Lubsan Sharab Tepkin

Who was Lubsan Sharab Tepkin?

Lubsan Sharab Tepkin was a Buddhist priest of Kalmyk origin who was born in the Bokshirgankan aimak in the Salsk District of the Don Cossack Host sometime in 1875.

Lubsan Tepkin was born to Dandun Tepkin, a horsebreeder and a member of a prominent family. He joined the Kalmyk clergy at a young age and became Baksha of the khurul in his native aimak by the age of 28 in 1903. In so doing, Lama Tepkin replaced Menko Bormanzhinov who became Lama of the Don Kalmyks. In 1911, Lama Tepkin abdicated his position and moved to Tibet, where he would remain until the fall of 1922.

Lama Tepkin moved to Petrograd, Russia in the fall of 1922 to become a deputy Tibetan envoy and a lecturer in Mongolian and Tibetan at the Leningrad Institute of Oriental Living Languages. Three years later in 1925, Lama Tepkin traveled to the Kalmyk Autonomous Oblast to attend the second conference of the Kalmyk Buddhist clergy where he was elected the Šajin Lama of the Kalmyk people.

Lama Tepkin held the position of Šajin Lama until his arrest by the NKVD in 1931. He was sentenced to imprisonment without a formal trial by an NKVD tribunal. Lama Tepkin reportedly spent the last years of his life working as a clerk on a dairy farm near Tashkent where he was last heard of in 1941.