Interviewer: Zhanet Khudayberdieva-Ambueva

- Utash Borisovich, hello.

- Good afternoon.

- Our journal is dedicated to the culture and traditions of Kalmykia. Frankly speaking, we could not conceive the inaugural issues of our magazine without a conversation with you—a person who is literally reconstructing and defending the history of our people piece by piece. In preparing for our meeting, I read your works, dissertations, and articles with great interest. In particular, your dissertation, "Kalmykia during the Period of the Revolution and the Civil War (1917–1920)," forced me to take a fresh look at our past. In that work, you note that a certain tendency to suppress inconvenient facts emerged within Soviet historiography. Do you believe this is incorrect for science?

- Of course. The thing is, the Soviet era was a time when a rigid political ideology held sway. In subordination to it, serious distortions occurred across many sciences, including history. Whenever real facts failed to align with the worldview constructed by party ideologues, they were either suppressed or their interpretation was distorted. As a result, society received a deformed perception of the past. A flawed understanding of history leads to a wrong comprehension of the present and can cause us to make mistakes in the future. This is a destructive phenomenon that directly violates the fundamental methodological principles of science: objectivity, scientific validity, and historicism. These are the very "three pillars," the three philosophical principles upon which historical knowledge rests, and ideological interference destroyed them.

- How do things stand now? Over the thirty years of post-Soviet Russia, have we managed to get rid of the "blank spots"?

- Here we must take into account that quite a few historical concepts and theories developed during the Soviet era turned out to be absolutely correct and stood the test of time, while others, conversely, failed to do so. However, over the past decades, many historical concepts developed during Soviet times based on those very ideological principles have become deeply entrenched. I myself studied from these textbooks and theories during my student years. I confess, it was hard to let go of the stereotypes when I began to realize their non-compliance with the principles of objectivity and scientific validity. Today, we have managed to refute, rethink, change the angle of view, and clarify the facts in many instances.

Regrettably, a significant portion of obsolete concepts still remains in force. To revise them, a massive amount of new knowledge is needed: one must sit in archives for years, search for documents, accumulate facts, process, and analyze them. This is a highly complex and arduous labor that is not within every researcher's capacity. There is also an institutional problem: if the majority of historians adhere to old dogmas for years, it is extremely difficult for isolated innovators to prove the validity of their conclusions alone. Compounding this, innovators themselves can make mistakes and advance false hypotheses. In this conflict of opinions, the main criteria must invariably remain objectivity and reliance on real sources. Only then can we traceably change scientific concepts. To summarize, I would say this: a great deal has been done, but a significant portion of issues currently persists in a state of sharp academic debates, disputes, and refinements.

- It turns out that the struggle for clean science continues to this day. As an example of such a profound analysis, free from old schemes, I studied your theses on the causes of the crisis in Kalmykia before 1917.

You call the absence of a modern judicial system one of the main problems for protecting the rights of the Kalmyk population. Concurrently, you note that reform was anticipated by only a small fraction of the people—primarily the emerging intelligentsia. The majority either did not want radical changes, did not realize the scale of the problems, or simply did not believe in the possibility of change. This presents a paradox: a fundamental problem—the courts—existed for the entire region, but only a minority understood it. Why did the majority of the population ultimately remain neutral during the Civil War as a consequence of this "protracted crisis"? Does it mean that ordinary pastoralists also suffered from disenfranchisement, but formulated their protest differently than the intelligentsia?

- You have raised a very complex question that requires a detailed breakdown. First of all, addressing your remark, let me note: the struggle for clean science will always go on. Scientific inquiry is a perpetual path of searches, experiments, trial, and error, from which no one is immune. In our case, the situation is complicated by the fact that contemporary historical science was preceded by a long period of ideological pressure, but even without it, academic disputes are inevitable.

Regarding the Civil War and the protracted crisis, it is vital to understand that the judicial system issue was merely one part of a huge complex of problems. I would isolate three key nodes of contradictions in Kalmyk society on the eve of the 1917 revolution.

The first node was the very system of governance over the Kalmyk people. The region operated under the so-called system of trusteeship (система попечительства). Trustees governed the uluses (districts). This system was introduced as a temporary measure—until the complete liquidation of serf-like "obligatory relations" between the Kalmyk noyons (nobles) and the tribute-paying population. The legal reform to abolish these relations was protracted in Russia just as heavily as the liquidation of serfdom as a whole. It was finally enacted only in 1892—thirty years after the general emancipation in Russia. Yet, the trusteeship system remained. As the saying goes, nothing in Russia is more permanent than the temporary. This system became entrenched, even though it absolutely did not correspond to the lifestyle of nomadic pastoralists and did not answer the tasks of their development: bureaucrats cared little about the literacy rate, culture, or healthcare of the people.

The main vice of the trustees was that they completely concentrated all branches of power in their hands. The Kalmyks had assemblies (сходы)—an element of traditional self-governance, but their rights were marginalized. All resolutions passed by the assemblies had to be approved by Russian bureaucrats. These same officials controlled self-governance, represented executive power, and concurrently headed the courts. Judicial, executive, and administrative powers merged into a single person.

Furthermore, these officials were usually outsiders. In the registers of administrative officials of the Kalmyk Steppe from the early 20th century, we find only two ethnic Kalmyks: the physician Erendzhen Khara-Davan and the administration's translator, Najmin Badmaev. The rest were appointed from the outside. When rendering judicial decisions, they were supposed to rely on the norms of customary law ("Tsaadjin Bichig") or imperial statutes, but in practice, they adjudicated as they saw fit, guided by personal or corrupt motives, and sometimes by sheer incompetence.

Moreover, Tsarist Russia was a strictly stratified, estate-based society. Nobles, honored citizens, and merchants enjoyed authority, while the lower estates—ordinary nomads, the "common folk"—were disenfranchised. In court, when a dispute arose between representatives of different estates, the upper side almost always won, regardless of objective justice. Ordinary pastoralists knew that taking a noyon or a zaisang (noble clan leader) to court was useless; you were guaranteed to lose, and folk proverbs even formed around this. For many categories of cases, the decisions of the Ulus Courts were final—with no right to appeal or cassation. Besides, the absolute majority of nomads simply did not know about the existence of defense attorneys, prosecutors, or appellate instances. A bureaucrat single-handedly rendered a verdict, and no one monitored him.

The second node of problems was the catastrophic illiteracy of the population. The Kalmyks are a people with an ancient literary culture. Our unique vertical script ("Todo Bichig") emerged back in the 17th century; before that, a pan-Mongolian script was used, and with the adoption of Buddhism, the Tibetan language was used for liturgy. The written traditions were deep, but the problem lay in the fact that an incredibly small percentage of people possessed literacy. Only about 1.5 percent of the population knew the Kalmyk script, and even fewer knew Russian. Virtually 98% of the population remained illiterate. They did not read newspapers, scientific works, and had no idea that revolutionary processes were unfolding in the country or that political parties were fighting for the rights of the oppressed.

There were reformist parties as well—the Kadets, the Octobrists, national movements that tried to defend the rights of peoples peacefully, through reforms. But ordinary pastoralists had never heard of them. A paradox emerged: the struggle for the rights of the Kalmyk people was waged exclusively by a very thin layer of literate individuals, most of whom had only a rudimentary primary education. Even the national educators who taught in rural schools, like Arashi Chapchaev, had only graduated from primary schools. Attaining a classical secondary education at a gymnasium, let alone a university, cost huge amounts of money. To do this, one had to travel far beyond the borders of the steppe, speaking almost no Russian. Higher education in the Empire was fee-based.

Talented self-taught individuals were occasionally helped by philanthropists. For instance, Nomto Ochirov—a towering public and scientific figure who was the first to record the epic "Jangar" on phonograph records and preserved the voice of the rhapsodist Eelyan Ovla for us—was able to become a jurist thanks to the financial support of his childhood friend's father, the noyon David-Tseren Tundutov. Sometimes education was sponsored by public funds that Kalmyk assemblies pooled for social needs. That was exactly how Dr. Erendzhen Khara-Davan received his medical degree. This small intelligentsia, who read the press, the philosophical works of Marx and Hegel, including illegal literature, clearly saw the root of the problems and understood that the region was in dire need of radical reforms in the systems of governance, education, and healthcare.

This brings us to the third node—the political fragmentation of the intelligentsia itself. People searching for a way out of the protracted crisis saw it differently. Representatives of the traditional elite, former noyons and zaisangs (Danzan Tundutov, the Tyumen brothers, Garya Balzanov), sought to reform governance along the general Russian model by implementing the Zemstvo system of local self-government. Others proposed a Cossack administrative pathway for integration. And as the revolutionary events unfolded, a faction of the intelligentsia became captivated by the egalitarian schemes of the Bolsheviks.

As for ordinary pastoralists, while they understood that they lived in poverty and lacked opportunities for development, they simply did not comprehend the structural mechanisms capable of changing their lives. For them, free education, European-standard quality medicine, or theater were completely beyond the horizon of possibility. They believed this was a normal, predetermined life.

When the Civil War erupted, the population in its mass tried to evade it. People did not understand what this slaughter was being fought for and what they could gain from it. This was compounded by the fact that the opposing forces, especially the Whites, were extremely heterogeneous: monarchists, Socialist Revolutionaries, and Kadets were all mixed there, and total ideological disarray reigned. It was impossible for the common people to figure out who was fighting for what.

This neutrality lasted until the war literally shattered the entire fabric of Kalmyk society, sweeping back and forth across the steppe multiple times. Once the violence touched everyone personally—someone's livestock was confiscated, another's brother was killed, a third person's daughter or sister was violated—animosity flared up on a personal, blood-feud level. Only then did the Civil War engulf the entire population of Kalmykia, and people were forced to take up arms, aligning with the side they deemed necessary.

- To summarize, we can say that this analysis fundamentally changes our view of those events. I think our readers will find it incredibly interesting to learn the authentic path of the Civil War on the territory of Kalmykia. Thank you once again.

- That path was long and dramatic. In this context, I simply wanted to show the palette of people's views on the immediate eve of the Civil War. Over the course of the combat operations themselves, these views naturally changed, repeatedly shifting in both ideological directions.

- Here is what is truly remarkable to me: if we step away from the Civil War for a moment, it is how across different eras, a historian must literally defend their people. In one instance, explaining the underlying motivations of ordinary pastoralists at the turn of the previous century, and in another, defending the heroic legacy of front-line soldiers.

You have been fighting for the honorable reputation of the 110th Cavalry Division for many years. When you observe a scientifically refuted myth resurface in a peer-reviewed journal or a major public platform, do you ever feel demoralized?

- I have experienced conflicting emotions. Let us first recall what the 110th Kalmyk Cavalry Division truly is. It was a national military formation established in accordance with the decree of the State Defense Committee on November 13, 1941. Facing a critical shortage of cavalry, the country's leadership resolved to mobilize the human and material resources of the national republics. In total, twenty such divisions were created—in Central Asia, the North Caucasus, the Lower Volga, and the Middle Urals. The formation of these units sparked an immense wave of patriotic enthusiasm; men actively sought to serve precisely within their national formations.

A definitive operational advantage was the complete absence of a language barrier. Prior to this, mobilized Kalmyks who ended up in standard mixed-ethnicity units often could not comprehend operational commands or technical instruction, which made them fight less efficiently and suffer disproportionately high, tragic casualties. Within a national division, however, all training was conducted in the native language: soldiers were thoroughly explained the regulations, tactics, and weapons handling. This enabled them to fight with maximum operational output. Furthermore, because the officer corps was also predominantly composed of compatriots (or Russian officers who were fully fluent in Kalmyk), an exceptional internal cohesion and morale emerged within the regiments—a genuine combat brotherhood forged long before entering active combat.

Regrettably, a counterproductive strategic shift temporarily prevailed within the high command, holding that cavalry as an arm of service was obsolete. A process of their liquidation began. Many fully equipped divisions were disbanded either in the rear or en route to the front. Only three of the original twenty national divisions successfully reached the front lines to engage the enemy, and our 110th Cavalry Division was one of them.

Its initial adversary on the Don River was an elite formation of the Wehrmacht—the motorzied division "Großdeutschland" (Greater Germany), equipped with the most advanced military technology of the era. German archival documents explicitly attest to the extraordinary intensity and ferocity of those engagements. The level of self-sacrifice displayed by our personnel was astonishing. There is a documented case where an officer, intending to salvage a truck carrying the division's regimental colors and confidential records, mounted a horse and charged a German tank with a grenade. He was killed, but he distracted the tank, enabling the vehicle to successfully escape.

The national spirit played a decisive role. Prior to engagement, the elders instructed the youth: "Our division bears the name of our Republic and our people. We carry the absolute responsibility not to dishonor it." Over its nine-month combat path, the division experienced both the bitterness of strategic retreat and the joy of counter-offensive operations. During one offensive operation, our cavalrymen liberated over 600 inhabited localities, captured vast quantities of enemy materiel, and rescued hundreds of young men and girls whom the Germans were forcibly deporting to Germany. It was a heroic formation that became a pride of our republic.

Nevertheless, during the war years, a network of highly damaging myths began to envelop the division. Defamatory narratives alleged that the formation exhibited structural instability, deserted en masse back to the Kalmyk steppes, or that a faction of the soldiers under the leadership of its own commander defected to form anti-Soviet insurgent bands. Parallel rumors asserted that the division crossed the front line to form the core of a collaborationist corps. Though these fabrications were internally contradictory, they served a singular purpose: to vilify the participation of the Kalmyк people in the Great Patriotic War.

Even when the decision to deport the Kalmyk population was enacted in December 1943, one of the primary official accusations quoted was explicitly anchored to this fabrication: "Your national division collapsed and ran away." The state leadership maintained this official narrative despite possessing definitive knowledge to the contrary, for the republic's leadership knew perfectly well that following its heavy defensive engagements on the Don, the division fell back directly onto Kalmyk territory, fought within its borders, was reinforced by the local population, and subsequently continued to fight until it was reorganized due to the natural exhaustion of regional mobilization reserves.

The struggle against these falsifications began during the war itself, as regional leaders continuously petitioned the high command. Following the repatriation from exile, this topic became the cornerstone of rigorous research conducted by our Kalmyk Research Institute of Language, Literature, and History (КНИИЯЛИ), and this academic effort was led by the first Kalmyk Doctor of Historical Sciences, Mergen Lidzhinovich Kichikov.

Historical memory is not the isolated memory of an individual—whether a conditional Vasya Ivanov or Sandzhi Mandzhiev. It is the collective memory of an entire society, and it is inherently inert. It operates through generational transmission over three, five, or ten degrees of separation. It takes decades to shift mass consciousness.

To be frank, in the initial years, when we were just beginning to publish archival documents and monographs and did not see an immediate return, I did feel demoralized. We expended a colossal amount of personal time, occasionally to the detriment of the institute's planned assignments. It felt as though it was entirely in vain.

But years later, a powerful public response ensued. Grassroots initiatives gained immense resonance in the republic—for example, horse-riding reenactment treks along the combat routes of the 110th Cavalry Division. People travel hundreds of kilometers on horseback through heat and cold, wearing authentic 1942 uniforms, holding rallies and concerts. The effect of these living practices of commemoration is even stronger than strict academic works. After all, we write for the professional community, but the common people need a living, tangible experience of shared empathy.

My feelings are twofold. On the one hand, as a scientist, I understand that mass consciousness is extremely inert, and many discoveries are recognized only after the authors pass away. On the other hand, I am happy to see how rapidly our labor yielded fruit in Kalmykia. I take deep pride in the fact that our research has evolved into a large-scale public movement to preserve historical memory.

- I completely concur; defending historical truth today is a necessity across all fronts. However, if the myth surrounding the division wounds a nation's pride, the deportation and Shiroklag represent an ongoing, unhealed trauma vibrating within every Kalmyk family.

Utash Borisovich, your work on the Kalmyk military personnel in Shiroklag is a monumental endeavor that uncovers profound human tragedies: starvation, systemic disease, and shattered lives. When a researcher spends years analyzing such archives, it is impossible to remain emotionally detached. What did you personally experience while processing these tragic destinies?

- To characterize it in a single word is impossible; I experienced an entire spectrum of profound emotions. The primary sentiment was, undeniably, acute bitterness. And even if one completely abstracts from my national identity as a Kalmyk, sets aside questions of morality and ethics, and includes cold structural calculation—this deportation was entirely non-resultative and impractical for the country.

The special settlements designated for the expellees were logistically unprepared to receive people, resulting in catastrophic demographic losses. Within the first four years of exile, the Kalmyk population was reduced by one-third. People perished en masse—either in transit wagons or within the special settlements, with the absolute peak of mortality occurring in 1944. It was only in 1949 that the Kalmyk birth rate began to marginally exceed the mortality rate for the first time. You see, these thousands of people perished entirely in vain, stripped of the ability to bring utility to the country. Had they remained in Kalmykia, they would have provided far greater economic value to the front and the rear through the supply of livestock and fish. Following the total expulsion of the Kalmyk population, the Caspian fishing fleet suffered immense operational disruptions that there was no one to rectify.

The enforcement mechanisms of the NKVD routinely executed expulsions, denying families preparation time. My own relative experienced a rare exception: her father was actively serving on the front lines, and the NKVD agents, recognizing this status, helped her pack a mechanical sewing machine. Upon arrival in Siberia, this single tool ensured her physical survival—she constantly sewed and sustained herself and her mother.

Conversely, the absolute majority of expellees possessed nothing. My relative recalled a profoundly talented young girl named Valentina Garyaeva—a beautiful, active Komsomol member who arrived in Siberia possessing nothing but a single winter coat. The Kalmyks were forcibly assigned to collective farms (kolkhozes), where remuneration occurred strictly at the end of the agricultural fiscal year based on accumulated "labor days" (trudodni). Consequently, for an entire year, families had to survive without any income.

To save her mother and three young siblings from starvation, Valya began selling her coat piece by piece. First, she unstitched and traded the expensive outer woolen cloth for potatoes, leaving only the internal lining. In the winter, she was left in nothing but raw, matted batting insulation. Ultimately, she had to sell the batting as well in exchange for potatoes. To make matters worse, the local resident who bartered the potatoes cheated her—he lined the bottom of the bucket with a thick cloth to artificially reduce the volume of food. This coat was insufficient to sustain the family's survival. Valya perished from starvation. Her younger brothers, sisters, and mother died sequentially. Entire lineages vanished in this precise manner.

Within my immediate family, my mother lost two of her birth sisters in Siberia. Yet, the absolute majority of women, children, and elderly would have survived had their front-line fathers and husbands been permitted to remain with them. Instead, the men were isolated in Shiroklag. Our family was fortunate: my grandfather was a disabled war veteran, so he was demobilized early and dispatched directly to the special settlement to join the family. He arrived in early 1944, secured administrative employment, and managed to feed the family—yet he still buried two daughters.

From a purely economic perspective, this policy defied rational administrative logic: Siberian logging enterprises and collective farms had absolutely no operational need for nomadic steppe pastoralists—predominantly women and infants incapable of heavy forestry labor—whereas their preservation in their native ecosystem would have yielded profound economic utility. Hence, the predominant emotion is a crushing bitterness over entirely senseless, preventable human loss.

- How do you manage to maintain scientific coldness despite these intense personal emotions?

- It is exceptionally demanding. An academic historian is under a strict epistemological obligation to maintain objectivity, adhere to rigorous scientific methods, and completely suppress emotional impulses born of national empathy or general humanitarian grief. But I am not a robot; I am an individual and a Kalmyk. I naturally maintain a profound love and pride for my nation.

Objectivity demands that we never manipulate empirical data or suppress inconvenient documentation, but record history with absolute fidelity. I sincerely strive toward this. There is an important professional aspect here: we all operate within a universal, international historiographical space of archival sources. If regional historians begin to distort historical truth to satisfy grievances or ambitions, they instantly forfeit academic authority among the global scientific community, thereby degrading the prestige of their entire regional discipline.

I take immense pride in the fact that within wider academic circles, the Kalmyk historical school is highly recognized for its rigorous adherence to the principles of scientific validity and historicism. My colleagues trust us. And it is precisely this institutional trust that enables me to effectively defend the historical memory of the 110th Cavalry Division and Shiroklag. I do not need to resort to polemical rhetoric; verified archival documents speak on my behalf.

Editorial Note:

The Shirokovsky Internal Labor Camp (Shiroklag) was a specialized corrective labor camp operated by the NKVD in the Molotov (now Perm) Region, structurally established to construct the Shirokovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station on the Kosva River. In the spring of 1944, acting strictly on ethnically targeted administrative decrees, the high command systematically withdrew approximately 3.5 thousand ethnic Kalmyk servicemen from active combat fronts of the Great Patriotic War and transferred them to Shiroklag. Formally, these men retained their status as personnel of the Red Army and were not judicial convicts, yet they were subjected to strict penal camp regimens under armed guard supervision.

- Fine, thank you. Speaking of the deportation of the Kalmyk people, we probably cannot bypass Alexei Balakaev's novella "Three Drawings," where the tragedy of exile is shown through the poignant image of a small boy. I think behind every scholar, writer, and journalist in Kalmykia, there stands a certain image of three drawings. If you examine these historical chapters through a personal lens, what constitute the primary "three drawings," the three core memories or oral histories transmitted to you by the older generation of your family?

- The first vivid drawing I have already painted—the tragic fate of the gifted girl Valya Garyaeva and her family, who were stripped of the basic right to pack essentials and food allowed by law. They burned away in exile entirely in vain.

The second drawing is the scientific-historical drama of Shiroklag, where the extraordinary labor heroism of front-line soldiers was completely devalued by the chaotic and brutal decisions of the state leadership. Kalmyk military personnel executed the most grueling structural operations there. The excavation of the main dam site took place in solid granite: the bedrock was blasted, fragmented manually with picks and crowbars, and excavated via hand-barrows. Initially, while the servicemen received standard front-line military rations, they maintained structural endurance. However, once the administration downgraded them to rear-echelon caloric allowances, rapid physiological exhaustion ensued. They maximized their physical output, executed commands honestly, and surrendered their final physiological reserves. In the latter half of 1944 alone, approximately one thousand Kalmyk soldiers perished from exhaustion and secondary diseases; the precise mortality figures for 1945 remain unquantified due to archival gaps. In the spring of 1945, the state finally demobilized the surviving personnel due to complete physical incapacitation and dispatched them to the special settlements to join their families.

The crowning tragedy of this immense labor heroism and penal exploitation lies in its complete structural futility. The operational design of the Shirokovskaya Hydroelectric Station relied entirely on specialized turbine units evacuated from the Lesogorskaya Hydroelectric Station on the Finnish border. Following the strategic advance of Soviet forces in the summer of 1944 and the subsequent exit of Finland from the war, that territory returned to absolute safety, prompting the state to return the turbine equipment to its original site. Alternative industrial turbines were non-existent in the wartime economy; manufacturing infrastructure imported under Lend-Lease was just beginning to be assembled. As a direct consequence, the Shirokovskaya Station was not commissioned until 1948. This underscores the profound tragedy: the rapid destruction of human lives was entirely unnecessary. The infrastructure could have been constructed via an ordinary, un-accelerated timeline without lethal physical strain, as the operational machinery was structurally unavailable for another three years.

The third "drawing" is deeply personal and illustrates the structural survival of my family. Prior to the war, my grandfather completed his postgraduate research, directed regional educational departments, and served as the director of an exemplary school. When he was exiled to Siberia, his high qualifications saved the family: he was appointed to teach a broad spectrum of disciplines as a school teacher, received a stable monetary salary, and was allocated a house and a cow. This provided a secure material baseline for survival.

However, he refused to confine his efforts to the security of his immediate family. Instead, he dedicated his resources to locating and rescuing orphaned relatives and compatriots scattered across Siberia. The deportation had left an immense number of children in our kinship network entirely unparented. Whenever a distant relative or cousin passed away and their household dissolved, my grandfather traveled to the respective settlement, claimed the surviving infants, and raised them as his own. Today, their descendants are my distant cousins, yet we maintain the closest bonds of kinship.

In one instance, he traveled to an orphanage in the Tyumen Region to locate the children of his birth sister. Confronted with severe material constraints, he could not physically claim both, and instructing the eldest daughter, who was an exceptional student, he said: "The director is prepared to offer you an internal administrative post for a year, which guarantees you shelter and a wage. Therefore, I must leave you here for now and select your younger brother, whom I am taking to my household." We remain in close contact with their grandchildren to this day.

Another profound example involves the children of his nephew—a junior lieutenant of the 110th Cavalry Division who perished heroically in the winter of 1942. He was a heavy machine-gunner who, to cover the retreat of his unit, dragged his weapon platform onto a haystack—the sole elevated vantage point in the flat steppe landscape. He successfully suppressed advancing enemy positions until German forces targeted the haystack with incendiary munitions, causing him to burn alive. His spouse perished during transit within a rail wagon, leaving two infants who were placed in a Siberian orphanage under an altered, Ukrainianized surname of "Mochaevo".

My grandfather faced an impossible task in tracing them through official channels, yet their recovery was achieved via the "Kalmyk Telegraph". This is a highly efficient cultural phenomenon characteristic of traditional, tight-knit societies subjected to displacement: whenever a Kalmyk encountered displaced children exhibiting clear national features, they systematically extracted their lineage data and verbally transmitted this information across vast geographic distances without a single structural distortion. Through this organic information network, intelligence regarding the children's precise location reached my grandfather, enabling him to secure their release and raise them.

- It is truly remarkable how much internal strength and wisdom the older generation possessed to pass through this and not break. Today, studying their experience and history, we also look for our own reference points. Utash Borisovich, where do you personally find your internal intellectual equilibrium and motivation to sustain this work?

First and foremost, I am an absolute devotee of historical science. I love history boundlessly. Even if I operated in an entirely different professional sphere, I would dedicate my leisure time to historical research as a hobby. My work is my passion.

Secondly, for me, it is fundamentally important to restore historical justice regarding our people, to cleanse our past from the layers of political falsehood.

Furthermore, a rigorous comprehension of shared history serves as a critical marker for contemporary national identity. In the era of the internet and globalization, traditional culture inevitably dissolves: we consume identical products, adopt globalized dress codes, and wear matching hairstyles. Language attrition is a severe crisis confronting Kalmykia. In these specific socio-cultural environments, a highly developed historical consciousness—the conscious alignment of oneself with a single collective destiny—becomes the primary structural pillar enabling the Kalmyk people to maintain their national self-identification.

- Fine, thank you. I would now like to propose a brief blitz-questionnaire. The rules are straightforward: concise prompts requiring immediate, distilled responses. The first thing that comes to a historian's mind. Are you prepared?

BLITZ-QUESTIONNAIRE

- What is the defining quality that a professional archival historian must possess?

- Objectivity.

- Was the Civil War in Kalmykia fundamentally a tragedy of a fragmented nation or an inevitable phase of modernization?

- It was both.

- What presents a greater professional challenge: discovering a unique primary document in the archives or articulating its significance in an accessible language for the public?

- Archival discovery is largely a function of simple serendipity; one can search fruitlessly for years or instantly uncover a monumental cache of records, so there is no real difficulty there—stubbornness and endurance matter more. Conversely, translating complex data into accessible prose is my daily work, a craft. There is no real difficulty there either; the availability of time and the psychological mindset matter more.

- Please complete the following phrase: "The history of Kalmykia is, above all, a history of..."

- ...the nations that inhabit its landscape.

- The Kalmyk language fifty years from now: will it endure as a medium of daily communication or persist exclusively within university departments?

- That trajectory depends entirely on us, the Kalmyks. If we fight for it, it will endure in daily life; if we succumb to apathy, it will vanish into a museum exhibit. Consider the historical precedent of the Jewish nation: deprived of sovereign statehood for millennia and dispersed globally, they mobilized, established a state, and completely resuscitated Hebrew from scratch, negotiating the pronunciation of forgotten words. Everything rests entirely in our hands.

- Thank you for this exceptionally illuminating final round. As our journal embarks on its path to popularize and preserve the culture of Kalmykia, what primary directive would you offer to our editorial board and the younger generation?

- I would invoke the precise words written by Veniamin Kaverin in "Two Captains": "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield".

- Utash Borisovich, I express our profound gratitude for this exceptionally candid, rigorous, and inspiring dialogue! This was not merely an exchange on historical events, but a profound masterclass in academic wisdom. For our journal, this conversation represents an immense honor and a powerfully authoritative foundation for our launch.