Tajikistan - Central Asia - page 353

of the Amu-Darya (Oxus River), along with
their resident Tajik population, and later
seized parts of Badakhshan including, tem-
porarily, the Rushan and Shughnan regions.

Soviet Uzbekistan, this was the first official
Tajik state. In 1929 it was upgraded to a full
union republic (SSR), although (possibly in
reprisal for the basmachi revolt) Samar-
kand and Bukhara - where over 700,000
Tajiks still lived - remained in Uzbekistan.
As recently as 1989 the government of So-
viet Tajikistan was demanding the 'return'
of areas lost in this cultural amputation. To-
day, tensions with the modern government
of Uzbekistan over these cultural centres
remain.
The Bolsheviks never fully trusted the
Tajikistan SSR and during the 1930s almost
all Tajiks in positions of influence within
the government were replaced by stooges
from Moscow. Some industrialisation of
Tajikistan was undertaken following WWII
but the republic remained heavily reliant
on imports from the rest of the Union for
food and standard commodities, as would
become painfully apparent after the 1991
collapse of the Soviet trading system.
In the mid-1970s, an underground Is-
lamic Renaissance Party started gathering
popular support especially in the south
around Kurgan-Tyube (Kurgonteppa). This
region had been neglected by Dushanbe's
ruling communist elite, who were mainly
drawn from the prosperous northern city of
Leninabad (now Khojand). Two 1979 events
sent serious ripples through Tajik society.
In Iran, whose language is essentialy the
same as Tajik, the Shah was toppled by an
Islamic revolution. And the same year, the
Soviets began an invasion of Afghanistan,
much of it launched through Tajikistan.
The disparity between truth and propagan-
da became increasingly obvious as massive
aid flowed to Afghanistan while Tajikistan
suffered with the USSR's worst levels of ed-
ucation, poverty and infant mortality.

The Great Game & the Basmachi
As part of the Russian Empire's thrust
southwards, St Petersburg made the emir-
ate of Bukhara a vassal state in 1868, which
gave Russia effective control over what now
passes for northern and western Tajikistan.
But the Pamirs (today's eastern Tajikistan)
remained a no-man's-land, an anomaly that
led to a strategic duel between Russia and
British India that author Rudyard Kipling
was to immortalise as the 'Great Game'. It
was in the eastern Pamirs, after visiting
Murgab, Alichur and Rang-Kul, that Francis
Younghusband was thrown out of the upper
Wakhan by his tsarist counterpart, sparking
an international crisis. Russia backed up its
claims by building a string of forts across the
Pamirs, including at Murgab. Border treaties
of 1893 and 1895 finally defined Tajikistan's
current borders, leaving the Wakhan Corri-
dor as Afghanistan's bizarre cartographical
buffer between the two empires.
Following the Russian Revolution of 1917,
new provisional governments were estab-
lished in Central Asia and the Tajiks found
themselves first part of the Turkestan (1918-
24), then the Uzbekistan (1924-29) Soviet
Socialist Republics (SSRs), despite pushing
for an autonomous Islamic-oriented repub-
lic. The next year Muslim basmachi guer-
rillas (literally 'rebels') under the leadership
of Enver Pasha began a campaign to free
the region from Bolshevik rule. It took four
years for the Bolsheviks to crush this resist-
ance, and in the process entire villages were
razed. The surviving guerrillas melted away
into Afghanistan, from where they contin-
ued to make sporadic raids over the bor-
der. Much of the population also fled south
during the decade that followed to avoid a
series of reprisals, repressions and, later,
from forced movements that saw whole vil-
lages removed from the mountains (notably
around Garm) and moved to the Vakhsh Val-
ley to cultivate cotton plantations.

From Civil Unrest to Civil War
For years Moscow managed to hold the lid
on the pressure cooker of resentment along
with the supressed religious sentiments
and clan-based tensions that had existed for
centuries. But as the Soviet system started
unravelling, things exploded. The first seri-
ous disturbances were on 12 February 1990
when it was rumoured that Armenian refu-
gees were to be resettled in Dushanbe, a city
already short on housing. Riots, deaths and
the imposition of a state of emergency fol-
lowed. Several opposition parties emerged
as a result of the crackdown.

Soviet Statehood
In 1924, when the Soviet Border Commis-
sion set about redefining Central Asia, the
Tajiks got their own autonomous republic
(ASSR). Although initially only a satellite of