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From Tibet Confidentially. The Secret Correspondence of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama to Agvan Dorzhiev, 1912–1925
(Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 2012) Samten, Jampa; Tsyrempilov, Nikolay
Letters, like human beings, can have complicated fates. This is especially true for the letters presented here – letters that were for many years stored on the dusty shelves of the Antireligious Museum of Verkhneudinsk. Today, both the museum and its city bear different names. The museum is now known as the National Museum of Buriatia, the city as Ulan-Ude. One may suppose that after the famous owner of these letters died in a prison hospital in November 1938, the letters, together with the rest of his property, were confiscated by NKVD officers. The officers probably assumed them to be religious writings, and handed them over to the Antireligious Museum. This is only speculation, of course, but the fact remains that the letters were stored for almost seventy years in the reserve funds of the Museum, completely unknown to the scholarly community, until they were introduced to us in 2004. Half of the preserved letters are of a private nature, but another half are of considerable significance for specialists in the history of modern Tibet.