Tuva, a sparsely populated region in southern Siberia, had functioned since 1921 as the nominally independent Tuvan People's Republic while remaining under close Soviet political and military control. In October 1944, its small assembly formally petitioned for incorporation into the USSR, and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet accepted, making Tuva the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast (later Tuvan ASSR) within the Russian SFSR. Unlike most other annexations covered here, the transfer involved no mass displacement, but it eliminated the last vestige of Tuvan statehood and subjected the region's largely nomadic, Turkic-speaking population to Soviet administrative and collectivization policies.
The Soviet Union formally annexed the nominally independent Tuvan People's Republic, a Soviet client state since the 1920s, following a request from a Soviet-aligned Tuvan assembly, incorporating it as the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast.
Tuva's own statistics are thin; the republic's population is usually given as roughly 95,000-100,000 in the mid-1940s, overwhelmingly Tuvan with a Russian settler minority of some 10,000-12,000. The Soviet census of 1959, the first full enumeration of the territory as the Tuvan Autonomous Oblast and then ASSR, counted 171,900.
The October-November 1944 accession was accomplished through votes of the Tuvan People's Revolutionary Party central committee and the Little Khural and a declaration presented to the USSR Presidium; no source records violent resistance or bloodshed attending the annexation itself. The lethal repression of Tuvans — the 1929 Soviet-backed coup and execution of Donduk Kuular, forced collectivisation, the purge of a third to a half of party members, and the destruction of Buddhist monasteries (from 25 lamaseries to one, and from about 4,000 lamas to fifteen, between 1929 and 1931) — occurred in the fifteen years before the annexation and is not enumerated in casualty terms.
Russia