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Tajikistan
Ethnic Groups
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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