Buryats – (self-name Buryad, Buryad zon, Buryaduud, Buryad-Mongol arad) - a Mongolian-speaking people living on both sides of Lake Baikal, as well as in Mongolia and China. The total population is estimated from 550 thousand to 690 thousand people. The Buryat language belongs to the Mongolian branch of the Altaic language family and is one of the state languages ​​of the Republic of Buryatia, along with Russian. The traditional religions of the Buryats are Buddhism and shamanism. At the beginning of the 17th century, the Muscovite state began the conquest of the Buryat land. The conquest of ethnic Buryatia lasted for about a hundred years and finally ended some time after the signing of the Burin Treaty between Russia and China in 1727.

The Buryat national movement originated at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries as a response to the tightening of Russia's policy towards the Buryats. The emergence of a stratum of bourgeois nationalists in the Buryat milieu was a unique phenomenon in the history of national movements in Central Asia, which has practically no analogues. The basis of the program of the Buryat nationalists was laid at the beginning of the 20th century, when, as a result of the administrative land reform undertaken by the tsarist government, the Buryat population rose to an active struggle to protect their rights. The main leaders of the Buryat national movement at the beginning of the 20th century, the main opponents of the threatening Russification were Bato-Dalai Ochirov, Mikhail Bogdanov, Bazar Baradiin, Tsyben Zhamtsarano and Elbek-Dorji Rinchino.

After the February Revolution, by the decision of the national congress of the Buryats of the Trans-Baikal region and the Irkutsk province in April 1917, the national state of the Buryats was formed – Buryad-Mongol Ulas. It was headed by the Buryat National Committee (Burnatskom). In 1923, the Buryat-Mongolian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was formed as part of the RSFSR. During the Stalinist repressions in 1937, the entire top leadership of the BMASSR was arrested, shot and sent to concentration camps. A wave of arrests hit thousands of citizens of the Republic. The apogee of the repression of the people of Buryatia was the act of dividing the republic into many small fragments, monstrous in its cunning. On September 26, 1937, almost a third of the territory was torn off from the Republic.

Demands for the reunification of the Buryat people within the boundaries of a single republic sounded with renewed vigor with the beginning of democratic reforms in the USSR. At the end of 1980s. and in the 1990s. The regional political association "Geser", the Buryat-Mongolian People's Party, the Movement of National Unity "Negedel" and the Congress of the Buryat People were created. The core of the platform of these organizations was the idea of ​​the revival of the Buryat-Mongolian people through spiritual and territorial reunification, the re-establishment of a single Buryat-Mongolian Republic, the ethnicization of education and culture, and the return to common Mongolian roots. In 2020, the Buryat Democratic Movement (in exile) officially appealed to the President of the Russian Federation with a legal demand, based on the existing laws of the Russian Federation and the obligations assumed by the Russian Federation to comply with international legal norms, as well as archival historical documents collected during the investigation, to restore the Republic of Buryatia within the borders 1937, the moment of the illegal division of its territory, to recognize the Buryat nation as repressed and to carry out the necessary regulatory and legal actions for the rehabilitation of the Buryat nation and the Republic of Buryatia. This legitimate demand, supported by a legal certificate and archival historical documents substantiating the legality of the demand put forward, was received an unmotivated refusal.

 

At the end of perestroika there was a revival of the all-Buryat congresses. At the First All-Buryat Congress in 1991, the delegates demanded that the Buryats be recognized as a “repressed people” due to the division of the BMASSR in 1937 and that the republic be returned to its former name, but the republican authorities managed to channel the energy of the first congress into a cultural channel. On the initiative of the delegates, the All-Buryat Association for the Development of Culture (VARK) was established. With each all-Buryat congress, at which the leadership and council of the VARK were re-elected, it became more and more tame. VARK is currently a purely decorative structure, completely controlled by the government.

A new wave of the Buryat national movement is associated with the activities of the Buryaad Aradai Tug association, created on the basis of youth organizations – the Regional Association of Young Scholars and the Human Rights Movement “Erkhe” in 2004-2008. The youth movement of the Buryats managed in a short period to loudly declare itself by a series of actions against the destruction of the autonomy of the Buryat districts within the framework of the federal program for the enlargement of the regions. Buryaad Araday Tug won the information war with the Russian authorities, demonstrating to the whole world that there was no voluntary merger of the Buryat districts with neighboring regions.

In 2014, in connection with the unleashing of the conflict in Ukraine by Russia, Erkhe activists and supporters of the Buryat national movement repeatedly declared the illegality of Russia's actions – the annexation of Crimea, the occupation of eastern Ukraine. During the hot period of hostilities in the Donbass in 2014-15. Erkhe issued a statement about the inadmissibility of sending soldiers from the territory of Buryatia and Siberia to participate in illegal military operations in Ukraine. Since 2016, due to the emigration of many activists, the formation of the Buryat Democratic Movement outside the Russian Federation began. With the start of Russia's large-scale war against Ukraine in 2022, the Buryat Democratic Movement (in exile) was one of the first (among the peoples enslaved by Moscow) to make an official statement of support for Ukraine and the illegality of Russian military aggression. The anti-war activities of the Buryat-Mongolian Democratic Movement “Erkheten” prompted other layers of the Buryat emigration to form a joint movement “Buryats Against War”, from which the “Free Buryatia Foundation” then emerged, with which the Buryat-Mongolian Democratic Movement “Erkheten” is in close cooperation. The ranks of the Buryat-Mongolian Democratic Movement “Erkheten” include activists in the EU, the USA, Mongolia, as well as those who remain in Buryatia and continue their work in the underground.