Khertek Anchimaa-Toka was a leading politician in her native Tuva, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation. She was active in the Soviet era and during the interwar and wartime period of national independence, when, as chairman of Tuva’s parliament, she became the world’s first non-royal female head of state.

Khertek Anchimaa was born, one of five children in a peasant family, in the winter of 1912 (she later adopted January 1 as her birthday). Until the previous year, Tuva, a region in Central Asia bordering Mongolia, had been under Chinese control; after the fall of the Qing dynasty and a brief period of independence, it became a Russian protectorate.

After the Russian Revolution, in 1921, Tuvan Bolsheviks, led by the former Buddhist monk Donduk Kuular, again declared independence, with Soviet support, as the Tuvan People’s Republic.

The country in which Anchimaa grew up was, therefore, a Soviet satellite state. Under Kuular’s premiership, however, it attempted to pursue an independent course, establishing Buddhism as the state religion. In 1929 Kuular was deposed and replaced with a more reliably pro-Soviet leadership, among them Salchak Toka, who was to become general-secretary of the Tuvan People’s Revolutionary Party (TPRP), and Anchimaa’s husband.

The 18-year-old Anchimaa joined Revsomol, a youth organisation patterned on the Soviet Komsomol, in 1930, the year that a written alphabet for the Tuvan language was introduced. Anchimaa, who had learnt to read Mongolian as a child and was among the first students to master the new Tuvan script, was charged with promoting literacy in her region.

In 1931, she became a member of the TPRP, working as a clerk and as technical secretary in a regional administration. Later that year, she was selected as one of 70 Tuvans sent to Moscow, a three-week journey from the Tuvan capital Kyzyl, to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. In May 1935, she became one of only eleven Tuvans to graduate.

Returning to Tuva, Anchimaa was appointed head of the propaganda and agitation section of Revsomol, then active in transforming a traditionally nomadic society through collectivisation. As head of the women’s affairs section of the TPRP from 1938, she devoted herself to female education.

In 1940 Anchimaa became chairman of the Presidium of the Little Khural, or parliament, and thus the world’s first female head of state of a republic. In the same year, she married Salchak Toka, who since 1932 had been Tuva’s Prime Minister.

Anchimaa’s period in office was characterised by ever closer relations with the Soviet Union. Tuva entered the Second World War, following the Soviet lead, on June 25, 1941, and Anchimaa devoted herself to arranging Tuvan support for the Soviet war effort. Also during her term, in 1943, the Latin-based Tuvan script was replaced by a Cyrillic-based one. Most significantly, Anchimaa worked towards the incorporation of her country into the Soviet Union, which took place, after a vote in the Little Khural, in October, 1944.

In the new Tuvan Autonomous Oblast, Anchimaa became deputy chairman of the Tuvan executive committee, a post that she would occupy until 1961, when Tuva became an autonomous republic.

Thereafter, until her retirement in 1972, she was deputy chairman of the Tuvan Council of Ministers. Among her responsibilities in these posts were public education and the development of science and culture. She also chaired the Tuvan branch of the Soviet-Mongolian Friendship Society, and was a delegate at the International Congress of Women.

Meanwhile, her husband Toka served as general-secretary of the Tuvan branch of the Soviet Communist Party, ruling the region until his death in 1973. The widowed Anchimaa added his surname to her own. Two sons and a daughter predeceased her.

Khertek Anchimaa-Toka, Tuvan and Soviet politician, was born in 1912. She died on November 4, 2008, aged 96