Emblem of Minority, Substitute for Sovereignty: The Case of Buryatia

1. The Buryats, who are ethnic Mongols, were integrated into the Russian empire in the 17th century as a group of tribes. They remained administratively divided, and the extent to which they were subjected to Russification and christianisation varied. Their awareness of their own ethnicity developed in the course of the 19th century, as a result of the spread of Buddhism from neighbouring Mongolia. It was recognised in the early Soviet era through the creation of the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Republic in 1923. I should like to offer my warmest thanks to Yves Hamant for his comments and his very valuable information concerning the contemporary situation, to which the final page of this essay seeks to respond.

2. By Manshuud Imegenov, written down by Zhamcarano in 1906.

3. Written in Mongol script, which is known only to a very small number of scholars.

4. The elites of Buryatia did not invoke either the mythical founder of the main Buryat tribe, nor Genghis Khan, who unified the Mongol tribes behind his conqueror's banner in the Middle Ages. Genghis Khan is the emblematic figure of post-communist Mongolia, where he is regarded as a god and often represented as an erudite sage, sitting down rather than on horseback, and holding a book rather than a weapon. While the absence of any allusion to Genghis Khan can certainly be explained, as Yves Hamant notes, by a concern to avoid any accusations of pan-Mongolism, it also reflects the Buryats' feeling of superiority in relation to the Mongols and their resulting desire to set themselves apart.

5. The 1300th anniversary of the epic cycle of Dede Korkut was celebrated by Unesco in June 1999, on the initiative of Azerbaidjan but with the collaboration of all the other Turkish peoples of central Asia and of Turkey itself.

6. 'The main obstacle in the campaign against Buryato-Mongol cultural nationalism in the post-war period was not however a living poet or writer, but the legendary Mongol hero Geser' (Kolarz 1955, 163).