Origin from 1937
Under Soviet pressure and the direction of Mongolian leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the Mongolian People's Republic carried out a systematic destruction of Buddhist institutions between September 1937 and April 1939, remembered as the Great Repression. Wikipedia's own account, drawing on the country's post-1990 reckoning with the period, records 746 monasteries liquidated and more than 18,000 lamas executed by secret tribunal, alongside thousands more forcibly defrocked or conscripted; by the close of the purges only a handful of monasteries remained standing anywhere in the country, most famously Gandan in Ulaanbaatar, kept open as a controlled showpiece. This atlas records the destruction as the political killing it was, not a doctrinal defeat.
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Dates
Start YearSourced to the subject's own accountWikipedia's own infobox dates the main phase September 1937 to April 1939; this atlas uses the calendar-year span for the start and end year atoms. End YearSourced to the subject's own account StatusSourced to the subject's own account Learn More
How Stalinist Purges Destroyed Buddhism in Mongolia
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Under Soviet pressure and the direction of Mongolian leader Khorloogiin Choibalsan, the Mongolian People's Republic carried out a systematic destruction of Buddhist institutions between September 1937 and April 1939, remembered as the Great Repression. It fell on a religious establishment that had stood as Mongolia's dominant faith for more than three centuries.
The country's own post 1990 reckoning with the period recorded the scale: 746 monasteries liquidated and more than 18,000 lamas executed by secret tribunal, alongside thousands more forcibly defrocked or conscripted into the army and civilian labor. By the close of the purges only a handful of monasteries remained standing anywhere in the country, most famously Gandan in Ulaanbaatar, kept open deliberately as a controlled showpiece for foreign visitors rather than as a functioning centre of the faith.
What this changed for Buddhism's spread in Mongolia was not a doctrinal defeat but a political killing, carried out by a state apparatus against an institution it saw as a rival source of authority. Buddhism did not lose an argument in Mongolia in the 1930s, it lost its monasteries, its clergy and, for the two generations that followed, almost its entire visible presence in the country it had dominated for so long.
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