His durable achievement was built in Russia. From 1909 he raised money and permission for a Buddhist temple in St Petersburg, at Staraya Derevnya, designed in a Tibetan idiom by Russian architects with stained glass by Nicholas Roerich. It was consecrated in 1915, the first Buddhist temple in a European capital, and it was intended as a statement that Buddhism belonged inside the empire rather than at its edge.
After the revolution he tried to make the same case to the new state. He led the movement for a renovated Buddhism in Buryatia and Kalmykia, arguing that monastic discipline and the Buddhist refusal of a creator god were compatible with the Soviet programme, and for a decade the argument was tolerated. It stopped being tolerated at the end of the 1920s. The datsans were closed and demolished through the 1930s, the monks were arrested, and the St Petersburg temple was taken over and used at various points as a physical culture facility and a radio transmitter station.
Dorzhiev was arrested at Ulan-Ude in 1937, at eighty-three, and died in the prison hospital there in January 1938. The temple was returned to Buddhist use in 1990, and the datsans of Buryatia were rebuilt after that, largely from photographs and from memory.