Buryatia is a land whose people are deeply connected to its many religions. For someone to come in one day and announce that the government has outlawed all religion within the entire country is cause for buddhists and shamans alike to rebel and fight back. During the Stalinist period, particularly in the time frame of the Great Purges, many religious believers such as shamans and lamas were arrested and fell to illness and eventual death while serving their sentences at brutal labor camps. In the book we are reading for class, The Shaman’s Coat, Anna Reid, the author, notes that up until the creation of the USSR, there were over 700 openly practicing shamans in a part of Buryatia. After the 1930s, the number plummeted to zero.
The degree of oppression the Buryat faced was not something I could particularly understand until I saw a monument in Ulan-Ude to those who suffered during the Purges. Many were practicing shamans or lamas. Buddhists temples, like Russian Orthodox churches, were also destroyed or started serving anti-religious purposes. The Buryat rapidly lost their places of  worship. You can see in the picture below that the monument has many parts. The first thing that catches your attention is the large statue of the mother and her child standing together in garments of the 1930s. Their faces look blank, sad, and soulless. They do not have mouths, symbolizing repression and the loss of essential freedoms. No one was allowed to practice religion, and everyone was too scared to open their mouths and voice their opinions. Barbed wire surrounds the pair giving an prison-like atmosphere to the viewer. The mother and child feel trapped in a vast and beautiful land. Behind them hangs the tablets with the names of those who lost their lives or went missing due to Stalin’s harsh and brutal policies. The monument is titled “За что?”, which translates to “For what?”, as in why did people have to suffer so much?

The monument really conveys the impact of repression on the Buryat. Stalin tried to cut the spiritual bonds that the Buryat had with their land and their religion, and they are still recovering to this day to regain lost years.