Khertek Amyrbitovna Anchimaa-Toka (1 January 1912[1] – 4 November 2008) was a Tuvan/Soviet politician who in 1940–44 was the Chairwoman of Little Khural of the Tuvan People's Republic, and the first non-hereditary female head of state. She was the wife of Salchak Toka, who was the republic's supreme leader from 1932 to 1973. Khertek Anchimaa was born in what is now Bay-Tagansky District of Tuva, near the present day settlement of Kyzyl-Dag. Months earlier the collapse of the Qing Dynasty had led to the end of the nominal Chinese rule and the establishment of the independent Tannu Uriankhai under Mongolian and Tuvan nobility. Anchimaa was born the third child in a family of peasant hunters. In the spring of 1918 a smallpox epidemic in the region claimed her father and one of her sisters, leaving her mother to care for Anchimaa and her four other siblings alone. To help make ends meet, the six-year-old Anchimaa was fostered out to a more prosperous branch of the family. A Russian protectorate was established over Tuva in 1914, however the region became a battleground in the Russian Civil War after 1917, where effective control over the territory and capital Belotsarsk changed between the Red Army and counter-revolutionary forces several times. However conservative forces in Tuva were defeated in 1920 and the People's Republic of Tannu Tuva was proclaimed on 17 August 1921. The new Soviet-backed government greatly increased education opportunities, and subsequently in a period where very few Tuvans, particularly women, were literate Anchimaa managed to learn to write and read in Mongolian language. At the age of 18, when the first national Tuvan alphabet was introduced, she was one of the first to learn it, and was subsequently recruited by the state to teach the language to others as a member of the Revolutionary Youth Union (Revsomol), the youth wing of the Tuvan People's Revolutionary Party (TNRP) and the functional equivalent to the CPSU's Komsomol. A year later, Anchimaa began working as a clerk and technical secretary for the Barun-Khemchiksky kozhuun, helping to oversee local economic production as well as continuing to work to eradicate illiteracy in the district. Her energy and success in these tasks brought her to the attention of the local party leadership. She was admitted to the TNRP and sent, among 70 others, to the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, a journey of some 5000 km over three weeks. 

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