trans-Baikal region and conferring prestigious titles on particular individuals who were eager to raise their stature. The goal, in a word, was autocephaly for Bud-dhism in Russia. Thus already in 1741 – before comparable steps with regard to most other religions and simultaneously with the initiation of a massive missionary campaign in the Volga region that included extensive destruction of mosques25 – Russian authorities in the region created a registry (shtat) for the “lamaist clergy,” and the Tsongol’skii datsan, founded a decade or so

23 V. Vashkevich, Lamaity v vostochnoi Sibiri (St. Petersburg, 1885), 35 (reproduced in T.

V. Ermakova, ed., Buddiiskii mir glazami rossiiskikh issledovatelei XIX – pervoi treti XX veka [St. Petersburg, 1998], 29–57); Institut Bandita-khambo-lamy i buriat i ego otnoshenii k lamaizmu i missii (Kazan, 1911), 3. On mapping of this region, see Marina Tolmacheva, “The Early Russian Exploration and Mapping of the Chinese Frontier,” Ca-hiers du monde russe 41/1 (2000): 41–56.

24 Hutagt (Russian: Khutukta) = “blessed one,” a high-ranking Mongolian incarnated “saint” or huvilgaan (incarnation, or “Living Buddha,” often the head of a monastery or temple). The Hutagt in Urga (Mongolia) gained also the title of Javzan damba in 1650 after study in Tibet. The Javzandamba Hutagt was outranked in the Lamaist hierarchy only by the Dalai and Panchen Lamas. On these concepts, see Historical Dictionary of Mongolia, ed. Alan J. K. Sanders (Landham, 1996), 27, 104, 111. Urga (also Hüree) was renamed Ulanbaator) in 1924.

25 The contrast between the fates of Buddhism and Islam at this moment is highlighted by Nikolai Tsyrempilov, “Za sviatuiu dkharmu i belogo tsaria: Rossiiskaia imperiia glazami buriatskikh buddistov XVIII – nachala XX vekov,” Ab Imperio 2 (2009): 107.


earlier, was recognized as the primary temple among Buriats.26 In 1764, authorities in Irkutsk recognized a certain Damba Dorzha Dzaiaev (Jaya) as Bandido Khambo Lama,27 which gave him the authority to ordinate people into lower orders. Dzaiaev had been seeking to fend off a challenge for reli-gious leadership from a slightly newer datsan established at Goose Lake in 1741/1758.28 Although he attained recognition as Bandido Khambo Lama, this struggle for preeminence between Goose Lake and the Tsongol’skii datsan continued for the rest of the eighteenth century and was resolved only in 1809, with the victory of Goose Lake.29 Buddhism’s inclusion in imperial Russia’s statutory regime lagged a bit behind the other confessions – not least of all because Buriats were transferred from the jurisdiction of the for-eign ministry to the interior ministry only in 184130 – but in 1853 Buddhists in Eastern Siberia were accorded their own legal statute akin to those pro-duced for the other “foreign confessions” in the 1830s.

26 A. S. Riazhev, “Prosveshchennoe dukhovenstvo pri Ekaterine II,” Voprosy istorii 9

(2004): 45; V. P. Androsov, Slovar’ Indo-Tibetskogo i Rossiiskogo Buddizma (n.p., 2000), 174; D. Shaglakhaev, Proshloe i nastoiashchee Khoimorskogo datsana (Ulan-Ude, 2003), 3; Galina G. Chimitdorzhin, Institut Pandito Khambo Lam, 1764–2004 (Ulan-Ude, 2004), 17.

27 The term “Bandido” (also “Bandita” and “Pandita”) is a Sanskrit term signifying someone with great knowledge. “Khambo” and “Lama” are Tibetan words signifying “religious teacher” and pertained only to religious figures within their monasteries (Vashkevich, Lamaity; and Institut Bandita-Khambo Lamy u buriat [1911], 2. Dzaiaev was able gain recognition of this title from Empress Catherine II during a visit to St. Petersburg in 1767. See Rybakov, “K voprosu,” 16.

28 I have encountered different dates for the founding of this datsan. 29 The Russian historian A. S. Riazhev suggests that the struggle for leadership in Buriat

Buddhism was in part one between Mongolian and Tibetan orientations. At stake in this regard was whether Russian Buddhists would look primarily to the Hutagt in Urga or to the Dalai-Lama in Lhasa for spiritual guidance and leadership. (Riazhev, "Prosveshchen-noe dukhovenstvo,” 54). The preference that Russian authorities eventually gave to Goose Lake may perhaps have reflected the hope that the Tibetan orientation, given Lhasa’s far-away location, would strengthen the religious independence of local (Russian) Buddhism. By one account, as late as 1748 lamas in the trans-Baikal region were being ordained in Tibet. (Memorandum by tsarist official Velichko [position not indicated] in RGIA, f. 1261, op. 1, 1841, d. 12b, l. 40).

30 The circumstances of transfer are addressed in the report of Dmitrii Bludov, head of His Majesty’s Second Division, to the Emperor in RGIA, f. 1261, op. 1, 1841, d. 12b. (6 March 1841), ll. 70–80ob.

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Certain parallels with the Muslim case will be immediately apparent. True, Islam had appeared among Muslim communities in Russia earlier than did Buddhism among Buriats.31 But – in a clear analogy to the Buddhist case – undoubtedly one of the most important reasons for Catherine II’s govern-ment to establish and/or recognize muft s in Ufa and Crimea was her desire to ensure spiritual independence of Russian Muslims from Islamic figures in the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere.32 Thus the Bandido Khambo Lama and Goose Lake in functional terms played – or at least were designed to play – a role quite similar to that of the muft and the Assembly in Ufa.

Another important similarity – one more directly relevant to the issue in this article – involves those adherents to Islam and Buddhism who were perceived by imperial rulers to be at the margins of their respective confes-sional communities. Many scholars of the Qazaq steppe now reject the prop-osition that Islam constituted merely a superficial layer over a “pagan” or shamanist core, in favor of the idea that it formed a deep synthesis with in-digenous Inner Asian values and conceptions, especially those concerning communal origins.33 From this perspective, though the practice of Islam in the steppe may have differed from that in sedentary regions in the Volga-Ural provinces and Central Asia, Islamic conceptions were still integral to the ways in which Qazaqs conceived of their communities and their histo-ry.34 For all this, though, many Russian officials and ethnographers – and

31 On the development of Islam on the territory of Kazakhstan, see Meruert Aubuseitova,

“The Spread of Islam in Kazakhstan from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in: Kazakhstan: Religions and Society in the History of Central Asia, eds. Gian Luca Bonora, Niccolò Pianciola, and Paolo Sartori (Turin, 2009), 113–24.

32 This point is made by several historians: Crews, “Empire and the Confessional State,” Sultangalieva, “’Tatarskaia’ diaspora,” 21; Charles Steinwedel, “Invisible Threads of Em-pire: State, Religion, and Ethnicity in Tsarist Bashkiria, 1773–1917” (Ph.D. diss., Colum-bia University, 1999), 50–54.

33 A compelling case along these lines is offered by Devin DeWeese in Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde: Baba Tükles and the Conversion to Islam in Histor-ical and Epic Tradition (University Park, 1994). For a similar set of assertions rooted in the study of contemporary Qazaq religion, see Bruce Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan: Kazak Religion and Collective Memory (Richmond, 2001), esp. 7–19.

34 For a consideration of some of these differences – for example involving oral as opposed to written transmission of Islamic knowledge among Qazaqs (of the Inner Horde) – see Allen J. Frank, Muslim Religious Institutions in Imperial Russia: The Islamic World of Novouzensk District and the Kazakh Inner Horde (Leiden, 2001), esp. 274–305. Frank is also inclined to emphasize a set of features of Islamic practice that were nonetheless


even some Qazaq informants – believed that Qazaqs were not (yet) Muslims, that Islamization was still rather superficial, and that effective state interven-tions could prevent Islam from becoming thoroughly rooted in steppe com-munities. Imperial policy thus posited a distinction between “true” Muslims (for example, Tatars and sedentary groups in Central Asia) and superficially Islamicized shamanists (Qazaqs). Administrators drew a similar distinction between Buriats in the trans-Baikal region and the roughly similar number of those to the west of that lake, the cis-Baikal. The former were understood to be thoroughly Buddhist, with only small remnants of a foregoing shaman-ism. The latter offered precisely the opposite image: largely shamanistic Buriats among whom Buddhism constituted a rather superficial layer, if it was present at all.35

To be sure, there are important differences between the two cases. If in the Muslim case the (perceived) degree of Islamization largely coincided with ethnic distinctions (crudely: Tatar vs. Qazaq), then in the Buddhist case the distinction ran through a specific ethnic group – Buriats. This allowed imperial officials to gloss the undesirable Islamization of Qazaqs as “Tatari-zation,” whereas – to my knowledge – there was no comparable term in the Baikal region. Moreover, my impression is that at least in proportional terms far more Buriats than Qazaqs converted to Christianity, at least nominally. Qazaq conversions to Orthodoxy were very rare, whereas a segment of (at least nominally) Christian Buriats had appeared by the mid-nineteenth centu-ry, especially to the west of Lake Baikal.36 For all that, the broad structural

broadly shared by nomadic Qazaqs and the sedentary population of Central Asia. See his “Islamic Transformation,” especially 264.

35 On the roots of this similar conception for Qazaqs and Buriats, see Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan, 17.

36 Tomohiko Uyama finds just 1902 Orthodox Christians who identified Qazaqs as their mother tongue in the 1897 census in his article, “A Particularist Empire: The Russian Pol-icies of Christianization and Military Conscription in Central Asia,” in: Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia, ed. Tomohiko Uyama (Sapporo, 2007), 35. Niccolò Pian-ciola points to little more than one thousand conversions in thirty years of missionary ac-tivity, in “Orthodoxy in the Kazakh Territories,” in: Kazakhstan, eds. Bonora, Pianciola, and Sartori, 241. Meanwhile Helen Hundley relates that 11.8% of the Buriat population of Irkutsk province (cis-Baikal) were formally Christian by 1868. See Helen Sharon Hund-ley, “Speransky and the Buriats: Administrative Reform in Nineteenth-Century Russia” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 1984), 166–71. On the very modest accomplishments of Orthodoxy missionary work among Qazaqs and the general problems encountered, see also Robert Geraci, “Going Abroad, Going to Russia? Orthodox Missionaries in the Ka-

Paul W. Werth 130

similarities between the two cases are significant. Initially (in the eighteenth century) tsarist authorities had sought to integrate adherents to a given reli-gion – Islam and Buddhism – across a large scope of territory. Subsequently, those authorities turned against this policy, rejected it as misguided or mis-taken, and sought to segregate certain groups of the respective populations from other Muslims / Buddhists and their centers of religious authority.

The reorientation in both cases can be dated roughly to the middle of the nineteenth century and more immediately to the 1860s. This timing was clearly a product, in part, of developments specific to each religion. On the one hand, the end of the Caucasian War in 1864 and especially the conquest of major portions of Central Asia at about the same time suggested the need for a new relationship between the state and its Muslim subjects. Whereas hitherto the inclusion of Qazaqs in the empire’s confessional order had ap-parently promoted their pacification and subordination to imperial authority, after the conquest of Central Asia some statesmen began to fear that this inclusion was enabling the formation of a single and potentially dangerous mass of “fanatical” Muslims extending from the Volga River all the way to the Tian-Shan mountains. Russia’s eastward expansion also placed ever more Qazaqs under more direct forms of tsarist authority, which ultimately diminished Islam’s utility as an instrument of imperial rule.37 On the other hand, various Christian missionary efforts among Buriats had by mid-

zakh Steppe, 1881–1917,” in: Of Religion and Empire: Missions, Conversion, and Toler-ance in Tsarist Russia, ed. Michael Khodarkovsky and Robert Geraci (Ithaca, NY, 2001): 274–310; and several contributions to the present volume. On the Buddhist case, see Dittmar Schorkowitz, “The Orthodox Church, Lamaism, and Shamanism among the Bur-iats and Kalmyks, 1825–1925,” in: Of Religion and Empire, 201–225. For an account on the Trans-Baikal region that stresses the minimal success of missionary work, see E. E. Ukhtomskii, O sostoianii missionerskago voprosa v Zabaikal'e, v sviazi s prichinami, obuslavlivaiushimi malouspeshnost’ khristianskoi propovedi sredi buriat (St. Petersburg, 1892).

37 On this reorientation of official attitudes towards Islam (about which there continues to be disagreement), see Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 192–195; Sultangalieva, “‘Tatarskaia diaspora’,” esp. 29–32; Elena Campbell, “The Muslim Question in Late Imperial Russia,” in: Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700–1930, eds. Jane Burbank, Mark von Ha-gen, and Anatolii Remnev (Bloomington, IN, 2007), 320–47; David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Russian Orientalism: Asia in the Russian Mind from Peter the Great to the Emigration (New Haven, 2010), esp. 122–152; and Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Or-thodoxy: Mission, Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Re-gion, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 177–199.


century laid the foundation for a more determined effort to promote Ortho-doxy among them. Thus the first permanent Orthodox missionary station among Buriats was established in 1850, while Irkutsk diocese created two missionary sections in 1863.38 It was immediately apparent that, especially in the cis-Baikal region where shamanism remained relatively strong, Bud-dhism represented a major competitor to Orthodoxy and thus an obstacle to the success of these missionary projects.

Yet even larger forces were also in play. The Great Reforms, and in par-ticular their anti-soslovie dimension, implied new modes of integrating the empire’s vast territories, by way of powerful (if also nebulous) conceptions of “civilization,” grazhdanstvennost’, and “Russification” (obrusenie). The January Insurrection of 1863 in the western provinces and Poland rendered this imperative even more pressing and inclined state authorities and con-servative publicists to see “separatism” in virtually any aspiration on the part of non-Russian peoples to maintain their particularity. In this context imperi-al statesmen now paid more attention to those communities and groups which seemed to represent obstacles to achieving greater unity and integra-tion of the imperial polity. Poles undoubtedly were at the top of this list, but Tatars and, somewhat later, Buriats and Armenians also came to occupy prominent places in it as well. It is noteworthy that each of these ethnic groups was related to a distinct non-Orthodox religious tradition – Catholi-cism, Islam, Buddhism, and the Apostolic (Gregorian) confession. Indeed given that the tsarist regime continued to classify people for many adminis-trative purposes by religion, there was a good deal of confusion and overlap in religious and ethnic categories. To the extent that the imperial government had patronized these religions in the previous century or so, many statesmen and observers began to criticize those earlier policies as misguided or mis-taken.

For state officials, one of the more distressing attributes of these obstacle groups was the prospect that they would assimilate neighboring non-Russian communities that might otherwise be amenable to Russian influence – for example, Belarusians and Ukrainians in the western provinces and various non-Russian groups (inorodtsy) in the Volga region.39 Qazaqs and cis-Baikal Buriats should be added to this list.

38 On these developments, see Hundley, “Defending the Periphery,” esp. 247–248. 39 This is an important theme in my book, At the Margins of Orthodoxy, and likewise occu-

pies a central place for Robert P. Geraci in Window on the East: National and Imperial

Paul W. Werth 132

The reorientation in policy on the steppe has been addressed by a number of scholars, so I shall recount it only briefly here. As we have seen, doubts began to appear among administrators about the degree to which Qazaqs were actually Muslims, based in part on the development of ethnography and the appearance of Russian-educated Qazaqs – most notably Chokan Valikhanov – which cast the steppe in a new light.40 These doubts drove administrators to reject the pattern of interaction with Muslims established for the sedentary regions to the west (state-sponsored institutionalization of Islam) and to begin favoring customary law over sharia.41 This reorientation was codified in the (temporary) steppe statute of 1868, which formally ter-minated the Orenburg Assembly’s jurisdiction over the steppe and allowed only one mull – always ethnically Qazaq – for each massive volost’. Those clerics were now subordinated directly to the local civil administration.42 Subsequent developments have received different interpretations from histo-

Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca, NY, 2001). On the western regions of the empire, see most recently Darius Staliunas, Making Russians: Meaning and Practice of Russifica-tion in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam, 2007); and Mikhail Dolbilov, Russkii krai, chuzhaia vera: Etnokonfessional’naia politika imperii v Litve i Belorussii pri Aleksandre II (Moscow, 2010).

40 On this assessment and role of figures like Valikhanov, see Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 210–223; Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan, 17–19; Peter Rottier, “Creating the Kazak Na-tion: The Intelligentsia’s Quest for Acceptance in the Russian Empire, 1905–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 2005), esp. 77–79; and Anatolii V. Remnev, “Rossiiskaia imperiia i islam v kazakhskoi stepi (60–80-e gody XIX v.),” Rasy i narody: Sovremennye etnicheskie i rasovye problemy 32 (2006): 238–277, here at 253–256. Valikhanov’s core text in this regard was “O musul’manstve v stepi” [1864], republished in Ch. Ch. Valikhanov, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 4 (Alma-Ata, 1985).

41 On the state’s promotion – and even “invention” – of customary law, as well as its rela-tion to Russian legal culture, see the careful analysis of Virginia Martin, Law and Custom in the Steppe: The Kazakhs of the Middle Horde and Russian Colonialism in the Nine-teenth Century (Richmond, 2001).

42 Those provisions are in sections 251–261 of the statute, reproduced in M. G. Masevich, Materialy po istorii politicheskogo stroia Kazakhstana, vol. 1 (Alma-Ata, 1960), 339–40. Several of these provisions were very close to what Valikhanov was suggesting, and in-deed the Steppe Commission of 1865–68 directly cited Valikhanov in making its recom-mendations. See Rottier, “Creating,” 79; and Uyama, “A Particularist Empire,” 27–28. The temporary statute did not pertain to the Inner (Bukei) Horde, which had been estab-lished between the Volga and Ural rivers in the early nineteenth century. Likewise, the Orenburg Assembly continued to have jurisdiction over Tatar inhabitants in the steppe and thus exercised a kind of extra-territorial religious authority. On this, see Arapov, Sistema, 167.


rians. The authors of a recent synthetic work on Central Asia assert that the permanent statute of 1891, which replaced its “temporary” predecessor of 1868, reduced the state regulation of Islam even further, “practically to a minimum.”43 Yet Allen Frank argues that a process of “Islamic transfor-mation” of the steppe continued even after 1868, because to a large extent it was rooted in an expansion of the Russian economy into the region – one that continued regardless of specific state rulings about the jurisdiction of the Orenburg Assembly. 44 Examining clandestine “administrative orders” as well as law statutes, Robert Crews detects a gradual reappearance of state supervision of Islam in the steppe, though this oversight seems always to have taken negative forms (surveillance, arrest, etc.). Whether it actually constituted “an Islamic restoration” in the steppe (as Crews’ section title would have it) remains unclear.45 But in any event, it seems safe to posit a fundamental reorientation of state policy on Islam in the steppe in the 1860s, and even Crews, eager to establish broad similarities in the interactions be-tween Muslims and the state throughout the Russian empire, treats this case explicitly as exceptional. This reorientation was rooted in the proposition that the state need not accept that Qazaqs were definitively Muslims (yet) and could perhaps change them into something else instead with the appro-priate interventions and manipulation.46

In the Buddhist case, this reorientation took a bit longer, although even the statute of 1853 – which from one perspective might be construed as sig-naling the full incorporation of Buddhism into Russia’s multiple establish-ment of religion – seems already to have reflected an important shift. Aside from the fact that the statute imposed extensive limitations on the numbers and activities of lamas and datsans, Nicholas I instructed that it should not be included in the empire’s Law Digest (Svod zakonov). This implies, per-haps, that the statute was designed to be temporary – to regulate the affairs of Buddhists only until missionary successes would render such a provision

43 Sergei Abashin, et al., eds., Tsentral’naia Aziia v sostave Rossiiskoi Imperii (Moscow,

2008), 24–41. But on the continued authority of the Orenburg muft in the steppe, see Uyama, “A Particularist Empire,” 36.

44 This process is the central concern of Frank in “Islamic Transformation.” 45 Crews, For Prophet and Tsar, 227–238. 46 On this reorientation, see also Sultangalieva, “‘Tatarskaia’ diaspora,” 29–34.

Paul W. Werth 134

obsolete.47 Voices more openly critical of earlier policy appeared not long thereafter. When Bandido Khambo Lama Choivan Danzan Eshizhamsuev died in 1859, efforts to replace him immediately ran into difficulties when it turned out that none of the three proposed candidates knew Russian, as re-quired by the statute. State authorities were compelled to appoint an acting Bandido Khambo Lama (Sandeleg Vanchikov), who was later removed for flagrantly ignoring the 1853 statute.48 In the immediate aftermath of the un-successful election – that is, in 1860 – a tsarist official by the name of Haupt was sent to investigate the Buddhist question,49 and he came to the conclu-sion that the state’s entire policy was based on the erroneous supposition that lamas constituted a “spiritual corporation” – and thus an indispensable soslovie – with particular duties in relation to the laity. Haupt rejected the proposition that the general Buriat population should be regarded as adher-ents of “the Lamaist faith” simply because most Lamas in the region were indeed Buriat by ethnicity.50 Arguing that lamas served only as an obstacle to the penetration of Christianity and Russian grazhdanstvennost’ among Buriats, he concluded that the government should eliminate the title Bandido Khambo Lama and prohibit lamas from performing any rites (treby) for the laity.51 The supposition here, in effect, was that only lamas themselves could be considered Buddhists, whereas the laity was something else entirely.52

Haupt’s recommendations had no immediate effect. True, the Orthodox bishop of Sengelinsk, Veniamin, quickly latched on to his arguments and proposed to the “higher authorities” that they reconsider their patronage of

47 This was the interpretation of Sergei Rybakov, an employee of the Department of Reli-

gious Affairs of Foreign Confessions, writing shortly after the February Revolution of 1917. (“K voprosu,” 17).

48 For details: RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 1236. 49 His precise task is not clearly indicated; documents refer merely to his dispatching (ko-

mandirovka) to perform an audit (reviziia) in 1860. It is likely that he was sent in conjunc-tion with the election, which was terminated in 1860.

50 Haupt may also have had in mind the fact, reported by Rybakov in 1917, that in 1767 Dzaiaev had been recognized by Catherine II specifically as “Khambo-Lama of all the Buriat and Tungus peoples,” which implied the right of Buddhist Buriats to spread Bud-dhism among those fellow Buriats who continued to adhere to shamanism. See “Rybakov, “K voprosu,” 16. The Tungus were a separate, smaller ethnic group in the region.

51 Haupt’s position is recounted in Vashkevich, 81. 52 Tsyrempilov likewise remarks that Buddhism addresses few directives to the “laity,” and

instead focuses almost exclusively on rules for those who have adopted monastic life. See “Za sviatuiu dkharmu,” 117.


Buddhist “paganism.”53 But when the local Governor-General convened a special committee to discuss the issue in 1865 – just as the Steppe Commis-sion was contemplating the removal of Qazaqs from the authority of the Orenburg Assembly – it proposed only a few insignificant changes and con-cluded that the 1853 statute remained consistent with the goals of the gov-ernment. Likewise, complaints of the Orthodox Missionary Society against state policy at the time were dismissed by the government, which instead merely promoted a policy of more strict enforcement of the statute, especial-ly its provisions prohibiting Buddhist “propaganda” among non-Buddhists.54

By the 1880s, however, Haupt’s earlier argument, fortified by complaints of Orthodox missionaries, was proving more compelling to the bureaucracy in St. Petersburg. In this regard two circumstances were crucial. First, in 1883 the state had reorganized the administration of Siberia by creating a governor-governorship along the Amur River, which included the trans-Baikal region. Thus in strictly administrative terms, the Buriat population was now divided between two distinct institutions: one centered to the east of Baikal and the other to the west.55 This reorganization created certain incentives for the state also to revise the religious authority of the Bandido Khambo Lama, which continued to extend across these administrative boundaries and was now directly subordinate to two separate state authori-ties. Second, the tsarist government seems generally at this time to have undertaken a review of existing religious statutes with the evident goal of abandoning its earlier policy of institutionalization and patronage for non-Orthodox religions. For Buddhism the central text in this regard was V. Vashkevich’s The Lamaists of Eastern Siberia (1885), which insisted on important differences between cis- and trans-Baikal Buriats and proposed the elimination, or at least a fundamental review, of the statute of 1853 – includ-ing even the issue of its recognition of the office of Bandido Khambo La-

53 Veniamin, O Lamskom idolopoklonnicheskom sueverii v vostorchnoi Sibiri (Irkutsk,

1882). This work was originally composed in 1863 and was first published in Irkutskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti in 1882. One commentator, Prince Ukhtomskii, very much doubted that this text, unrevised and published twenty years after its composition, had any relevance as an accurate reflection of the situation on the ground. See Ukhtomskii, O sos-toianii, 19.

54 Vashkevich, Lamaity, 82–88. 55 Vsepoddaneishii otchet i. d. General-Gubernatora Vostochnoi Sibiri za 1885–1886 gg.

(St. Petersburg, 1886), 3.

Paul W. Werth 136

ma.56 On this basis, a young Prince Esper Ukhtomskii was dispatched to eastern Siberia for another survey of the Buddhist issue there in 1886–87. What precisely Ukhtomskii proposed is not clear from the sources I have,57 but the interior ministry now conceded that “the attitude of the government towards lamas should be negative.” Apparently, there was serious considera-tion of the abolition of the 1853 statute altogether, but the interior ministry rejected this as an imprudent way of resolving “the difficult question about lamas.” Buddhists had evidently got wind of the possibility of impending anti-Buddhist measures, and the resulting agitation, it was feared, might destabilize the border regions with Mongolia. The interior ministry therefore suggested a more modest approach involving the gradual modification of the more objectionable aspects of the statute. The first step in this regard was to terminate the jurisdiction of the Bandido Khambo Lama over the Buddhists of Irkutsk province in 1889 – a jurisdiction that was especially undesirable in light of the much stronger institutional and cultural presence of Lamaism on the other side of Lake Baikal. The experience of many years had shown, the ministry remarked, “that the concentration of power in the hands of one Head Lama alone has given strength and significance to Lamaist propaganda among local pagans and paralyzes the establishment of Christianity among them.” A new “temporary instruction” was accordingly produced for the Buddhists of Irkutsk province, which denied them a spiritual leader (aside from the head of each datsan, a shiretui) and also prohibited any contact with foreign clergy, under threat of “resettlement to the most distant places of Siberia.”58 Thus the western Buriat population was separated from their

56 Vashekevich, Lamaity. See also the less restrained criticism on the statute in O Lamaistve

v zabaikal’skom krae (n.d, n.p., probably mid 1880s), located in the Russian National Li-brary (St. Petersburg) under the call number: 114 /1013. As Hundley notes, between 1800 and 1860 there were only three Bandido Khambo Lamas, each of them serving until his death. Over the next forty years, three of the four Bandido Khambo Lamas were removed from their positions by state authorities. See Hundley, “Defending the Periphery,” 248.

57 Although some of his observations, at least about the missionary situation, were included by Ukhtomskii in his O sostoianii, published in 1892. David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye relates that that this published text was in fact a variant of Ukhtomskii’s 1888 report to the Department of Foreign Confessions. See Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Toward the Rising Sun: Russian Ideologies of Empire and the Path to War with Japan (DeKalb, IL, 2001), 45–47, 228–229 (n. 19).

58 RGIA, f. 821, op. 150, d. 423, ll. 13–25, 56–57ob. (citations at ll. 19ob.-20, 25, 56ob.). See also Schorkowitz, “Orthodox Church,” 207, who also ascribes this change to the initi-


trans-Baikal counterparts in order to make the former safe for Orthodox proselytism. Sources suggest that this was a significant source of dissatisfac-tion for cis-Baikal Buddhists, who found it extremely difficult to maintain their religious life and institutions while being deprived of contacts with the main centers of Siberian Buddhism east of Baikal. Yet even after the autoc-racy made promises of religious reform in 1905, their requests for the resto-ration of the statute and the authority of the Bandido Khambo Lama west of Baikal were rejected or ignored.59

The two cases presented here are notable both for their similarities and differences. Both involved attempts by state authorities to preserve a group of imperial subjects from the negative effects (as they saw it) of dynamic religious and cultural competitors to Russian “civilization” and Orthodoxy – Islam and Buddhism. Both involved identifying a particular, seemingly mar-ginal segment of a given confessional community that could be effectively segregated, it was thought, from its core and thus diverted, over the longer term, into a different cultural channel – one more conducive to the long-term interests of the imperial state. A principal difference, however, involves eth-nic distinctions. In the case of Qazaqs, the case for segregation could be made by appealing to their emerging national consciousness. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Qazaq critics of Islam, like Valikhanov, were notable in the first generation of an emerging Qazaq nationalist intelligentsia.60 Thus in the Qazaq case, the group that was to be segregated was – or could at least be construed as – a distinct ethnic community. In the Buddhist case this was more difficult, as the line separating full-fledged Buddhists from only mar-ginal ones needed to be drawn through the Buriat people itself. Thus while the separation of Qazaqs from Orenburg and “Tatar influence” could facili-tate their national consolidation, divisions in the Buddhist case would have the opposite effect – dividing one segment of the Buriat population from another.

If we consider the situation in the Qazaq steppe in comparison to wider patterns of imperial rule through religious institutions, we see that this case was in important ways atypical, but by no means utterly unique. By the mid-

ative of the chief procurator of the Orthodox Holy Synod Konstantin Pobedonostsev and his circle.

59 See the account sympathetic to Buriats provided by Rybakov in “K voprosu,” 18–22. 60 This, for example, is that way that Rottier presents Valikhanov and several others in

“Creating the Kazak Nation.”

Paul W. Werth 138

nineteenth century, most religious communities in Russia, whatever their religion or confession, were under the jurisdiction of state-authorized reli-gious institutions and legal statutes specifically designed for the regulation of their spiritual affairs. Qazaqs and Buriats fit into this broader pattern from the beginnings of state institutionalization in ca. 1740 to the second half of the nineteenth century. But even when both groups were removed from the religious jurisdictions in question, they joined other groups – Muslims in the North Caucasus, Muslims in Central Asia, “pagans” throughout the empire – that lacked state-sponsored religious institutions. Qazaqs and Buriats were unique in that only in these two cases were populations actually removed from the jurisdiction of established religious institutions and returned to a condition of only rudimentary regulation. That is, if in several cases the state failed to take the process of religious institutionalization to its logical end by incorporating previously unregulated populations, then only in the case of Qazaqs and Buriats did the state actually backtrack and deinstitutionalize particular populations and territories. In my view this act of deinstitutionali-zation was reflective of a broader aspiration in certain quarters of the state administration to dismantle Russia’s multi-confessional establishment in a more comprehensive fashion. But it speaks to the continued utility of these institutions – or at least to the fact that tsarist administrators had nothing with which to replace them – that this dismantling did not go beyond these two groups. On the whole, Imperial Russia’s multi-confessional establish-ment continued to function, even if the Qazaq steppe and the cis-Baikal re-gion were now located on its periphery.


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