Home – Home – Jornals – Humanitarian sciences in Siberia 2016 number

The goal of the present article is to study and throw light upon the activities of industrial enterprises and trade organizations of Soviet foreign colony in Tuva. With this goal in mind, the author used a systematic method to analyze the scarce publications of predecessors along with the new documentary and other sources. This allowed tracing the origin of industrial enterprises and trade organizations of Soviet colonists in Tuva (in all their specific manifestations and in synthesis of the general and the particular) and to define the main result of their activities. At the beginning of 1922, the Soviet citizens in Tuva established a Russian Self-Administering Workers’ Colony (RSWC). Living in a foreign environment and suffering from the lack of financial support from the USSR, the executive committee of the colony began its economic activities with the development of gold mining and creation of simple production workshops. At the early stage, these activities had a limited economic benefit: revenues from gold mining did not go to the budget of the colony and were not used for its development; the workshops were also unprofitable due to the lack of skilled workers, funds and technical facilities. The establishment of joint Soviet-Tuvan organization-Mining Department of Tuvan Bank- helped to make the gold mining cost effective. Industrial enterprises became the first business organizations of the RSWS to be transferred into the jurisdiction of the Tuvan People’s Republic. The first and the following steps of handicraft and trading organizations were more successful and economically feasible. The study undertaken in this article showed that while addressing the economic issues the Soviet colonists strengthened Tuva’s economy. These processes could have been be more successful had they not been hampered by the priority of political sphere over the economy.