Muslims constituted about 5 percent of the empire’s population, from Crimea to
the Volga to Irkutsk. They boasted several centers of Muslim scholarship. The
Crimean Peninsula had long been a thriving center of Islamic learning, with major
schools and esteemed scholars at Bakhchisarai, Akkerman, Bender, Kilia, and other
towns; a memoir by a Girey prince in the mid-eighteenth century identifies over
fifty revered scholars, sheikhs, and spiritual leaders in Crimea. In the eighteenth
century, the long-established Tatar community in Kazan was also an intellectual
center, with Tatar printing presses and schools training leaders and providing
religious and secular works for the empire; since the 1740s Orenburg had also
been developing a center of Muslim teaching and learning at Kargali, with four
mosques and several religious schools. In 1803 the Spiritual Assembly was assigned,
along with other“non-Christian religions,”to the Synod for central oversight; in
the Nicolaevan era of confessional organization (1830s), these Synod offices were
assigned to the Ministry of Interior’s new Department of Alien Spiritual Affairs.
BUDDHISM
In the late seventeenth century Lamaist (Tibetan or Mahayana) Buddhism spread
rapidly among two peoples in the expanding Russian empire—the Kalmyks on the
Caspian steppe and the Buriats around Lake Baikal. Buddhism allowed these
groups to integrate shamanist belief with its faith and was effectively proselytized
by monks who taught converts to read sacred texts. A network of monasteries and
temples rapidly grew in eastern Siberia, with eleven monasteries by the end of the
eighteenth century. By 1831 half the Buriats were Buddhist (the rest still animist).
Nevertheless Russian authority spread steadily over both these communities:
Cossacks claimed the Buriat lands for Russia in the 1640s and through the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Russia gradually asserted control over the
Kalmyks. As we saw in Chapter 4, in 1771 the majority of the Kalmyks decamped
to the Jungarian steppe north of China. The remaining Kalmyks were gradually
integrated into Russian control, and the Russian empire’s challenge with Buddhism
was primarily in Buriatiia (Figure 19.1), which bordered the Buddhist states of
Mongolia and China (which had taken control of Tibet, the spiritual home of
Lamaist Buddhism, by 1720).
The potential for Buriat Buddhists to build political connections with Mongo-
lian, Chinese, or Tibetan co-religionists created the same anxiety that the Russian
empire felt towards Islam. Russia responded a bit more cautiously with the Buriats
in the eighteenth century than with Muslims. In the 1720s Russia tried to prevent
the arrival of new lamas to the Buriats, but by 1741 Empress Elizabeth relented,
granting permission for some new lamas and temples, having decided that Bud-
dhism’s ability to convert the local shamanist population was a force for stability.
Catherine II’s government in 1764 created a Buddhist hierarchy in the form of a
new lama, the Bandido Khambo Lama, intended to be free of Tibetan control and
subject to Russia. Russian Orthodoxy meanwhile failed to win converts using its
customary material incentives and force and only in the 1830s did the state begin to
Confessionalization in a Multi-ethnic Empire 401