A book I was reading had a map of the Soviet Union which featured an independent Tuvan nation. I was curious so I looked it up. Wikipedia describes the nation forming with soviet cooperation, but then goes on to talk about a soviet-backed coup in 1929. How independent was Tuva before this coup?
Sorry, just a little HOI IV humor there for anyone out there who has wasted as much of their lives as I have battling against that inevitable annexation to bring unbridled glory to the mighty Tuvan People's Republic.
One quick additional aside: there is actually quite a large amount of academic literature about the Tuvan people written by Tuvan academics so I've endeavored to completely source this answer from such authors. See the Sources and Further Reading section at the end of this answer for those works and consider giving one of them a read if you're interested in learning more about the truly storied history of this region which dates back to the late Paleolithic period (±10,000 BCE).
Okay on to your question. How independent was the Tannu Tuvan People's Republic during the period from its foundation in 1921 to its normalization (re: Soviet Communist coup) in 1929 and then outright annexation in 1944?
The short answer is, not really at all.
In fact, when the Khural (Congress) gathered for the first time 99 years ago to the day of this writing (13 August, 2020), a clause was written in Chapter I of the newly formed constitution that despite being "a free state [...] in its internal affairs, [...] in international relations it operates under the leadership of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic." [1] (See pp. 234). Furthermore, the Tuvan People's Republic (they dropped the "Tannu" in the 1926 rewrite of the constitution) featured many of the telltale signs of Soviet puppet-ship and/or occupation of its governance. Most obviously, the "People's" descriptor of the Republic in its official name, but more substantively:
Before the Bolsheviks had even staged their revolution in 1917, the Russian Empire (which annexed the Tuva region in 1911 from Qing China during the Xinhai Revolution) had already begun a policy of ethnic diffusion in the area. In 1911, the Russian Imperial Government spent around 5 million rubles (Exeter College maintains a tool which told me that this amount is the rough equivalent to 60 million 2015 USD) to begin settling ethnic Russians in the region. By the end of that year, there were around 4,000 such settlers. By 1916, that number had doubled to 8,000 and by the time of the October Revolution it had grown to 10,000. Using that same 1931 census figure above, you can see that means that roughly 13% (and likely at least a bit more, as we're talking about a time 14 years prior to that census) of the population was ethnically Russian. This population was granted autonomous protection under the Bolsheviks as a minority work colony, given that they -- being the proletariat electorate with whom the Bolshevik message resonated -- largely favored Soviet power. This "autonomy" was frequently used to undermine native attempts to enact Tuvan nationalist and/or Buddhist theocratic measures amongst the nation's population and in its laws. [2] (See pp. 60)
Indeed:
The Russian colony maintained close contacts with Soviet Russia and the Comintern. To a large extent, [S]ovietization of Tuva was carried out through this colony. [1] (See pp. 237)
All that said, Tuvan academics -- or more precisely, Drs. Vera Damdynchap and Salimaa Khovalyg regard the period from 1921 to 1929 as having largely positive effects on the actual people and culture of Tuva if only because they were finally a nominally independent nation (having been almost exclusively subjugated since the beginning of the Common Era by various conquering peoples from the Muslim Uyghurs and Jochi Khan all the way to the Imperial Chinese and Russians) and traditionalist Tuvan culture had the space to flourish under such conditions, even if only against the backdrop of eventual Soviet domination and frequent political stymying of the legal codification of that very same culture. Of course, that all came to a quick end upon the initiation of Stalin's internal annihilation of military and government officials in the 1930s.
By 1944, after nearly 20 years of a Soviet puppet regime, the TPR was simply in an untenable geopolitical position. The near-omnipotent Joseph Stalin was ruling a wartime Soviet Union that was no longer on the back foot against Hitler's Germany, the pre-revolutionary class of former Tuvan aristocratic and Buddhist lama classes had been almost completely destroyed by the Great Terror repressions of the 1930s leaving only Soviet-educated Marxists in positions of power, the small nation was bordered on both sides by Soviet Socialist Republics (Mongolian and Russian), and to make matters worse, uranium deposits had been discovered in the region, requiring (in the eyes of the Soviet leadership) more direct control over the area. Thus, the short tale of Tuvan independence came to an anticlimactic end as the Soviet Union enacted (but did not announce) the integration of the TPR into the RSFSR where it remains to this day, existing as the Tuvan Republic of the modern-day Russian Federation.
Sources and Further Reading
Bayyr-ool, M.S.; A Unique Experience in Vertical Mobility; Sociological Research Journal; 2010
Damdynchap, Vera; The Tuvan People’s Republic (1921–1944): Formation of the Legislative Framework; Bulletin of the Kalmyk Institute for Humanities of the Russian Academy of Sciences; 2008 [2]
Khovalyg, Salimaa; Officialdom of the Tuvan people's republic: transformation of the socio-cultural; Tuvan State University; 2018 [1]
