Stalin was an imperialist. In Europe he used the war to add the Baltic states, eastern Poland and parts of Finland and Romania to his imperium. In Asia he annexed Tuva in 1944. It had previously been one of the world's most obscure and remote independent states. Before Han administrators were expelled in 1911 it had been part of the Qing Empire. To this day Chinese online "chat room nationalists" claim Tuva, as does Taiwan on its official maps of "the true China".  

Stalin was also a racist, whose prejudices designed most of the internal borders of the USSR. He divided the empire into nations that were "creators of culture" which deserved constituent republics (Georgians, Armenians, Ukrainians) and those that were merely "carriers of culture" that did not merit them (Chechens, Tatars, Yakuts). The 40,000 nomadic Tuvans were considered so primitive they were turned into a mere Autonomous District of the Soviet Russian republic, therefore Tuva was never legally a union republic of the USSR. This meant Tuvans did not have the constitutional right to secede in 1991. Yet between 1990 and 1992 there were waves of agitation in Kyzyl whipped up by the Tuvan National Front demanding "national exit". Hopes of copying Georgia or Estonia turned to rage when they were informed independence was not an option. Rioting ensued. Russian riot police were flown in from Novosibirsk to quell it. Out in the countryside Tuvan horsemen raided the villages of Russian colonists, setting fire to the collective farms. Slavs were raped and beaten up in the villages. So even if Tuva didn't leave Russia, the Russians who lived there began to pack their bags en masse as if it had. 

They never came back. In 1959 the autonomous district was 40 per cent ethnic Russian but today local experts estimate it is below 10 per cent. The more I wandered round Kyzyl the clearer it became there are fewer Russians than in Tashkent or Samarkand, even Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan. But the closer I looked the more Chinese characters I began to see: on fridges, cars, clothes, everything. It was these mandarin invaders that had terrified the Tuvans into not copying Chechnya in the 1990s and dreaming of independence today. "Better be part of a weak empire, than a strong one," murmured one former official. "The Chinese would swallow what Russia could never digest," sighed one canteen owner. "We are more frightened of the Chinese than the Russians," said just about everyone I met. 

Yet the Tuvans are also scared that Russia might collapse. They have nightmares about being swallowed up like the Uighurs in Chinese Xinjiang a few hundred kilometres to the south. They know Estonia and Moldova can be independent as the rise of the EU means there are no German, Romanian or Polish armies on the march. "But this is Asia," say the locals. The age of empires is not over here.

I looked for Chinese colonists in Kyzyl but there are none; they exist only in people's heads. I ate in cheap canteens with widows who looked like Brezhnev. I wandered the streets with a happy-go-lucky nationalist, twice jailed. I visited the semi-underground newspaper, which printed out blog posts onto cheap yellow paper, almost like the samizdat in the Soviet Union. I discussed the meaning of "Tuvaness" with a heavy-smoking throat singer in a baseball cap. But I still couldn't stop thinking about Moscow, or more accurately, the question that nagged at Moscow, and me. For four years the question had been simple. Would Putin or Medvedev be president in 2012? Now the question was cruder still. With the protest movement disintegrating, will Putin rule for life? Is he so strong, or Russia so weak, that he might die in the Kremlin? Will the decades ahead be the same old story, with him swapping roles with cardboard dauphins?