| Summary: | The article examines a number of key aspects in the political history of Tuvan People’s Republic shortly before it became part of the USSR. The entries in the diary of the charge d’affaires of the USSR in the Tuvan People’s Republic, M.G. Sushchevsky (1942-1943) help us focus, in particular, on the early preparatory stage of this process and pinpoint the date when the Soviet leaders started to consider the issue quite seriously – March 18, 1943. Attention is also paid to other developments in the social and political life of the People’s Republic of Tuva which had some bearing in the process of taking the decision to join the USSR. Among them are the government institutions and their work (e.g. the Little Khural) and the political purges which continued into the 1940s.
Some light is shed on the emigration of Tuvan arats to Mongolia and the forced resettlement of ethnic Tuvans from Mongolia to Tuva in the 1930s and 1940s. Special treatment is given to the issue of the border which since the early 1930s had become dominant in the Tuvan-Mongolian relations and remained so until the accession of Tuva into the USSR in October 1944.
For its sources, the study, inter alia, relies in the unpublished “Diaries of the charge d’affaires of the USSR in the Tuvan People’s Republic c[omrades] Sushchevsky and Budarin”, preserved at the Archives of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (f. 06 “V.M . Molotov’s Secretariat”).
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