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MongoliaThe Suppression of Buddhism
When the revolutionaries--determined to modernize their
country and to reform its society--took power, they confronted a
massive ecclesiastical structure that enrolled a larger part of
the population, monopolized education and medical services,
administered justice in a large part of the country, and
controlled a great deal of the national wealth. The Buddhist
church, moreover, had no interest in reforming itself or in
modernizing the country. The result was a protracted political
struggle that absorbed the energies and attention of the party
and its Soviet advisers for nearly twenty years. As late as 1934,
the party counted 843 major Buddhist centers, about 3,000 temples
of various sizes, and nearly 6,000 associated buildings, which
usually were the only fixed structures in a world of felt tents.
The annual income of the church was 31 million tugriks, while
that of the state was 37.5 million tugriks. A party source
claimed that, in 1935, monks constituted 48 percent of the adult
male population. In a campaign marked by shifts of tactics,
alternating between conciliation and persecution, and armed
uprisings led by monks and abbots, the Buddhist church was
removed progressively from public administration, was subjected
to confiscatory taxes, was forbidden to teach children, and was
prohibited from recruiting new monks or replacing living buddhas.
The campaign's timing matched the phases of Josef Stalin's
persecution of the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1938--amid
official fears that the church and monasteries were likely to
cooperate with the Japanese, who were promoting a pan-Mongol
puppet state--the remaining monasteries were dissolved, their
property was seized, and their monks were secularized. The
monastic buildings were taken over to serve as local government
offices or schools. Only then was the ruling party, which since
1921 gradually had built a cadre of politically reliable and
secularly educated administrators, able to destroy the church and
to mobilize the country's wealth and population for its program
of modernization and social change.
Data as of June 1989
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