The Kalmyk people live in an unusual place.

Mongols are not a group of people you’d expect to find in Europe in large numbers, unless perhaps it is the 1200s and your peasant armies currently being overrun by horse archers. Certainly a Mongol ethnic group that predominately follows Tibetan Buddhism doesn’t seem like they should be a majority in a European political region in the year 2025.

Kalmykia in Europe

Yet somehow, there they are, in the aptly named Kalmykia Republic, one of many “republics” within the Russian Federation.¹ Kalmykia lies the western bank of the Volga river – West of the Urals, North of the Caucasus, and closer to Russia’s western border than Moscow is. If any part of Russia is in Europe, Kalmykia is in Europe. So, uh, how exactly did the Kalmyks get there?

Today’s Kalmyks descend from Oirat Mongols who settled west of the Volga (area in Yellow)

In short, the westernmost branch of the Mongols kept moving farther and farther west until they found themselves living in Europe. The Kalmyks’ ancestors were members of the Western or Oirat Mongols, and specifically the westernmost tribe (the Torghut). Still, this only placed them as far as modern Kazakhstan.

The Oirats were the last Mongol group to join Genghis Khan’s empire (in 1207), and the first to leave as that empire splintered. The Oirat consisted of four tribes: the Torghut, Choros, Dorbet and Khoid, which slowly drifted apart politically.

Around the year 1600, prince Kharkhul of the Choros tribe sought to reunite the Oirat into a new khanate. The Torghut leaders chose to migrate westward rather than submit to the Choros, and some Dorbet followed along with them. The migrants found a nice patch of steppe north of the Caucasus, in land nominally claimed by the Russian Tsar but in practice beyond his control. So, Russia signed a treaty with the Torghut to guard Russia’s borders from its more threatening Muslim Turkic neighbors. Those neighbors invented the name “Kalmyk” for these westernmost Mongols, who gradually adopted that name as their own identity.

(Meanwhile, the Choros tribe succeeded in establishing the Dzungar Khanate. It lasted until the 1750s, when China’s Qing Dynasty conquered the region and killed the Dzungars en masse.)

Annushka, a Kalmyk girl under Russian tutelage in 1767

As Russia consolidated control over its frontiers, the Kalmyks’ independence was reduced bit by bit. In 1771, the Kalmyks decided they’d had enough, and resolved to move back east to the steppe of their ancestors. According to tradition, the frozen Volga began to melt just before the chosen day of departure, so only the Kalmyks on the eastern side were able to leave. The Russians attacked the Kalmyks that were departing, and politically cracked down on the ones who remained, but the Kalmyks west of the Volga remained a part of the Russian Empire for the rest of its existence.

A Kalmyk family in 1917

The next major crisis for the Kalmyks came during World War Two. By then, Kalmykia was an autonomous republic of the Russian SFSR, within the Soviet Union. The Nazis invaded Kalmykia in 1942, while trying to reach the oil wells of Azerbaijan. After the Soviets drove the Nazis back, Joseph Stalin accused the Kalmyks of collaborating with the Nazi invaders and deported the entire population to Siberia, along with several other ethnic groups. Over 1,200 Kalmyk people died during the journey alone.² They were only allowed to return to their homes in 1957, under Khrushchev.³

The Golden Temple, built in 2005 in Kalmykia

Today, Kalmykia has a population of about a quarter million people, of which a bit over 60% are ethnic Kalmyks. Like many of Russia’s minorities, Kalmyk conscripts are dying or being wounded in the war with Ukraine at a disproportionately high rate.⁴ Some Kalmyk people have also emigrated to other nations. About 3,000 live in the USA, with the largest population in Monmouth County, New Jersey.⁵

Ethnic groups in history have moved around for lots of reasons, both voluntarily and involuntarily. The Kalmyks’ story seems unusual to us for a few reasons. They’re in Europe, even if it is the very edge of Europe. Their closest kin are famous as Asian conquerors. They moved to their current homeland at the very beginning of the era of colonial mass migrations, but they were only tangentially involved in colonialism itself.

Groups like the Kalmyk challenge our usual assumptions of what kinds of people live in what kinds of places. Their history teaches us that as much as those assumptions are useful abstractions, they still break down when dealing with the complex nature of our world. Plus, it’s just cool to learn about this corner of Europe that might deserve a bit more attention.

Coming soon: Re: Collisteru on college admissions⁶