‘No Changes in Kalmyk Lifestyles of the Newly Converted Witnessed’: Confessional Identity of Kalmyk Christians Revisited

Abstract

The article deals with confessional identity of Kalmyks who converted to Christianity. Despite almost a two-centuries long policy of Christianization, the Kalmyks managed to preserve their religious identity remaining committed to their ancestral religion. The Russian Government conducted somewhat flexible and moderate policy towards the Kalmyks preferring to leave them as they were in the territory of the Kalmyk Khanate. But migrations of Kalmyks to other governorates and their conversion to Christianity outside the khanate were welcomed and encouraged. During this period a number of settlements outside the khanate were established, e.g., those in the Don River region, Kalmyks also resettled to Chuguev in Kharkov Governorate, Belyaevo in Eastern Ukraine, Tereshka River area in the right bank of the Volga to the north of Saratov, Stavropol-on-Volga, uninhabited territories around Churkinsky Monastery, to the Urals and Terek River region. The paper mentions that the newly converted Kalmyk Christians migrated to the granted lands but retained their ethnic status. Furthermore, despite being virtually isolated from fellow tribesmen and being nominally referred to as Orthodox Christians, those newly converted Kalmyks kept professing Buddhism whatever remote regions of Russia they inhabited, and despite great distances between those Kalmyk families they perceived themselves as members of the Kalmyk ethnos. The fact that the newly converted Kalmyks kept perceiving Buddhism as their national religion and thus remained committed to it was due to a number of reasons including: numerical superiority of Buddhist clergymen over Orthodox missionaries within Kalmyk communities, special emphasis laid by the missionaries upon sheer quantitative indices during Christianization of Buddhist populations, etc. Thus, the relative isolation of the newly converted and resettled Kalmyks guaranteed no Russianization of theirs, nor that they had adopted lifestyle patterns of ethnic Russians. As a result, positions and influences of the Kalmyk Buddhist clergy on their compatriots were too strong despite the imposed measures for administrative control over their activities. So, Buddhism proved one of the key factors in resisting the policy of Christianization of the Kalmyks and served as an important socio-cultural element of the emerging ethnic identity.