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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
In creating the new Central Asian republics in the 1920s, the central
political leadership arbitrarily defined national identities, which until
that time had had little political importance. In the case of the Tajiks,
this meant not only differentiating them from the Uzbeks, with whom they
had much in common despite their different native languages, but also from
fellow Persian-speakers outside the Soviet Union. Although the labels "Tajik"
and "Uzbek" were not Soviet inventions, they had little meaning
to many of the people to whom they were suddenly applied. This
circumstance led to much confusion when people were required to identify
themselves by one of these two national designations.
The Tajiks' language, which they traditionally had called Persian
(Farsi), was relabeled Tajik. Major Persian-language writers were called
Tajiks, even if they had not used that term to describe themselves and had
not lived in Central Asia. Tajik, like the other Central Asian languages,
underwent a two-stage alphabet reform by order of the Soviet regime.
First, the Arabic alphabet was abandoned in 1929 in favor of the Latin.
Then, in 1940 Moscow declared Cyrillic the official alphabet of the Tajik
language.
Meanwhile, during the 1930s and 1940s Tajik culture was redefined and
Sovietized to suit the political requirements of the central government of
Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin. In this period, the accusation of "bourgeois
nationalism" could destroy a member of the intelligentsia or a
political figure. In the renewed wave of Stalinist repression after World
War II, Tajik intellectuals were purged for being nationalists, a loosely
defined offense that could be applied to any form of opposition to central
government policies.
By the time Tajikistan became an independent republic in 1991, its
multiethnic population included an ethnic majority of Tajiks and an even
larger religious majority of Muslims (see table 4, Appendix). Despite
Soviet claims that ethnic and religious loyalties had diminished sharply
and were bound for extinction, there were strong indications in the late
1980s and early 1990s that ethnic and religious identities remained
essentially intact. Indeed, those factors began to exert greater influence
as Soviet controls weakened and people sought alternative ideologies.
According to the latest census, taken in 1989, Tajikistan had a
population of 5,092,603, of whom Tajiks constituted about 3.17 million, or
62.3 percent. The accuracy of subsequent population estimates suffers from
the region's large-scale population movement. In 1989 about three-quarters
of all Tajiks in the Soviet Union lived in Tajikistan. Of the remaining 1
million Tajiks, about 933,000 lived in neighboring Uzbekistan. Much
smaller Tajik populations lived in Afghanistan and China. The other major
nationalities living in Tajikistan were Uzbeks, 23.5 percent (1,197,841);
Russians, 7.6 percent (388,481); Volga Tatars, 1.4 percent (72,228); and
Kyrgyz, 1.3 percent (63,832). In order of size, the remaining 3.9 percent
included populations of Ukrainians, Germans, Turkmen, Koreans, Jews
(including those of European ancestry and "Bukhoran Jews," whose
ancestors had lived in Central Asia for centuries), Belorussians, Crimean
Tatars, and Armenians.
Although ethnically classified with the Tajiks in the Soviet era,
several Eastern Iranian peoples who had not been assimilated over the
centuries by their Persian- or Turkic-speaking neighbors preserved
distinct identities. These groups were the Yaghnobs and seven Pamiri
peoples. At the end of the Soviet era, the Dushanbe government allowed
some leeway for education, broadcasting, and publication in the Pamiri
languages. However, these limited reforms were more than outweighed by the
repression that the victors in the civil war directed against the Pamiris
in 1992 on the grounds that they tended to support political reform.
In the last decade of Soviet power, Tajiks became a larger proportion
of the republic's total population. The 62.3 percent they constituted in
the 1989 census was an increase from their 58.8 percent proportion in the
1979 census. This trend seemed likely to continue into the late 1990s,
barring such countervailing factors as civil war and emigration, because
Tajiks accounted for 70 percent of the republic's natural population
increase in 1989.
For much of the Soviet era, the central government used inducements
such as scholarships and cash bonuses, as well as outright reassignment,
to increase the settlement of Russian workers in Tajikistan. In the 1920s
and 1930s, the small number of Tajikistanis with industrial and
professional skills prompted the central authorities to relocate
individuals with special expertise to Tajikistan, and Moscow sent many
other people as political prisoners. By 1940 roughly half of the
republic's industrial work force belonged to nonindigenous nationalities;
most of these people were Russian. The engineering profession had a
particularly large proportion of Russians and other non-Central Asians.
Non-Central Asians settled in Tajikistan during World War II as industries
and their workers were shifted east of the Ural Mountains to prevent their
capture by the German army. Additional Russians and other Europeans went
to Tajikistan in this period as war refugees or political deportees. As a
result, between 1926 and 1959 the proportion of Russians among
Tajikistan's population grew from less than 1 percent to 13 percent.
During the same period, the proportion of Tajiks dropped from 80 percent
to about 50 percent. This figure fell especially fast during the
agricultural collectivization of the 1930s.
Because of the prominence of Russians and other non-Tajiks in such
urban activities as government and industry, Dushanbe, the capital, became
a predominantly non-Tajik city. According to the 1989 census, Tajiks
constituted 39.1 percent, Russians 32.4 percent, Uzbeks 10 percent, Tatars
4.1 percent, and Ukrainians 3.5 percent of Dushanbe's population of about
602,000. Although educated, urban Tajiks were likely to speak Russian
well, few Russians living in Dushanbe spoke Tajik or felt a need to do so.
This situation caused increasing resentment among Tajiks in the late 1980s
and early 1990s.
By the end of the Soviet era, many educated Tajiks were criticizing
what they perceived as the continued privileged position of Russians in
society. Even after decades of improved education and indoctrination of
younger generations of Tajiks, Russians and other nonindigenous peoples
still occupied a disproportionate number of top positions in the
republic's communist party (see Political Parties, this ch.). Tajiks also
saw Russians perpetuating their dominance by hiring practices biased
against Tajiks. By the end of the Soviet era, Tajiks often were a small
minority in the administration of the republic's main industrial
enterprises, including the chemical plants, the cotton textile industry,
and large construction projects (see Labor, this ch.).
The preindependence government of Tajikistan made some provision for
the distinctive needs of minority nationalities living within the
republic's borders. It provided education, mass media, and cultural
offerings in Russian (see Education; The Media, this ch.). In 1988 state
radio began broadcasting in German, Kyrgyz, and Crimean Tatar. There were
several Uzbek-language bookstores in the republic. Late in the Soviet era,
Dushanbe had cultural centers for Uzbeks, Ukrainians, and members of other
nationalities as well as restaurants that provided ethnic foods for
Uzbeks, Tatars, Koreans, and Germans.
Data as of March 1996
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