Religious practice and belief in the Republic of Buryatia: comparing across faiths and national groups

Abstract

Using results from a 2010 survey conducted in the Republic of Buryatia, this paper compares the responses of Russians and Buryats on questions of religious practice and belief, as well as the role of religion and religious organizations in the political sphere of contemporary Russia. Buryats more commonly identify with a religion and more frequently attend religious services in comparison to Russians living in the republic. There is greater consonance between the two groups on the public role of religion, with both Russians and Buryats generally supportive of the recent extension of religious education into schools and the creation of national holidays for all traditional religions, among other issues.

Keywords:

• Buryatia
• Russian Federation
• religion
• religious practice and belief
• Buddhism
• Russian Orthodoxy

Notes

1. Today, the Buryats are spread out between three regions in eastern Siberia: the Republic of Buryatia, Zabaikalskiy krai, and Irkutsk oblast. The latter two regions were formed in 2008, when two Buryat autonomous okrugs – Aga-Buryat and Ust-Orda – were merged with their surrounding federal units (Graber and Long 2009). I use the term “region” to refer to the Buryat-settled areas, while “republic” refers specifically to the Republic of Buryatia, where the survey research was conducted.

2. The most well-known incident was the trial of Bidya Dandaron in Ulan-Ude in the early 1970s (Bourdeaux 2000).

3. The Interreligious Council of Russia promotes interfaith dialog between the four traditional religions of the Russian Federation: Orthodoxy, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism.

4. A growing body of scholarship has considered the role of Buddhism in the imperial and Soviet periods. Some of the key works in this literature include Snelling's (1993) biography of Agvan Dorzhiev, Hundley's (2010) recent piece on imperial-era policy toward Budddhism in Buryatia, and a range of writings by Zhukovskaya (1992, 2008). For more background on the Republic of Buryatia itself and the wider, post-communist transition, see Humphrey (1998).

5. Namsaraeva (2008) states that this data come from the Republic of Buryatia's Ministry of Justice. This chapter also notes the difficulties encountered in the registration process by non-traditional religions, though this is not necessarily reflected in the registration numbers; for example, between 2000 and 2004, the number of registered Evangelical organizations increased from 11 to 25.

6. I am indebted to one of the paper's anonymous reviewers for this point.

7. The remaining four responses to the question “What is your nationality?” were Georgian, Jewish, Lithuanian, and Tatar, respectively.

8. To reiterate, because of the non-random nature of the sample, chi-square tests or other types of statistical analysis are not used; to do so would impose an assumption of generalizability that cannot be ascribed to non-random data.

9. Within the national samples, respectively 67.1% of the Buryats and 58.0% of the Russians interviewed were women. The consequences of this imbalance for the analysis are discussed further below, in note 15.

10. Though Buryats are highly educated, I maintain the assumption that the well-educated were oversampled, given that contacts in urban areas frequently occurred in places of employment (offices and shops).

11. According to data compiled by Kaiser (1994), in 1979 the Buryats stood third in higher education rates when compared to other nationalities in the Soviet Union; for every 1000 persons, 122 had some higher education (see Kaiser 1994, Table 5.9). Only the Georgians and the Ossetians had higher rates of higher education participation; the Armenians were fourth in this measure.

12. The remaining Buryats contacted for the survey practice a diverse set of religions – including Christianity and Shamanism – or identify themselves as atheists.

13. The question on religious identification followed the question on national identity in the survey, but not directly. Between these two questions, the survey included questions on identity, trust, and intergroup relations. Though the survey design potentially elicited responses of “Buddhist” from the Buryats who were sampled, structurally the measure tried to distance questions on national and religious identity from one another.

14. The small numbers of respondents who indicate that they are “very religious” – n = 11 (7.7%) for the entire sample – precludes valid comparisons across groups.

15. The table below stratifies the survey results to the three questions discussed above by gender, which is necessary given the imbalance in gender across the subsamples noted in note 9; when the survey results are broken down along gender lines, the most notable finding is the lack of divergence in terms of self-reported religiosity and attendance at religious services when comparing Buryat men and women. In turn, this moderates some of the potential concerns associated with the non-representative nature of the sample, as the overweighting toward females is not substantially distorting the intergroup comparison; as a group, the Buryats are consistent across gender.

Table

16. The 19 regions where the trial program was launched are the republics of Kalmykia, Karachay-Cherkessia, Udmurtia, Chechnya and Chuvashia; Kamchatka, Krasnoyarsk and Stavropol territories; Vologda, Kaliningrad, Kostroma, Kurgan, Novosibirsk, Penza, Sverdlovsk, Tambov, Tver and Tomsk provinces; and in the Jewish Autonomous region (Rozhaeva 2010). During the 2012–2013 school year, the course was extended to other parts of Russia, though the offering in secular ethics, and not the course of study in Russian Orthodoxy, was the most popular choice at the national level (Brunwasser 2012).