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Maimed Sense of Nationhood
As seen in the previous chapter the Central Asian Persian-speakers were deprived of an opportunity to develop the sense of national unity due to unfair delimitations and censuses undertaken by Soviet planners who favoured Uzbeks over Tajiks. Undoubtedly, the creation of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tajikistan was a victory for the Tajiks, but it maimed the sense of nationhood among them.
Nasrin Dadmehr believes, "Samarkand and Bukhara, the two capitals of Tajik culture, remained within Uzbekistan, forcing the Tajiks to forge a new identity without their historical cultural centers. These losses were a fundamental blow to the Tajiks’ nation-building process and deeply affected their political life. Tajik intellectuals, mostly centered in these two cities, remained in Uzbekistan." (Robert I. Rotberg, State Terror and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, p. 247).
Thus, a wrong conception emerged among Bolsheviks that mainly mountain dwellers constituted Tajiks. Numerous ‘scientific researches’ were fabricated in order to explain how Iranians of Central Asia were driven up from plains into the mountains by Turkic conquerors of the region. Those ‘researches’ were to justify the disproportionately mountainous terrain earmarked for the new Tajik republic, despite the fact that nobody could deny the existence of more Tajiks on the plains. "Tajiks [were] given an impossible piece of territory with a disparate population and [were] forced to make a nation out of it." (William O. Beeman, "The Struggle for Identity in Post-Soviet Tajikistan," Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA), III (1999). This approach inevitably undermined the Tajik sense of national sovereignty.
Nevertheless, Tajik nationalism in the early 20 th century was taking shape before it was strangled by Stalinist Sovietizers. Those keen to awaken Tajiks’ national sense mentioned in the previous chapter paid with their lives. Shirinsho Shotemur, the second secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee of Tajikistan was shot in 1937. Nusratullah Makhsum, the chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the party, was executed in the same year or in 1938. With Makhsum was condemned for bourgeois-nationalist tendencies, and of mistaken nationalist deviation Abdurrahim Hajibayev, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of Tajikistan. He was executed sometime between 1937 and 1938. Narzullah Bektash (Haidari), the head of the Literature Department of the Tajik branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences was shot in the 1930s too. Sadriddin Ayni was severely criticized for his pro-Tajik stance in 1930s, but survived thanks to his pro-revolutionary novels, as almost the sole survivor of the anti-nationalist pogroms of the 1930s.
Political Localism Established
The 93 percent-mountainous country was divided into Leninabad region in the north (later renamed Soghd), Dushanbe and thirteen districts of the ‘republican subordination’ in the centre, Gorno-Badakhshan (Kuhistan-i Badakhshan) autonomous province in the east, Kulab and Kurgan-teppa regions in the south-west (later unified as Khatlan province). In order to further curb the nationalist sense of the Tajik intelligentsia political power on all levels came to rest on the dominance of certain regional groups. "The control of political power became a serious issue of rivalry among different regions. The elite of Khujand held power from 1950s until the outbreak of civil war in 1992. In such a context, regionalism replaced nationalism." (Robert I. Rotberg, State Terror and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, p. 248).
Nasrin Dadmehr elaborates: "Regionalism not only affected nation-building, it undermined national sovereignty in Tajikistan. The political pre-eminence of Khujandis, tied as they were culturally, politically, and economically to Uzbekistan, opened the door to the pervasive influence of its bigger neighbour. That influence endured until the end of the Soviet period and became an important element in undermining stability in Tajikistan after independence."
Khojand – with its overwhelmingly Tajik population – had not been given back to Tajiks until 1929 and remained within the Uzbek SSR boundaries until the Tajik SSR was created. The reason for such an unwonted pro-Tajik decision of Bolsheviks was a serious shortage of Communist cadres they had faced in the autonomous republic. Therefore, it was deemed that the addition of Khojand would hasten the process of socialism in Tajikistan, since Khojand’s Communist Party had more members and was better organized than anywhere else in Tajikistan.
"At the time, the Party in Khojand had 1572 members, which would give a huge boost to the party’s membership in Tajikistan. It is still not entirely clear why these arguments were not accepted with regard to Samarkand, which could have increased Tajikistan’s staff of communists even more substantially." (Paul Bergne, The Birth of Tajikistan, pp. 109-110).
Hence, Khojand was selected as the locomotive of the Communist Tajikistan, simultaneously promoting political regionalism as an effective means to control from Moscow.
According to James Minahan, the author of Miniature Empires: A Historical Dictionary of the Newly Independent States, Tajikistan is the only former Soviet republic where regionalism developed under the cover of the Communist Party to the level of government policy. "For over a half century the Soviet government allowed power to be controlled by representatives of one area or region," writes Minahan. "The clan system was used for its political leverage to accumulate wealth and power for the leaders of its local region in the north at the expense of the rest of the republic. The northern clan leaders sustained a system called "feudal socialism," a system of nepotism and corruption." (James Minahan, Miniature Empires: A Historical Dictionary of the Newly Independent States p.260).
Measures to prevent the intelligentsia from forming a common conception of a Tajik nation allowed Moscow’s plan to bear fruits. A full-fledged political regionalism was institutionalised and exploited by Tajik localists; Leninabad oblast remained the power base of the leading clan of the republic until the break-up of the USSR.
Tajik regionalism developed its specific hierarchy throughout all levels of government, so that most of top positions belonged to representatives of a certain region. Its development stages will be discussed in the next chapter.
(to be continued)