Despite Centuries of Trying, Russia Still Can’t Genocide Buryatia
Russia has spent hundreds of years trying to erase Buryatia — through conquest, forced assimilation, destruction of religious institutions, targeted executions of its intellectual class, and, more recently, the quiet suffocation of its cultural production. Yet despite this long, deliberate campaign of erasure, Buryatia persists. And nowhere is this struggle clearer than in the repeated attempts to suppress Buryat cinema.
For the Buryat people — an Indigenous Mongolic nation on the shores of Lake Baikal — film is one of the last remaining tools to preserve language, memory, and identity. That is precisely why the Russian state treats Buryat filmmaking as something dangerous. The suppression is rarely open or officially declared; it operates through pressure, intimidation, administrative blockages, and the quiet removal of films from public life. But the intent is unmistakable.
The clearest example is Byalyn, a Buryat-language film produced in the late 2000s. It was not political, not provocative, not a critique of Moscow. It simply told a story in the Buryat language, showing everyday life through Buryat eyes. That alone was unacceptable. As soon as the film reached the stage for public screenings, regional authorities in Buryatia blocked cinema showings using standard censorship formulas: “technical issues,” “missing certificates,” “administrative concerns.”
Cinemas that tried to screen it were quietly instructed to remove all listings. Cultural administrators warned the filmmakers against “nationalist framing,” a euphemism that, in the Russian system, applies not to extremism but to any expression of ethnic identity outside the state’s control. Byalyn was never banned on paper — Russia almost never leaves a paper trail for minority-language censorship — but it was effectively erased from its own republic.
Around the same period, Buryatia saw a second cultural controversy: the pressure surrounding screenings of Echoes of the Past (Узники Таллина). Although not exclusively a Buryat-language film, it explored the theme of historical repression and state violence — subjects with profound resonance in Buryatia, where Stalinist purges annihilated the Buddhist clergy, the intellectual class, and local leadership. Regional authorities discouraged screenings, telling cinemas that such themes could “create unnecessary political associations.” Filmmakers who supported the screenings later described being warned about “future cooperation” with state cultural bodies.
These two cases are the tip of a larger structure. Throughout the 2010s, Buryat directors attempting to shoot films in their own language encountered a pattern of delayed approvals, withdrawn funding, revoked spaces, and sudden “policy changes.” Films focusing on Buddhist heritage, shamanic traditions, or the massacre of Buryat elites in the 1930s were consistently labeled “sensitive.” Even student filmmakers were advised to “avoid ethnic narratives.”
The intention is not simply to censor. It is to suffocate everything that keeps Buryatia alive: its language, its memory, its ability to tell its own story.
Cultural suppression sits alongside other longstanding tools of domination. The destruction of monasteries in the 1930s. The torture of monks and intellectuals. Police brutality cases in the 2010s that disproportionately targeted young Buryat men. Economic neglect. Environmental devastation around Lake Baikal. And today, the disproportionate loss of Buryat soldiers in Russia’s war against Ukraine — a demographic assault that activists openly describe as “ethnic cleansing by attrition.”
But Buryatia endures because culture endures. Despite pressure, filmmakers continue to produce in the Buryat language. Screenings happen in community halls, private spaces, and online. Diaspora groups distribute banned or suppressed films. Young Buryats document their traditions on social media in defiance of the censorship ecosystem built to erase them.
Russia has tried for centuries to crush Buryatia. It failed. It is still failing. And each attempt to silence a Buryat film — from Byalyn to the projects still being quietly strangled today — only proves that the culture remains alive enough to frighten the empire trying to destroy it.
