Tuva

• 1. Introduction

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  Tuva sits at the geographical center of Asia, a republic within Russia that most of the world has never heard of. Physicist Richard Feynman became so obsessed with reaching it that his lifelong, ultimately unsuccessful attempt was chronicled in a book called Tuva or Bust! That story captures something essential about this place: remote, hard to access, and strangely magnetic to those who catch a glimpse of it.

  With a population of 336,651 as counted in the 2021 census, Tuva is small by any measure. Its capital, Kyzyl, holds more than a third of those people. Beyond Kyzyl, settlements have few if any Russian inhabitants, and Tuvan remains the first language of daily life. Two faiths, Tibetan Buddhism and shamanism, coexist here in a combination found almost nowhere else on earth.

  The questions worth sitting with are these: how did a land at the heart of a continent end up absorbed into Russia only in 1944, after decades as a nominally independent republic? What did it cost the people who lived through that transition? And what survives today of the culture that predates all of it?

• 2. Empires at the Center

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  The Xiongnu controlled this territory from 209 BC to 93 AD, and after them came a procession of powers spanning more than two millennia. The Xianbei state, the Rouran Khaganate, the Tang dynasty, the Yenisei Kyrgyz Khaganate, the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty, the Northern Yuan dynasty, the Khotgoid Khanate, and finally the Zunghar Khanate all held Tuva at one point or another before 1758.

  In 1758, the Qing dynasty, the last imperial house of China, absorbed Tuva as the Tannu Uriankhai region of Outer Mongolia. That arrangement held for over 150 years, until the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 upended the Qing order. Tsarist Russia moved quickly. It cultivated a separatist movement among Tuvans while pro-independence and pro-Mongol factions also competed for the future of the territory.

  Tsar Nicholas II agreed to the third petition from Tuva's leadership in 1912, extending a protectorate over what was then nominally an independent state. Merchants, travelers, and explorers from Russia had already been settling there. On the 17th of April 1914, Tuva was formalized as the Russian protectorate of Uryankhay Krai, and a capital was built and named Belotsarsk, meaning "Town of the White Tsar."

• 3. Wars, Coups, and Kyzyl

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  Alexander Kolchak's White Russian troops occupied most of Tuva from the 5th of July 1918 to the 15th of July 1919, with Pyotr Ivanovich Turchaninov appointed governor. In the autumn of 1918, Chinese troops took the southwest and Mongol troops led by Khatanbaatar Magsarjav occupied the south. Control shifted again: the Red Army held Tuva from July 1919 until February 1920, then China governed it under a governor named Yan Shichao until the Bolsheviks expelled them in 1921.

  On the 14th of August 1921, the Bolsheviks established the Tuvan People's Republic, popularly known as Tannu-Tuva. The capital, which had been renamed Khem-Beldyr in 1918, was renamed again in 1926 to Kyzyl, a word meaning "red." The state was de jure independent between the two World Wars, but recognized only by the Soviet Union and Mongolia.

  Chairman Donduk Kuular, the state's ruler, sought to deepen ties with Mongolia and make Tibetan Buddhism the official state religion. Moscow found this alarming. In 1929, five young Tuvan graduates of Moscow's Communist University of the Toilers of the East carried out a Soviet-orchestrated coup that removed Kuular from power. The following year, the state's Mongol script was replaced by a Latin alphabet designed by Russian linguists; Cyrillic replaced Latin in 1943.

• 4. Annexation and Its Aftermath

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  Tuva was annexed into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1944. The approval came from Tuva's Little Khural, the parliament, but no public referendum was held. It became the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast after the Soviet victory in World War II, and was elevated to the Tuvan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on the 10th of October 1961.

  Party Secretary Salchak Toka shaped the Soviet Tuva. Ethnic Russians received full citizenship rights; Buddhist and Mongol influences on Tuvan society were systematically curtailed. Toka, also leader of the Tuvan People's Revolutionary Party, held effective power as First Secretary of the Tuvan Communist Party until his death in 1973.

  In February 1990, a philologist at the Kyzyl State Pedagogical Institute named Kaadyr-ool Bicheldei founded the Khostug Tyva, or Tuvan Democratic Movement. The party pressed for jobs, housing, and a stronger status for the Tuvan language. Later that year, a wave of violence against the Russian community followed, with 168 people reportedly murdered; sniper attacks on trucks and raids on outlying settlements drove many Russians out of the republic. Russian OMON special police units were deployed. Historian Mark Beissinger linked the ultimate failure of the Tuvan nationalist movement, relative to contemporaneous movements across the Soviet Union, to the movement's weaker urban networks.

• 5. Land, Rivers, and Mountains

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  Mount Mongun-Tayga, which translates as "Silver Mountain," rises to 3,970 meters and is the republic's highest point, named for the glacier it carries. Mountains and hills cover over 80 percent of Tuva's 170,427 square kilometers of territory. The republic stretches more than 700 kilometers from west to east and 450 kilometers from north to south.

  More than 8,000 rivers run through the republic. Among them is the upper course of the Yenisei River, the fifth longest river in the world, which Tuvans also call Ulug-Khem. Most other rivers here drain into the Yenisei as tributaries. Glacial and salt lakes dot the landscape; Todzha Lake, also known as Azas Lake, covers 100 square kilometers and is the largest in the republic.

  Uvs Lake, shared with Mongolia, holds a World Heritage designation. The eastern part of the republic is forested and elevated while the western part is drier lowland, all of it enclosed within a mountain basin sitting roughly 600 meters above sea level, ringed by the Sayan and Tannu-Ola mountain ranges.

• 6. Faith, Throat Singing, and Gold

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  In September 1992, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, visited Tuva for three days. On the 20th of September he blessed and consecrated the yellow-blue-white flag of Tuva, which had been officially adopted three days earlier. The flag's colors carry specific meanings: yellow for prosperity, blue for courage and strength, white for purity.

  Tuvans are one of only two Turkic groups in the world who are primarily Buddhist, the other being the Yellow Uyghurs in China. Buddhist contact first came during the 13th and 14th centuries, when Tuva entered the Mongol Empire. The earliest Buddhist temples uncovered by archaeologists in the territory date to that same period. Shamanism runs alongside: good and evil spirits inhabit mountains, forests, water, the heavens, and the underworld, with a shaman acting as mediator between the human world and those forces. A 2012 survey found 61.8% of the population adhering to Buddhism and 8% to Tengrism or Tuvan shamanism.

  Tuvan throat singing, called khoomei, involves a singer producing a fundamental tone and an overtone simultaneously. Throat singing can be heard through the Tuvan National Orchestra and at the International Khoomei Day held at the National Tuvinian Theatre in Kyzyl. At the archaeological site Arzhaan-2, excavations uncovered Scythian animal art in great variety alongside over 9,000 decorative gold pieces; that collection is displayed today at the National Museum Aldan-Maadyr in Kyzyl.

• 7. People and Presence

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  According to the 2021 census, ethnic Tuvans make up 88.7% of the population; Russians account for 10.1%. Between 1959 and 2010, the number of ethnic Tuvans more than doubled. The Russian population grew until the 1980s and then fell by 70% from its 1989 peak, driven out in part by the violence of 1990 and the broader dislocations of the Soviet collapse.

  A small population of Old Believers, ultra-Orthodox Russian Christians who retreated deeper into the taiga as Soviet atheism spread, persists in some of the most isolated corners of the republic. Major Old Believer villages, including Erzhei, Uzhep, Unzhei, Zhivei, and Bolee Malkiye, are clustered in the remote Kaa-Khemsky District, where Russians still make up 27.4% of the population.

  Tuva's average life expectancy, at 56.5 years on UNDP data, sits well below the Russian national figures. Genetic research by Ilya Zakharov of Moscow's Vavilov Institute of General Genetics suggests that modern Tuvans are the closest genetic relatives of the native peoples of North and South America. Sergei Shoygu, born 1955, who served as Minister of Defence of the Russian Federation and now serves as Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, was born in Tuva, while throat singer Kongar-ool Ondar, who lived from 1962 to 2013, served as a member of the Great Khural of Tuva.