B. Renchin

Byambyn Rinchen (Mongolian: Бямбын Ринчен; 21 November 1905 – 4 March 1977), also known as Rinchen Bimbayev (Russian: Ринчен Бимбаев), was a Mongolian scholar and writer. He was a researcher of Mongolia's language, literature, and history, and a recorder and preserver of the country's cultural heritage, publishing many shamanist and folklore texts. Rinchen was also a prolific poet, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and translator, authoring the screenplay for Tsogt taij (1945), Mongolia's first historical feature film, and the trilogy Rays of Dawn (1951–1955, revised 1971), its first novel set during the 1921 revolution. Rinchen was often criticized by the ruling Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party for his "nationalism", but was spared in the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Byambyn Rinchen (full name Rinchendorj) was born on 21 November 1905 in Mongolian Kyakhta (now Altanbulag, Selenge Province), just across the border from Troitskosavsk (now named Kyakhta) in the Russian Empire. His great-grandfather Bimba, despite being an ethnic Khalkha of the Yüngshiyebü clan, fled zud in Outer Mongolia and enrolled in Russia's Buryat Cossacks, adopting the surname Bimbayev (which Rinchen also used early in his life). Rinchen's mother was a descendant of the famous Khalkha prince Choghtu Khong Tayiji, whose poetry Rinchen later studied. After the 1911 revolution, Rinchen's father, Radnajab (1874–1921), worked as a border official.

Rinchen learned Mongolian and Manchu before attending a Russian school in Kyakhta from 1914 to 1920, and in 1921 was employed as a scribe in the Bogd Khan government's Border Ministry. Between 1923 and 1927, Rinchen studied at Leningrad's Institute of Oriental Languages with Russian Mongolist Boris Vladimirtsov, and after his return worked with Tsyben Zhamtsarano at the Institute of Scriptures and Manuscripts and was director of an Ulaanbaatar middle school. Rinchen joined the leftist "Writers' Circle" in 1929. In 1931, he married Ochiryn Ratna (Maria Ivanovna Oshirov), a Buryat and former wife of arrested Buryat scholar Dashi Sampilon. The couple had three daughters and one son, Rinchen Barsbold, one of Mongolia's leading paleontologists.

On 10 September 1937, Rinchen was arrested during the Stalinist purges in Mongolia as a "pan-Mongolist Japanese spy" and a counter-revolutionary. He was named as a ringleader by Khorloogiin Choibalsan and sentenced to death in April 1939, but in December 1941 had his sentence reduced to 10 years' imprisonment. On 30 March 1942, he was released at Choibalsan's behest to live under supervision in Ulaanbaatar, where he became literary secretary of the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) and an editor of the party paper Ünen with Tsendiin Damdinsüren, with whom he often disagreed.

From 1944, Rinchen worked at the Mongolian State University and State Publishing House. In 1947, he translated Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's The Communist Manifesto into Mongolian. In 1948, he criticized the work of a Soviet adviser at the university, and was first attacked by the MPRP Politburo for his "nationalism" in 1949. He obtained a doctorate in philology in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for his study of Mongolian grammar. In December 1956, Rinchen wrote a letter to Nikita Khrushchev stating that the Cyrillic script was unsuitable for Mongolian; in March 1958, he wrote another to Mao Zedong asking him to not allow introduction of Cyrillic in Inner Mongolia. In 1959, Rinchen organized the First International Congress of Mongolists, the first Mongolian forum to invite scholars from outside the Eastern Bloc. In 1959–1960, the Politburo again accused Rinchen of "bourgeois nationalism", citing Tsogt taij's excessive admiration of feudal characters, Rinchen's poetically-expressed distaste for Russian urban life, and praise for pre-revolutionary cultural achievements as displayed in his 1959 Hungarian travelogue. His work as a theater critic was criticized for neglecting "questions of ideology".

Rinchen was removed as the director of the Institute of Language and Literature, though in 1961 he was a founding member of the Mongolian Academy of Sciences. In 1963, the Supreme Court found him innocent of the charges for which he was imprisoned in 1937–1942. The third volume of his Grammar of Written Mongolian (1967) was recalled and destroyed for expressing nationalism. Another criticism of Rinchen in March 1976 also attacked his parents and brother. These later criticisms were prepared by his academic rivals, such as Shanjmyatavyn Gaadamba. Rinchen died of cancer on 4 March 1977.