Buryat Deputies and the Imperial Transformations: Bato-Dalai Ochirov, Mikhail Bogdanov, and Baiarto Vampilon

• In Event: Buddhists, Marxists, and Nationalists: Buryat-Mongol Intellectuals in History

Abstract

This study is devoted to Buryat representatives in parliamentary bodies established during
the imperial transformations of 1905–1918. Buryat (Buryat-Mongol) deputies were part of the
Second State Duma of the Russian Empire (Bato-Dalai Ochirov) and the All-Russian Constituent
Assembly (Mikhail Nikolaevich Bogdanov and Baiarto Vampilon) as well as several other
assemblies and collegial government bodies at the (post)imperial, regional, and provincial levels.
In these assemblies, they contributed to the construction of a composite, inclusionary political
community of Russian citizens – the (post)imperial Russian nation – and co-produced
particularistic communities. Particularistic communities were defined by regional (such as
Siberian, Eastern Siberian, Irkutsk, and Transbaikal), ethnic (Buryat), social estate (pertaining to
the “aliens”), and religious (Buddhist) categories. As members of the Socialist Revolutionary
(SR) Party, Bogdanov and Vampilon also participated in constructing class-based communities.
Relying on published and unpublished documents and the press, including texts authored by
Buryat activists and politicians, this study seeks to reconstruct how they envisioned these
communities and the reconciliation of overarching and particularistic interests. It aims to
contribute to the inclusionary intellectual history of the global imperial crisis of the 1900s–1910s
and parliamentarism as a means of overcoming its vernacular manifestations.

Author

• Ivan Sablin, Heidelberg U (Germany)