The remnants

I was looking recently at a map of the places where Buddhism is practiced.  Notice anything amiss?

Apart from the omission of California?

It look a moment for my out-of-warranty eyes to pick up, but, off to the left, about 3,000 miles from Tibet, is a pocket of Tibetan Buddhism in Russia, just north of Georgia, in a place called Kalmykia.

Pagoda of Seven Days in Lenin Plaza

There has to be a story to this.  This is like finding an ancient Confucian enclave in New Jersey - it cries out for explanation.

Here's what little we know:

• First, you got your Oirats, western Mongols, basically.  
• According to The Wiki "they were dubbed Kalmyk or Kalmak, which means 'remnant' or 'to remain', by their western Turkic neighbours... This name may...reflect the Kalmyks' remaining Buddhist [after converting around 1615] rather than converting to Islam; or the Kalmyks' remaining in the Altay region when the Turkic tribes migrated further west."
• By the fall of the Yuan dynasty (mid 1300s), the Oirats view themselves as separate from the eastern Mongols.
• We know they had their moments.  Per Wikipedia:

The greatest ruler of the Four Oirat [tribes] was Esen Tayisi who led the Four Oirats from 1438 to 1454, during which time he unified Mongolia under his puppet khan Toghtoa Bukha. In 1449 Esen Tayisi and Toghtoa Bukh mobilized their cavalry along the Chinese border and invaded Ming China, defeating and destroying the Ming defenses at the Great Wall and the reinforcements sent to intercept the cavalry. In the process, the Zhengtong Emperor was captured at Tumu [know as "The Tumu Crisis"].   The following year, Esen returned the emperor after an unsuccessful ransom attempt. 

But like the 1983 Sixers, the Oirats had nowhere to go but down.  Esen was killed the next year, and they return to their normal routines.

In 1615, they convert to Buddhism.  Three years later they decide to move a few thousand miles west, to the banks of the Caspian Sea.

[T]hey moved west through southern Siberia and the southern Ural Mountains, avoiding the more direct route that would have taken them through the heart of the territory of their enemy, the Kazakhs. En route, they raided Russian settlements and Kazakh and Bashkir encampments.

Why?

Many theories have been advanced to explain the reasons for the migration. One generally accepted theory is that there may have been discontent among the Oirat tribes, which arose from the attempt by Kharkhul, taishi of the Dzungars, to centralize political and military control over the tribes under his leadership. Some scholars, however, believe that the Torghuts sought uncontested pastures as their territory was being encroached upon by the Russians from the north, the Kazakhs from the south and the Dzungars from the east. The encroachments resulted in overcrowding of people and livestock, thereby diminishing the food supply. Lastly, a third theory suggests that the Torghuts grew weary of the militant struggle between the Oirats and the Altan Khanate.

But once they got there, it was love.

The region was lightly populated, from south of Saratov to the Russian garrison at Astrakhan and on both the east and the west banks of the Volga River. The Russian Empire was not ready to colonize the area and was in no position to prevent the Oirats from encamping in the region. But it had a direct political interest in ensuring that the Oirats would not become allied with its Turkic-speaking neighbors. The Kalmyks became Russian allies and a treaty to protect the southern Russian border was signed between the Kalmyk Khanate and Russia.

No dangerous trees to run into (source)

So maybe a little like the Serbs in the Krajina, before the adjustments of the 1990s, these tough, warlike (Buddhist) nomads were pretty good people to put on a frontier.  They were happy to have the land, and any invader would have to get to them (hard) and deal with them (harder) before they could enter Russia proper.

The Russians noticed this with regard to Mongols in general in the 1930s, and Mongolia in particular.  As every schoolchild knows, this open-minded approach helped halt Japanese inroads into central Asia at the Battles of Khalkhin Gol in 1939.  (For the militarily minded, I believe Zhukov was the only commander to achieve a double envelopment victory against both the Japanese and the Germans.)

Zhukov doctrine: immobilize, surround, annihilate

The arrangement fell apart when the Germans showed up in Kalmykia in 1942.  The Russians had been persecuting Buddhist monks and nuns, as one does, so the Germans found plenty of volunteers for the Kalmykian Cavalry Corps.  Stalin, not appreciating this, had the entire population declared collaborators and sent to Siberia.  This despite the fact that Lenin's father had been 1/2 Kalmyk.    Well, there's gratitude for you.  Kruschev let the survivors return home in 1957.

They are called Kalmyks.  There are about 200,000 of them...including about 3,000 in New Jersey.

Yes, still here, thanks, doing fine