Paul Goble
Moscow is expanding its efforts to use Buddhists within the Russian Federation to expand its influence in Buddhist countries abroad, despite facing growing problems among its own Buddhist population due to its divided response to the war against Ukraine.
While it can still field Buddhist leaders ready to parrot Moscow’s line, the Kremlin can no longer count on unity because its moves against anti-war Buddhists have split this faith community and led it to become, in the words of some, “a protest religion.”
The People’s Republic of China and Mongolia are both increasingly actively involved with Russia’s Buddhists, forcing the Kremlin to take the interests of anti-Buddhist Beijing and pro-Buddhist Ulaanbaatar into account.
Of Russia’s four traditional faiths, Buddhism, the third largest, garners far less attention than any of the others. This gives Moscow a greater opportunity to sell its version of Buddhist life in the Russian Federation without being challenged, as it does with Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism. Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin has long exploited this situation to influence Buddhist countries. As its influence elsewhere has slipped since Russian President Vladimir Putin began his expanded war against Ukraine, Moscow has stepped up its efforts to shore up or win additional support among Buddhist countries abroad. Just how far the Kremlin is prepared to go was signaled last week when it attracted more than 7,000 Buddhists from across the world to the Third International Buddhist Forum that Moscow organized in Kalmykia and to which Putin sent an effusively warm message (Asia Russia, September 27; III Mezhdunarodniy Buddiyskiy Forum, September 28).
Moscow media coverage of the event, unsurprisingly, was uniformly upbeat. This did little to conceal the growing anger and divisions within the Buddhist community in Russia, however, which have now become so intense that some Buddhists there describe their faith as having become “a protest religion” (Ekho, January 29, 2023). Nor could it obscure the ways Moscow has been forced to tailor its policies toward Buddhists within the country to cope with Kremlin concerns about the reactions of Mongolia which supports Buddhist dissidents from Russia, and of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), which, because it is concerned about Buddhism in Tibet, favors a more repressive line (Window on Eurasia, February 5, 2023, August 8; see China Brief, September 19). As a result, and despite the Moscow headlines, the latest forum has only complicated the Kremlin’s relations with the Buddhists both inside the Russian Federation and abroad, with some of the former now pursuing independence from Moscow and some of the latter increasingly alienated by it (Readovka, September 26).
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