Kalmyk people
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.