Public work, not private lives

People and their work

A curated directory of public scholarship, writing and cultural work related to the Buryat world.

Profiles describe published work and public professional roles. Private contact details, family information and political affiliations are outside the scope of this directory.

14peopleAll entries verified 15 Jul 2026

Scholars

A. Oyuuntungalag

history/Mongology, Buryats of Mongolia

Author of a key Mongolian-language historiographical work on the Buryats of Mongolia, "Mongol ulsyn buriadud"; cited in reviews, though clear official open access to the full text is not confirmed.

Selected works

  • "Mongol ulsyn buriadud" [Buryats of Mongolia] (Buryaty Mongolii)
No public link yet

Altana Dorzhieva

bibliography, cataloguing of pre-revolutionary Buryat books

cataloguing project at the National Library of Russia (NLR)

Lead of a project (2025) cataloguing 45 pre-revolutionary Buryat publications in vertical Mongolian script from the NLR collections, featuring full digitisation and historical context; as of October 2025, access is open from within Buryatia.

Selected works

  • Catalogue of pre-revolutionary Buryat books at the NLR (2025) — 45 publications in vertical Mongolian script, including full digitisation and historical context
No public link yet

Caroline Humphrey

anthropology, Inner Asia

University of Cambridge, MIASU (emerita)

A leading Western researcher of Buryat genealogies and Inner Asia; her work on the creation and interpretation of Buryat genealogies serves as a key academic reference for the project's genealogical section.

Selected works

  • Alternative History: Creation, Use and Interpretation of Buryat Genealogies
  • "The Buryat Case and Beyond" (edited collection, 2020/21)
  • "Frontier Encounters" (ed., Open Book Publishers, 2012, open access)

Dittmar Schorkowitz

ethno-political history of Russia and the USSR, Buryats and Kalmyks, Russian colonialism

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle

A historian and anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle); his work covers the integration of Buryats and Kalmyks into the Russian state (monograph, 2001), the publication of an archival document regarding Buryats and Mongols in the early Soviet Far Eastern Krai (Acta Mongolica, 2025), and the question of Russian colonialism.

Selected works

  • "Staat und Nationalitäten in Rußland" (monograph, 2001; subtitle covers the integration of Buryats and Kalmyks, 1822–1925)
  • "Nikolai Kyuner on the Buryats and Mongols in the Soviet Far Eastern Krai" (Acta Mongolica, 2025)
  • "Byla li Rossiya kolonial'noy imperiyey?" [Was Russia a colonial empire?] (Russian-language article, open access)

Joseph J. Long

anthropology, ritual and performance of Western Buryats, shamanism

Author of the open-access monograph "Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage" on Western Buryat ritual, shamanism, public culture, and belonging—connecting ethnography with historical context.

Selected works

  • "Facing the Fire, Taking the Stage" (open monograph, Indiana University Press)
  • "Negotiating Belonging: Ritual, Performance and Buriat National Culture in Pribaikal'e, Southern Siberia" (dissertation)

Melissa Chakars

history, Soviet modernisation in Siberia

Author of the dissertation "Being Buryat: Soviet Modernization in Siberia" regarding Soviet modernisation in Siberia based on Buryat material; bibliographically significant, though stable open full-text access is not confirmed.

Selected works

  • "Being Buryat: Soviet Modernization in Siberia" (dissertation)
No public link yet

Nikolai Tsyrempilov

history, Christianisation of the Buryats, 19th-century imperial period

Author of a 2025 article (The Russian Review) on the history of the Orthodox mission and the Christianisation of Transbaikal Buryats in the 19th century (the Dymbilov affair)—one of the clearest new English-language texts on the imperial period.

Selected works

  • "A Story about One Hapless Baptism: Christianization of the Buryats and the Dymbilov Affair, 1841–48"

Robert A. Rupen

history, early 20th-century Buryat intelligentsia

Author of the classic article "The Buriat Intelligentsia" on the Buryat intelligentsia of the early 20th century—an older but still fundamental English-language source on the elites of that period.

Selected works

  • "The Buriat Intelligentsia" (classic article)

Robert W. Montgomery

history, early 20th-century Buryat national movement and intelligentsia

Author of an open article in the journal Sibirica regarding the early 20th-century Buryat activist/intellectual Bato-Dalai Ochirov—a source on the national movement and intelligentsia of the 1900–1920s.

Selected works

  • article on Bato-Dalai Ochirov (journal Sibirica)

Sayana Namsaraeva

history, oral memory of the Korean War, late Soviet period

Author (co-authored with Vitaly Tsytsykov) of an open article on Buryat soldiers in the Korean War and its memory—a rare free English-language source on the late Soviet period.

Selected works

  • "Overcoming Subaltern Silences: The Forgotten Buryat Soldiers of the Korean War" (co-authored with Vitaly Tsytsykov)

Timofey Arkhangelskiy

computational linguistics, corpus technologies

participant in the development of the Electronic Corpus of the Buryat Language (IMBT SB RAS)

Listed in a landscape report as a participant ("with the participation of... T. Arkhangelskiy") in the development of the Electronic Corpus of the Buryat Language at IMBT SB RAS, alongside M. Daniel.

Selected works

  • Participation in the development and expansion of the Electronic Corpus of the Buryat Language (IMBT SB RAS) alongside M. Daniel

Vsevolod Bashkuev

history, early Soviet state-building, medical anthropology

Author of an open article in EMSCAT regarding medical and anthropological research on Buryat-Mongols during the 1920s–early 1930s—a source on early Soviet state-building and the BMAR (Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic).

Selected works

  • "An outpost of socialism in the Buddhist Orient" (EMSCAT)

Writers

Dorje Batuu

prose (Ukrainian); also a specialist in spacecraft trajectory calculation

Vydavnytstvo Staroho Lva (Lviv)

A writer of Buryat origin writing in Ukrainian: born in Ulan-Ude (1977) to a family of musicians, graduated from BSU, worked as a TV journalist, and has been in the US aerospace industry since 2013. He has five bestsellers in Ukraine; "Taymnytsia storoho Lamy" (VSL, 2021, illus. Yaryna Zhuk) is an autobiographical novel about two Buddhist datsan novices and the teacher Chimitdorzhe-lama. A vivid example of contemporary Buryat culture outside Russia and a bridge to the Ukrainian-speaking audience.

Selected works

  • Franceska. Povelivka traiektoriy (2018)
  • Franceska. Volodarka ofitsers'koho zhetona (2019)
  • Mozart 2.0 (2020)
  • Taymnytsia storoho Lamy (2021) [The Secret of the Old Lama] — regarding Buddhism, Soviet repression, and childhood in Buryat-Mongolia
  • Koko 2.0 (2022)

Translators

Sarana Abidueva

computational linguistics, machine translation Buryat↔Russian

project supported by a grant from the Government of the Republic of Buryatia

Author of a neural network Russian-Buryat translator and open parallel corpora on Hugging Face; her project's data formed the basis for the inclusion of the Buryat language in Yandex Translate (from 2025).

Selected works

  • Neural network Russian-Buryat translator (parallel corpus of over 100,000 translation pairs)
  • SaranaAbidueva/buryat-russian_parallel_corpus (Hugging Face, 41,000 pairs)
  • SaranaAbidueva/buryat_monocorpus (Hugging Face, 220,000 lines)