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Mikhail Erentsenov, About Some Manuscripts


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Authors

Terbish, Baasanjav 

Abstract

Mikhail talks about what happened in the 1930s in Kalmykia through the example of several manuscripts that were appropriated by a NKVD-linked scholar: When I was working in the Supreme Council, I received a complaint from one old man from Chonos. His father was a doctor in the Cheerya khurul (temple). In 1934 Baatr Basangov arrested his father, and confiscated all his books on Tibetan medicine. The doctor was sent to Stalingrad, but after a month returned home. It turned out that there he had treated some important people and as a reward was released. In his complaint the old man requested that his father’s books should be found and returned to the people of Kalmykia. I invited the director of the local KGB and asked him to find the books. A month later the KGB director reported to me that there was no interrogation protocol available, and opined that the books must have been destroyed. The former People's Commissar for Education, Khonin Kosiyev’s wife Valentina Dmitrievna told me that her husband was working on a Russian-Kalmyk dictionary, compiling a card file, and preparing the publication of the epos Jangar. Baatr Basangov, who at that time worked in the NKVD, helped him by doing copies. In 1937, when after Kosiyev’s arrest his wife and two children were thrown out of their apartment into the street, Baatr approached them to reassure that everything would be fine. He also asked whether he could take Kosiev’s manuscripts. The woman gave the manuscripts to Baatr, and soon was exiled to Western Kazakhstan. Kosiyev himself was shot in Stalingrad. Upon returning to Kalmykia, Valentina Dmitrievna learnt from her acquaintance about a dictionary that had been published under the editorship of Baatr Basangov. She immediately understood that it was her husband’s work.

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Keywords

NKVD, manuscripts

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Publisher

Kalmyk Cultural Heritage Documentation Project, University of Cambridge

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Sponsorship
Sponsored by Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin

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