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Tajikistan
Historical Background
TAJIKISTAN, LITERALLY THE "LAND OF THE TAJIKS," has ancient cultural
roots. The people now known as the Tajiks are the Persian speakers
of Central Asia, some of whose ancestors inhabited Central Asia
(including present-day Afghanistan and western China) at the dawn
of history. Despite the long heritage of its indigenous peoples,
Tajikistan has existed as a state only since the Soviet Union
decreed its existence in 1924. The creation of modern Tajikistan
was part of the Soviet policy of giving the outward trappings
of political representation to minority nationalities in Central
Asia while simultaneously reorganizing or fragmenting communities
and political entities.
Of the five Central Asian states that declared independence
from the Soviet Union in 1991, Tajikistan is the smallest in area
and the third largest in population. Landlocked and mountainous,
the republic has some valuable natural resources, such as waterpower
and minerals, but arable land is scarce, the industrial base is
narrow, and the communications and transportation infrastructures
are poorly developed.
As was the case in other republics of the Soviet Union, nearly
seventy years of Soviet rule brought Tajikistan a combination
of modernization and repression. Although barometers of modernization
such as education, health care, and industrial development registered
substantial improvements over low starting points in this era,
the quality of the transformation in such areas was less impressive
than the quantity, with reforms benefiting Russian-speaking city
dwellers more than rural citizens who lacked fluency in Russian.
For all the modernization that occurred under Soviet rule, the
central government's policies limited Tajikistan to a role as
a predominantly agricultural producer of raw materials for industries
located elsewhere. Through the end of the Soviet era, Tajikistan
had one of the lowest standards of living of the Soviet republics.
Independence came to Tajikistan with the dissolution of the
Soviet Union in December 1991. The first few years after that
were a time of great hardship. Some of the new republic's problems--including
the breakdown of the old system of interdependent economic relationships
upon which the Soviet republics had relied, and the stress of
movement toward participation in the world market--were common
among the Soviet successor states. The pain of economic decline
was compounded in Tajikistan by a bloody and protracted civil
conflict over whether the country would perpetuate a system of
monopoly rule by a narrow elite like the one that ruled in the
Soviet era, or establish a reformist, more democratic regime.
The struggle peaked as an outright war in the second half of 1992,
and smaller-scale conflict continued into the mid-1990s. The victors
preserved a repressive system of rule, and the lingering effects
of the conflict contributed to the further worsening of living
conditions.
Data as of March 1996
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