Overview

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.

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9781041077930

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Melissa Chakars is a professor of History at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, USA. She specializes in Eurasian history with a focus on the Mongolian and Siberian peoples of Russia. She has published numerous articles, an edited volume, and the monograph The Socialist Way of Life in Siberia: Transformation in Buryatia in English with Central European Press (2014) and in Russian with Academic Studies Press (2022). Nikolay Tsyrempilov is an associate professor of History at Nazarbayev University in Kazakhstan and a historian of Inner Asia, specializing in the religious and political history of the Russian and Qing empires. He is the author of numerous works, including Under the Shadow of White Tara: Buriat Buddhists in Imperial Russia (Brill 2021). His research explores Buddhism, empire, and identity among Buryat, Mongolian, and Tibetan communities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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