Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR 9781501771033

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Note on Spelling and Transliteration
Acronyms and Abbreviations
Introduction: The Long Road to Violence
1. The Periphery before Perestroika
2. Moscow Promotes Perestroika
3. The Winds of Perestroika Drift South
4. 1989: The Center Cannot Hold
5. The Harsh Reckoning of February 1990
6. The “Calm” before the Storm: March 1990–July 1991
7. Slouching towards Independence
8. The Short Road to War
Conclusion: War
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

MOSCOW’S HEAVY SHADOW

MOSCOW’S HEAVY SHADOW

T H E V I O L E N T CO L L A P S E O F T H E U SS R

I saac M c K ean S carborough

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS Ithaca and London

​Copyright © 2023 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress​.­cornell​.­edu. First published 2023 by Cornell University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Scarborough, Isaac McKean, author. Title: Moscow’s heavy shadow : the violent collapse of the   USSR / Isaac McKean Scarborough. Description: Ithaca [New York] : Cornell University Press,   2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022049339 (print) | LCCN   2022049340 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501771026 (hardcover) |   ISBN 9781501771033 (pdf ) | ISBN 9781501771040 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Perestroĭka—­Tajikistan. | Tajikistan—  ­History. | Tajikistan—­Social conditions. | Soviet   Union—­History—1985–1991. | Soviet Union—  ­Economic policy—1986–1991. | Soviet Union—  ­Politics and government—1985–1991. Classification: LCC DK928.86 .S33 2023 (print) |   LCC DK928.86 (ebook) | DDC 958.608/5—­dc23/eng/  20221028 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2022049339 LC ebook rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov  /­ 2022049340 Epigraph source is the “Poem Written in 1991, When the Soviet Union was Disintegrating” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Used with permission from Le Guin’s Estate / Ginger Clark Literary Plc. Jacket image: Komil Yodgor, Prizrak (Ghost), 1989. Used with permission of the artist.

For she who would be queen

S​ o now I’ll turn right round and unburden an embittered mind that would rejoice to rejoice in the second Revolution in Rus­sia but c­ an’t, b­ ecause it has got old and wise and mean and womanly and says: So. The men having spent seventy years in the name of something killing men, ­women, and ­children, torturing, ­running slave camps, telling lies and making profits, have now de­cided that that something w ­ asn’t the right one, so ­they’ll do something ­else the same way. Seventy years for nothing. And the dream that came before the betrayal, the justice glimpsed before the murders, the truth that shone before the lies, all that is thrown away. It d­ idn’t m ­ atter anyway ­because all that ­matters is who has the sayso. . . . —­Ursula K. Le Guin, “Poem Written in 1991, When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating”

C o n te n ts

Preface  ix Note on Spelling and Transliteration  xiii Acronyms and Abbreviations  xv

Introduction: The Long Road to Vio­lence

1

1. The Periphery before Perestroika

14

2. Moscow Promotes Perestroika

31

3. The Winds of Perestroika Drift South

46

4. 1989: The Center Cannot Hold

61

5. The Harsh Reckoning of February 1990 82 6. The “Calm” before the Storm: March 1990–­July 1991

102

7. Slouching ­towards In­de­pen­dence

122

8. The Short Road to War

139

Conclusion: War

158

Notes  175 Bibliography  237 Index  263

P r e face

As I completed this book’s final chapters in ­ ebruary 2022, the Rus­sian Federation launched a full-­scale invasion of Ukraine. F This took the world by surprise: an anachronistic blitzkrieg of tanks and armored columns moving across borders and mowing down civilians in violation of both the accepted norms of be­hav­ior in the globalized twenty-­first ­century and the supposedly set post-­Soviet order. It took me by surprise: I had spent the months prior repeatedly telling my students that no Rus­sian government would be so foolhardy as to attempt any such assault. I, like much of the world, was wrong and flabbergasted when the invasion occurred. But we should not have been. This was not only ­because the CIA had been warning of this very outcome for months (although it had been), or ­because Ukraine had already been at war with Rus­sia over the Donbass region since 2014 (although it had also been), but also ­because the invasion of Ukraine was simply the most recent bloody chapter of the violent collapse of the USSR. Although its immediate c­ auses may have been more directly related to the expansion of NATO in recent de­cades and the Rus­sian president’s own motivations (which remain opaque), the under­lying reasons for the war trace back to the collapse of the USSR, the somewhat arbitrary national divisions that resulted, and an ongoing ambiguity about the collapse’s consequences. This has generally been overlooked in the West, but it has been on the minds and the lips of ­those more directly involved in the conflict. In a piece of incredible and subversive reporting, the Rus­sian journalists Aleksandr Chernykh and Anatoly Zhdanov visited the Russian-­occupied city of Mariupol in late April 2022, two months into the ravages of invasion. They w ­ ere accompanied by a soldier from the army of the Donetsk P ­ eople’s Republic (DNR), the breakaway region of eastern Ukraine that, along with the neighboring Luhansk ­People’s Republic (LNR), had declared its in­de­pen­dence from Ukraine in 2014. Driving through the territory recently occupied by the Rus­sian Federation and the DNR in southern Ukraine, the journalists began taking pictures of abandoned ­houses and burned-­out factories. Their companion from the DNR army laughed at them: “That’s not yet the war,” he said, “That’s history. As soon as ix

x P r e fa c e

the USSR collapsed, every­thing ­here began to shut down and disintegrate. And you ask why this all started.”1 This soldier went to war, or was convinced to go to war, in 2014 ­because when he looked around, all he could see was disintegration. For him, like many ­others, the collapse of the USSR had led to an unacceptable set of outcomes and a loss of livelihoods, in some places more immediately than in ­others, that ultimately led to vio­lence as the only plausible or remaining action. Since 1991, ­those individuals, parties, armies, and states unhappy with the outcomes of the Soviet collapse have often turned to vio­lence to try to reset the scales: to achieve a post-­Soviet balance of power more attuned to their own interests. In the West, this has been overlooked, as I have tried to argue in this book, ­because of the general assumption that the worst (nuclear war) had been avoided and the idea that ultimately the post-­Soviet sphere was moving ­toward Western norms of governance and stability. Any vio­lence along the way was an exception to the rule—­except that when the sheer number of ­these exceptions begins to be listed, the supposed rule begins to look quite shaky. A partial list of conflict zones would include Georgia, Chechnya, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-­Karabakh, Osh, Ferghana, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and now Donbass and Ukraine. In recent years the scale of vio­lence and its ongoing nature have become apparent, with Azerbaijan reopening its war with Armenia in late 2020 and successfully resetting the scales of post-­ Soviet territorial settlement in its f­avor. The current war in Ukraine should dispel any further doubts: we thought the violent collapse of the USSR was over, but we w ­ ere wrong: it is very much ongoing. This book tells the story of Tajikistan’s experience of the violent collapse of the USSR. It was begun, however, in more peaceful years and represents the conclusion of a long path started a de­cade ago in Dushanbe. Along this path, it was guided and supported by innumerable individuals, all of whom deserve greater thanks than I can h ­ ere give: help without which this story could not have been told. Conversations with Abdughani Mamadazimov motivated this proj­ect and provided it with an initial form; this form was then ­shaped into a research proj­ect and concrete proposal with the invaluable aid of Michael Kemper. Vladislav Zubok supported the proj­ect at the London School of Economics and Po­liti­cal Science (LSE), where it became the basis for my PhD thesis, which Professor Zubok supervised and never tired of correcting, promoting, and guiding to completion, much to its final benefit. Research for this book was conducted in Moscow, London, Texas, Amsterdam, and, more than anywhere ­else, Dushanbe. I am deeply grateful to the archivists and librarians working on the many collections I have consulted, not

P r e f a c e

xi

all of whom I can list ­here. I am, however, particularly thankful to RGASPI’s Mikhail Vladimirovich for his insightful suggestion to consult Nikolai Ryzhkov’s files. In Dushanbe, my thanks go to Usmon Usmonov at the National Library’s periodical section for his constant help and friendship, to Api Sayora at the Reading Room of the Library of the Tajik Acad­emy of Sciences for this institution’s especially congenial atmosphere, and to Khusrav at the State Archive of the Republic of Tajikistan, who I hope ­will one day achieve his dream of musical stardom. In Tajikistan, Matlubakhon Jabborova was an excellent research assistant. Funding for this research was generously provided by the US State Department’s Title VIII Program, the Economic History Society, the Institute for Humane Studies, the LSE Postgraduate Travel Fund, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Following the completion of research, this book was drafted u ­ nder the auspices of three institutions, all of which provided support and a welcome academic home. The LSE was always a quiet hub amongst the bustle of central London, and I am especially grateful for the support of the administrative staff in the Department of International History, among them Demetra Frini and Nayna Bhatti. At Liverpool John Moores University, the airy hallways of the John Foster Building ­were a ­g reat place to spend one’s days, as was the Wellcome Trust–­funded “Growing Old in the Soviet Union” proj­ect, on which I was employed. I am thankful to the proj­ect’s principal investigator, Susan Grant, for her support and advice over the years. The manuscript was completed at Leiden University, where I have been lucky enough to work in the collegial environment of the Institute for History. As this manuscript developed, chapters and sections ­were read by Artemy Kalinovsky and Vladislav Zubok, for whose comments I am particularly grateful. Over the many years of this book’s germination, moreover, innumerable individuals have influenced it through their comments, thoughts, seemingly unrelated conversations, and off hand remarks. In no par­tic­u­lar order and in no way exclusively, I wish to offer my thanks to Shokhrat Kadyrov, Olga Brusina, Tohir Kalandarov, Max Skjonsberg, Aleksandra Brokman, Botakoz Kassymbekova, Klaus Richter, Jonathan Gumz, Guzel Maitdinova, Aeron O’Connor, Karolina Kluczewska, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Anita Prazmowska, Zikriyo Akrami, Nurali Davlat, Shodiboi Jabborov, Bahrom Rahmatjonov, Zarinakhon Rahmatulloeva, Madeleine Reeves, Beatrice Penati, Alexander Morrison, Sergei Abashin, Timothy O’Connor, and Riccardo Mario Cucciolla. At Cornell University Press, this book benefited greatly from the sure guidance of Jim Lance and Clare Jones, who have shepherded it through the many twists and turns of the publishing pro­cess. Ben Nelson provided the book’s excellent maps. More than anyone ­else, however, I am forever grateful to my wife,

xi i P r e fa c e

Malika Bahovadinova, who has never tired of commenting on, critiquing, and helping to improve this manuscript. If this book manages to say something valuable, this is to her credit alone. In closing, it needs to be said that as a work about modern Tajikistan, this book could never have been written without the many individuals who spoke to me about their lives over the years in Tajikistan, from strangers in the streets of Dushanbe to cotton farmers in Qurghonteppa, from the po­liti­cal interviewees cited in this book to the booksellers, shop­keep­ers, taxi ­drivers, barbers, art gallery o ­ wners, bankers, NGO workers, UN officials, bread bakers, and many ­others with whom I conversed. I would not have been able to write this book without them, or without the neighbors and friends I came to know and cherish in the country. Tajikistan is a wonderful place: verdant and green and full of some of the most charming and charismatic ­people I have ever met. It has not, however, had the easiest of de­cades in the years since the collapse of the USSR, with social convulsion or perturbation seemingly never far beyond the horizon. For all of ­those who informed my research, and for every­one in the country, I do so very hope—­nasip boshad—­that the ­future may be that much easier. Amsterdam, May 2022

N ote o n S p e l l i n g a n d  Tr a nsl i te r ati o n

This book contains many names and foreign words transliterated from Rus­sian and Tajik, both of which are written in Cyrillic characters. In the case of Rus­sian words and names, the standard US Library of Congress transliteration scheme is used, with the exception of proper names with established En­glish spellings (for example “Yeltsin” in place of “El’tsin”). For Tajik, which lacks an agreed-­upon standard for transliteration into Latin characters, a slightly modified version of the Library of Congress scheme has been chosen to balance between the phonetics of the language and ease of reading in En­glish. For t­hose characters in Tajik not covered by the Library of Congress standard for Rus­sian, the following ­table has been employed: CYRILLIC

LATIN

ғ ӣ қ ӯ ҳ ҷ

gh y q u h j

ъ

“

The spellings of toponyms and proper names have also changed extensively in Tajikistan since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. For example, the southern Tajik city of Kulyab has become Kulob, and many politicians and o ­ thers have dropped the Soviet -ov ending from their last names (“Usmonov,” for example, becoming “Usmon”). ­These changes represent a po­liti­cal choice in the country, but rather than take a stance on the “proper” spelling of any name or toponym, this book instead uses the place and proper names in the form and spelling employed by individuals and government bodies during the period of study itself. This avoids the historical anachronism of applying modern names to historical cities or applying po­liti­cal lenses from ­today to the xiii

xiv

N ot e o n Sp e l l i n g a n d T r a nsl i t e r at i o n

spelling of historical personal names. For ­these reasons, the city in the south of Tajikistan is consistently spelled “Kulyab” in this work, and names are listed as per their con­temporary, rather than ­later, spellings and pronunciations. Where multiple versions of one name are contemporaneously used, such as in the case of the opposition politician Tohir Abdujabbor, who during the 1980s interchangeably signed his last name “Abdujabbor,” “Abdujabborov,” and “Abdudzhabborov,” the most common usage has been chosen as the standard. Specialist readers may also note an apparent mixing of Rus­sian and Tajik spelling norms in many names, such that “Kahhor Mahkamov,” for example, is rendered with the letter “h” replacing what is e­ ither “х” in the Rus­sian spelling of the name or “ҳ” in the Tajik equivalent, but with “k” replacing the “к/қ” ambiguity. While spellings like this are not in accordance with “proper” transliteration as per e­ ither Rus­sian or Tajik norms, they represent the a­ ctual pronunciation of names in late Soviet Tajikistan, which in practice mixed both.

A cr o n yms a n d A b b r e vi ati o ns

2RR Archive of The Second Rus­sian Revolution, BBC Documentary AGF Archive of the Gorbachev Foundation AvtoVAZ Volga Automobile Factory CC CPSU Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union CIA Central Intelligence Agency of the United States CIS Commonwealth of In­de­pen­dent States CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPT Communist Party of Tajikistan DPT Demo­cratic Party of Tajikistan GAKFD RT State Archive of Movie and Photo­g raph Documents of the Republic of Tajikistan GARF State Archive of the Rus­sian Federation GBAO Gorno-­Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast GDP Gross Domestic Product Genprokuratura General Prosecutor’s Office Glavlit Central Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in Publication GNP Gross National Product Gosagroprom State Agricultural-­Industrial Committee Goskomstat State Statistics Committee Goskomtrud State ­Labor Committee Goskomtsen State Price Committee Gosplan State Planning Committee Gospriemka State Approval Standards Gossnab State Provisioning Committee Goszakaz State ­Orders IEiOPP Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production IISH International Institute of Social History IMF International Monetary Fund xv

xvi Acr o n ym s

a n d A b b r e v i at i o ns

IRPT Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan KGB Committee for State Security Khozraschet Self-­Financing KNB Committee for National Security Kolkhoz Collective Farm MIA Ministry of Internal Affairs Minsredmash Ministry of Medium Engineering NIP National Income Produced NIU National Income Used NMP National Material Product NPO Scientific-­Productive Association Orgbiuro Orga­nizational Bureau of the CC CPSU PA IPI KPT Party Archive of the Institute of Po­liti­cal Research of the Communist Party of Tajikistan Politburo Po­liti­cal Bureau of the CC CPSU, its highest body RGAE Rus­sian State Archive of the Economy RGANI Rus­sian State Archive of Con­temporary History RGASPI Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History RSFSR Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic SADUM Religious Administration of Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan SOFE System of Optimally Functioning Socialist Economy SOPS Council for the Study of Productive Powers of the USSR’s Gosplan Sovkhoz State Farm Tajik SSR Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic TsEMI Central Mathematical Economics Institute TsGART Central State Archive of the Republic of Tajikistan TsSU Central Statistical Administration Uralmash Urals Machinery Factory USSR Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

K

SE

A

TURKMEN S.S.R.

Ashkhabad

Baku

CASPIAN SEA

Map of the USSR. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

AZERBAIJAN S.S.R.

Yerevan

Tblisi

GEORGIAN S.S.R.

Dushanbe

Tashkent

UZBEK S.S.R.

Frunze

TAJIK S.S.R.

KIRGIZ S.S.R.

KAZAKH S.S.R.

O C E A N

0

0 500

1000

500

UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (USSR)

A R C T I C

RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC BELORUSSIAN S.S.R.

UKRAINIAN S.S.R. MOLDOVAN S.S.R.

Kiev

Minsk

Moscow

ESTONIAN S.S.R. LATVIAN S.S.R. LITHUANIAN S.S.R.

Talinn Riga

ARMENIAN S.S.R.

AC

Chishinau

BL

IC LT

Vilnius

BA

N

A

SE

1000 mi 1500 km

SEA OF JAPAN

SEA OF OKHOTSK

ZAR

Ura-Tyube

Leninabad

50

0

Map of Tajikistan. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

30

0

Pyanj

Kulyab

100 km

60 mi

r Sy

rya Da

Gharm

Y M

TA

IN

S

AFGHANISTAN

TA J I K I S TA N

ALA

N OU

Isfara

Y A VA L L E GAN

Asht

Kairakum Reservoir

FER

Nurek Reservoir

Kurgan-Tyube

Danghara

Nurek

Kolkhozobad

Gissar

Vakhdat

AN RANGE

Zarafshon

TA N R A N G E

Dushanbe

AFSH

Aini

TURKES

Kofarnihon

Tursunzoda

Penjikent

UZBEKISTAN

KAZAKHSTAN

Vakh sh

r mi Pa

Khorog

PA

M

IR

M

O

T UN

AI

ho Murg b

Murgap

PAKISTAN

NS

KYRGYZSTAN

CHINA

N

0 0

1.5 km

N

am ay e Str

Lenin Avenue

et

Ha zS

t tree iS roz he

Karl Marx Street

R iv

Red Partisans’

b Varzo

er

Avenue

Shahidon Square

Street

Putovsky

1 mi 1

H ar Om

Karamov Street

.5 .5

l Street Komsomo Street Communist

Shev

Ch ap a

Opera Theater

ev

keno

Str ee

t

t Stree

e venu da A Prav

Map of Dushanbe. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

Aini Street

Av en

Lakhuti Street

Lenin (Ozody) Square

Victory V ictory P ar k Park

ue

of

Pe op les ’F rie

nd

Chekhov Street

sh

ip

Introduction The Long Road to Vio­lence

How terrible it is that the world suffers such, That friend is pulled apart from friend, For days we ­were as close as to touch, A hundred offenses tear us apart in the end —­Unattributed “folk poem” (she”ri khalqy)

Death came for Qadriddin Aslonov in December 1992. It came as death does in war—­suddenly but inevitably, inexorably slow but over in a moment. Held captive for five weeks on a collective farm near the town of Pyanj on the Tajik-­Afghan border, Aslonov fell victim to the miasma of vio­lence and civil war that had engulfed Tajikistan over the previous six months. Appointed acting governor of Tajikistan’s southern Kurgan-­ Tyube region in October, Aslonov had been the representative of Tajikistan’s central government in a region over which it increasingly had l­ittle control. On October 29 he set out for Pyanj to meet with Jahonkhon Rizoev, acting governor of the breakaway southern region of Kulyab. Neither Rizoev nor Aslonov made it to their planned meeting. Rizoev was murdered by a rival for power, Sangak Safarov, on October 28, and Aslonov was captured by Faizali Saidov, one of Safarov’s supporters, on his way to Pyanj. Never allowed to leave his captivity on the collective farm, he was given the chance to call home and speak with his wife and ­children in the first days of December. Thereafter he was shot.1 In contrast to many who died in Tajikistan in the summer and fall of 1992, Aslonov was no stranger to the conflict that led to his death; his own actions as a politician had helped, however inadvertently, to bring Tajikistan to this juncture. During the quiet Soviet years of the 1980s, he had been largely unknown outside of the higher echelons of the Communist Party of Tajikistan 1

2 I N TROD U CTIO N

(CPT), where he had the reputation of an effective if unassuming party man­ ag­er. A handsome man in his early forties, he was, in the words of his contemporaries, “far from politics and deficient in ­matters of state administration.”2 Yet in November 1990 Aslonov had been elevated to the position of chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR when the previous chairman, Kahhor Mahkamov, ascended to the newly minted presidency of the republic. Mahkamov was also the first secretary of the CPT, and Aslonov, his deputy secretary, was meant to support him in the Supreme Soviet. He quietly did so u ­ ntil September 1991, when Mahkamov was suddenly forced to resign in the face of strident protests and Aslonov found himself, against all expectations, the acting president of Tajikistan. U ­ nder pressure from all sides, Aslonov first bowed to the demands of the anti-­Soviet opposition, declaring Tajikistan an in­de­pen­dent republic and passing a temporary ban on the Communist Party. As counterprotests r­ ose from t­ hose in f­avor of retaining the old order, however, he folded, resigning his position and retiring from politics.3 Unexpectedly returning in October 1992, Aslonov traveled to Kurgan-­Tyube and l­ater Pyanj, knowing full well the danger he faced in what was then the center of the Tajik Civil War.4 Perhaps ­there seemed no other choice to take—­both Aslonov’s po­liti­cal stature and the calm and quiet world of Soviet Tajikistan he had known before 1990 had disintegrated, leaving ­little in its stead. Aslonov was hardly alone in watching his world collapse, his job become intolerable, and his life and the lives of ­those around him being snatched away. To one degree or another and in one form or another, this was the fate of millions in Tajikistan during and a­ fter the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet po­liti­cal order crumbled during the last few years of the USSR, the citizens of Tajikistan watched in confusion, overwhelmingly disagreeing with the need for radical change, growing bewildered with the justifications promulgated by Moscow, and facing a fundamental downturn in their standard of living. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs and livelihoods in 1989–1992 as the economy took a nosedive and former guarantees of employment, salaries, and social support vanished. Moscow’s previous economic coordination and po­ liti­cal backing waned, but as its shadow over Tajikistani society lightened, many ­people found the light of day harsh and uncompromising; o ­ thers continued to yearn for the shade of Rus­sia’s heavy presence. With nearly all social expectations evaporating, some Tajikistani citizens tried to continue working, sticking to routines and jobs even as protests turned ugly, while o ­ thers joined the protests, riots, and, by May 1992, the warring camps fighting a bloody civil war. Estimates continue to vary, but at least twenty to twenty-­five thousand ­people w ­ ere killed during the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997), the vast majority during the first six months of the conflict (May–­December 1992).5 Nearly seven

T H E LO N G ROAD TO VIOLE N CE

3

hundred thousand p­ eople ­were displaced, becoming refugees in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, as well as in its other major cities and in neighboring countries.6 In part, this book is meant to tell Aslonov’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands who experienced similar fates. Rather than the story of their deaths, however, it is the story of how and why collapse and death arrived; it is not the story of vio­lence, which is often told, but the prehistory of vio­lence, which can easily be forgotten. That Aslonov was executed in an outlying collective farm near Pyanj in December 1992 was neither inevitable nor random, but rather the consequence of the ways in which the USSR reformed, collapsed, and descended into chaos in southern Tajikistan. Before 1985, this would have been inconceivable: Tajikistan was as quiet and stable a corner of the USSR as could be found, f­ ree of protest, unrest, or even significant po­liti­ cal initiative. Understanding the economic conditions and po­liti­cal environment that predated the vio­lence on display in 1992 requires moving backwards in time, to the point at which the USSR began to change with the initiation of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) reforms in the mid-1980s. This book shows how ­these reforms to the Soviet Union’s economic and po­liti­cal system undermined Tajikistan’s previous stability, enervated a new class of populist politicians, and led to the outbreak of civil war in May 1992. It may be easy to think of Tajikistan, and its thousands of Aslonovs, as l­ ittle more than outliers, the extreme and violent end of a spectrum of perestroika-­ era and post-­Soviet outcomes scattered across the detritus of the USSR. Tajikistan is far away, even from Moscow, and certainly from Amer­i­ca or Eu­rope; Aslonov, Mahkamov, Safarov, and other Tajikistani politicians and combatants in the Tajik Civil War have names, lives, and experiences that can seem peripheral and hard to follow. It would be easy to write off Tajikistan as an unrepresentative example of Soviet collapse and post-­Soviet trajectory. Yet it would be fundamentally wrong to do so. The violent collapse of the USSR in Tajikistan has much to show about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a w ­ hole, and even about social disorder elsewhere in the world. Notwithstanding Western triumphalism over the end to the Cold War and the impending collapse of the USSR, the world watched in worry as the Soviet empire crumbled. The Soviet Union had the second most power­f ul military in the world: its arsenals ­were vast and spread across Eurasia, from Belarus to Kazakhstan and further east. Even as Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985, attempted to reform the Soviet economy, oversaw the collapse of that economy, and largely single-­handedly surrendered the Cold War to the West, the

4 I N TROD U CTIO N

Soviet military had remained unified and secure. Only in the fall of 1991 did this sacrosanct institution of order also begin to crack, pulled apart by the competing forces of republican in­de­pen­dence and central financial bankruptcy. In Moscow, neither Gorbachev, president of the USSR, nor Boris Yeltsin, president of the Rus­sian Federated Republic, had funds to support the ­whole of the military, while their po­liti­cal rivalry for power made many officers feel like pawns. In the fifteen Soviet republics, the fall of 1991 was a time of po­liti­cal reassessment, with the former support of the central Soviet government, now broke and toothless, replaced with local pop­u­lism and rule by fiat. Military assets increasingly began to look impor­tant to local politicians hoping to hold and retain power. What most worried the world—­and most immediately Western leaders, such as President George H. W. Bush in Washington—­was the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.7 If the USSR collapsed, it was unclear what would happen to its unified armed forces; if the armed forces broke up, it was unclear what would happen to the nuclear arms located in Rus­sia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The United States had long been committed to “nuclear non-­ proliferation” in an attempt to retain its nuclear hegemony through limitations on other nuclear states, and it had ­little desire for the sudden arrival of three or more new nuclear-­armed powers.8 As the Soviet Union came to an end in December 1991 and over the coming years, the United States worked overtime, and quite successfully, to prevent the spread of uncontrolled nuclear weapons. Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus all renounced the nuclear weapons they inherited, and the United States worked with Rus­sia, now enthroned as the single nuclear successor to the USSR, to destroy or remove all of the nuclear arms from elsewhere in the former USSR. The possibility of “rogue states” had been avoided; the United States and the West could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing the worst had been avoided.9 And yet as Washington slept soundly, blood flowed across the former USSR. Lost in the single-­minded focus on nuclear armaments had been the banal vastness of the a­ ctual Soviet military and its hardware.10 No military is simply missiles, rockets, or silos; much of any army, navy, or air force is much simpler: tanks, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, boats, r­ ifles, bullets, and soldiers and officers. This equipment makes up most of any military and constitutes the central ele­ment of any state’s capacity to produce vio­lence. Throughout the twentieth ­century, the majority of causalities in war have not been victims of rockets, but t­ hose killed by small arms; not t­ hose facing the scream of gravity’s rainbow, but ­those mundanely cut down in the eyesight of man.11 The Soviet military was no exception. As the USSR crumbled, so did its military, with assets as large as air forces and as small as boxes of bul-

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lets becoming scattered across its successor states. Some republics ­were more successful than o ­ thers in fighting for and acquiring t­ hese assets, while o ­ thers made l­ittle attempt to capture what might have formed the basis for a new republican military. As the arms dispersed unequally, however, so did the vio­ lence: conflicts predating the collapse in Georgia, Nagorno-­Karabakh, and Ossetia grew worse, and new strug­gles in Chechnya, Transnistria, and Tajikistan became bloody. Across the former USSR or­ga­nized crime exploded, as did daily vio­lence and murder, as the availability of arms and the emptiness of wallets (and store shelves) both did their part. By 1993 Yeltsin had shelled the Rus­sian parliament, Tajikistan was fully engulfed in a civil war, and Chechnya was about to fight and win its first war of in­de­pen­dence from Rus­sia. For t­hose who lived through the 1990s in the former USSR, this is not a surprising story. It is instead the lives that they lived, and an experience that they can, in one shape and degree or another, recognize. ­There is good reason why Rus­sians ­today refer to that de­cade as the “wild 1990s” (likhie 90-­e), and publications from across the former Soviet space attest to the chaos, vio­ lence, and ­simple difficulties of the years following the collapse of the USSR.12 For t­ hose in the West, however, it came as a surprise that the end of communism did not herald the social and economic renewal that had been promised. Of course, the vio­lence and absolute depravity of the collapse was easy to ignore or write off as the unavoidable tailwinds of socialism. The vari­ous wars that occurred in the post-­Soviet space in the early 1990s ­were disparate and peripheral; Moscow was (mostly) not aflame, the nuclear armaments had been secured, and ­things could have been worse, such as in Yugo­slavia. Po­liti­cal scientists have written extensively, for example, about the relative shortness and lower-­than-­average number of casualties of post-­Soviet conflicts, when compared to other civil wars of the twentieth c­ entury. When compared to other social collapses, the implication is that the vio­lence following the Soviet collapse was just not as bad.13 More importantly for the citizens of the United States and Western Eu­rope, however, the 1990s ­were a time of relative peace and unheralded economic growth: life was good, and the goods of capitalism ­were clearly just around the bend for the former USSR, a­ fter it overcame the hiccups left from its socialist hangover. Overcoming and broadening this perspective requires both tying together the many conflicts that started and ­stopped along the southern and eastern edge of the former USSR and seeing their links not to a lost superstructure but instead to the conditions in which they erupted. This means returning to the period immediately prior to the collapse, the six years now known as perestroika (1985–1991) a­ fter the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. It means considering the state of the USSR prior to this period of reforms and the ­actual

6 I N TROD U CTIO N

impact that the reforms had, at first incrementally, and l­ ater aggregately. This, in turn, requires focusing on the experiences of former Soviet citizens, and not on a Western-­centric geopo­liti­cal lens. The fact that life could have been worse does not in any way mean that it was not fundamentally bad. What­ ever was happening contemporaneously in Yugo­slavia or had happened in ­earlier de­cades in Africa or East Asia was completely irrelevant to t­ hose caught in the crossfire in Chechnya, or Nagorno-­K arabakh, or Tajikistan, or Tambov, just as irrelevant as the predicted trajectory t­ oward consumer capitalism and a stable market.14 This book attempts to understand the pro­cess by which the Soviet Union’s economy and polity collapsed and the vio­lence this collapse engendered from the perspectives of ­those who lived through it. It cannot tell the story of the entire USSR, a landmass and a citizenry far too vast to sit within the confines of a single book. Instead, it narrates the history of collapse and disintegration from the perspective of Tajikistan, which experienced one of the worst cases of vio­lence resulting from the end of the USSR. As a case study for the broader collapse, moreover, Tajikistan provides a surprisingly apt and clear perspective. In Moscow and much of Rus­sia, the period of perestroika and the subsequent collapse have been deeply politicized since their occurrence. ­Today, as a growing body of lit­er­ a­ture has demonstrated, the collapse of the USSR is an increasingly bemoaned event in Russia—­the “greatest geopo­liti­cal catastrophe” of the twentieth c­ entury in the words of Rus­sia’s president, Vladimir Putin, a disaster that could and should have been avoided.15 Yet even in the face of such criticism, Gorbachev’s defenders remain convinced that the collapse had nothing to do with his policies and changes to the Soviet polity and economy. Western historians, too, frequently give Gorbachev a nearly complete pass, citing his reforms as a failed—­ but right-­minded—­attempt to change the USSR for the better.16 When his work failed, the USSR disintegrated and life became unbearable for millions, but, as this line of reasoning goes, it was the fault of long-­suppressed ethnic hatreds and nationalism, the baggage of Stalinism, the inherent inefficiencies of socialism, the structural fault lines built into the USSR’s semi-­imperial system of republics, and the inevitable forward movement of history away from authoritarianism that together led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration seen in its wake.17 It is undeniable that all of t­ hese ­factors had an impor­tant role to play in the final collapse of the USSR. Yet in this perspective the period immediately prior to the collapse—­Gorbachev’s perestroika—­can fade in importance, if not recede entirely as simply lost time. This is partly ­because the history of the Soviet collapse that exists ­today has been largely written from the perspective of the city where it was engi-

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neered (Moscow), using documents produced by the architects of reform (Gorbachev and ­those around him), and avoiding, in many cases, the a­ ctual results of the reform program. Consequently, ­there has been an attempt to remove responsibility from individuals, including Gorbachev, his advisors, and the other Soviet politicians who took advantage of the new order to enrich or empower themselves, and shift it to the “forces of history,” the “centrifugal forces” (tsentrobezhnye sily) so loved in Soviet academic lit­er­a­ture. From the perspective of life in a Western democracy, it may be tempting to suggest that certain social ­orders—­democracy, capitalism—­are inherently better and more desirable than ­others; if exposed to a “­free market of ideas,” it is suggested, t­ hese structures inevitably win out. In this view, all citizens of authoritarian states, the USSR included, are inherently opposed to the states in which they live and are essentially waiting for a chance to reject ­these states. ­These assumptions tend to support the narrative of perestroika’s noble failure: Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the structural flaws of the Soviet Union failed, while providing space for glasnost and freedom of expression. L ­ ittle won­der, then, that provided with a taste of freedom, the citizens of the USSR (and especially its elites) revolted and moved inescapably t­ oward Western models.18 Yet history does not move on the back of inexorable waves; t­ here is no forward direction to h ­ uman existence and h ­ uman order that is not directed by individuals and individual actions. No m ­ atter the moral feelings attached to democracy and capitalism, that the former USSR moved in a par­tic­u­lar direction was neither inevitable nor even necessarily desired by all involved. In the end, understanding exactly what occurred during perestroika and why it engendered so much destruction requires analyzing the real content and consequences of the 1980s’ reforms. No ­matter the long-­term strug­gles, contradictions, and under­lying conflicts in the USSR, the state crumbled and collapsed in 1991, not before or ­after; it is impossible to understand that collapse and its consequences without a detailed and scrupulous examination of the years immediately prior. This, in turn, demands avoiding the screen of politicized discourse and getting out of the long shadow cast by Moscow. This book tries to do so by moving as far away as pos­si­ble, to the southern periphery of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. The homeland for which Aslonov died, Tajikistan is ­today a small and green pocket of land between the Pyanj River to the south and the Ferghana Valley to the north. The farthest southeast corner of the former USSR, it borders Af­ghan­i­stan to the south, China to the east, and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the north, with wobbling borders that defy straight lines and clear explication alike. Nearly covered in mountain ranges, from the Hisor range in the south to the Fan in the north to the Pamirs in the east, it is, and always has

8 I N TROD U CTIO N

been, a difficult place to reach. A thousand years ago it became a refuge for an Ismaili Shia population fleeing religious persecution in the Abbasid Caliphate; in the 1930s and 1940s ­those escaping potential arrest and internment in the Gulag or late Stalinist anti-­Semitism in Moscow equally found it a welcoming home. Tajikistan (or, formally, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic or Tajik SSR) was amongst the poorest and least developed of the fifteen Soviet republics that made up the USSR. Its weight in Moscow was ­limited, and its leaders often had to strug­gle to have local investment increased or industry boosted. Over time, the leaders of the USSR showed less and less interest in the republic: Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev both visited Tajikistan, but none of their successors did. Gorbachev in par­tic­u­lar paid almost no regard to the republic or to Central Asia, confusing its geography and generally disregarding its importance for the USSR. ­Until the final years of perestroika, as this book describes, this meant that Tajikistan was largely insulated from the machinations of politics in Moscow, left to develop its own quiet and quiet­est approach to socialism. Paradoxically, however, although Dushanbe remained on the absolute edge of Moscow’s shadow, this shadow in many ways grew thicker and heavier on the periphery. ­Because of their ­limited influence in Moscow and overwhelming reliance on the Soviet economic superstructure, Tajikistan’s leaders ­were among the most loyal of party cadres, d­ oing their utmost to follow the Communist Party’s decisions, policies, and ideology and eke out what benefit they could. In the years prior to 1985 and the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika, this largely seemed in keeping with Tajikistan’s interests: investment generally increased, standards of living grew, if at times slowly, and the republic remained stable, safe, and calm. A ­ fter the start of perestroika, however, the leaders of the Communist Party of Tajikistan (CPT) often found themselves confused and privately frustrated with the course taken in Moscow. They did not understand why the party should retreat from public life, why the economy should be partially marketized, or why po­liti­cal opposition should be tolerated and even promoted. At the same time, however, they remained loyal, continuing to follow policies and initiate reforms even as they disagreed with their justifications and consequences. Unable to shake Moscow’s hold, the leaders of the Tajik SSR watched as their application of Gorbachev’s reforms led to the disintegration of the placid but safe republic they had overseen. Social quietude was replaced by disorder, riots, and ultimately vio­lence; slow economic growth was pushed aside by increased in­equality, recession, and collapse; a populace long considered subservient and among the most content in the USSR ended up, to every­one’s surprise, on the streets with guns in their hands. This unique vantage point,

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showing republican leaders applying reforms they disagreed with and receiving results they found distasteful, completely re­orients the history of the Soviet collapse. It clarifies the content of perestroika’s reforms, their practical application in Soviet society and its economy, and lays bare the consequences that they brought about. One cannot escape Moscow’s shadow by r­ unning away to Dushanbe; instead, by moving to the periphery it becomes pos­si­ble to understand the a­ ctual pro­cesses set forth from Moscow across the w ­ hole of the g­ reat Soviet territory. Fundamentally, this book uses this perspective to argue that the collapse and vio­lence of the 1990s in the former USSR cannot and should not be separated from the period of reform and change that preceded. The shape and form of social disorder and vio­lence observed in Tajikistan and elsewhere across the former USSR was built and dependent upon the structure of t­ hese reforms and cannot be simply relegated to the impact of ­earlier de­cades or centuries of history, however impor­tant ­these periods may remain. In Tajikistan, the civil war in which Aslonov and tens of thousands of ­others died can only be properly understood through an accounting of the period of perestroika and the immediate Soviet past, an ele­ment that is often given short shrift in available accounts.19 For the USSR as a w ­ hole, moreover, the period of reform initiated and overseen by Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 1980s cannot be divided from the consequences to which it led: the collapse of the Soviet polity and economy, the disintegration of social order, and the wave of vio­lence that spread across the former USSR in the first years of the 1990s. This book returns the connection between ­these two processes—­late Soviet reform and early post-­Soviet vio­lence—­and demonstrates the ways in which they are inseparable from one another. By considering the destabilizing effects of perestroika, moreover, the narrative of Tajikistan’s experience of reform and l­ater collapse suggests an impor­ tant reevaluation of the late Soviet state and the state of its economy. Instead of an unstable society exposed by Gorbachev’s reforms, this emerges as a stable, if often inert, society that was instead undermined by reform.20 The legalization of private business undercut state enterprises and guarantees of employment and social support; the inculcation of profit motives into enterprise plans destroyed incentives to produce consumer goods; pressure to criticize the Soviet state and Communist Party led many former party workers and activists to found their own po­liti­cal platforms. Across the USSR, ties between factories and republics w ­ ere severed and entire sections of the economy ­were left adrift. Inevitably, standards of living dropped along with real income and access to basic goods. Like elsewhere in the world, this sharp decrease in the population’s standard of living quickly translated into social

10 I N TROD U CTIO N

frustration and then disorder. In the final reckoning, the USSR proved to be like any other state, shaken by the masses protesting in one form or another over their loss of livelihoods.21 Instead of a unique iron colossus hollowed out by de­cades of socialism’s inefficiencies, the Soviet Union was instead a stumbling automaton like most other countries, held together by a million spare parts and constant upkeep. It is thus pos­si­ble to learn a g­ reat deal about how any national automaton is held together, this book suggests, by taking a closer look at how the USSR remained stable before 1985—­and how the drop in living standards that perestroika initiated thereafter undermined that stability. This book connects the late Soviet reforms of perestroika to the economic and social collapse that followed, including and up to the outbreak of mass vio­ lence. It does so by moving between Moscow, where reforms ­were developed and laws passed, and Dushanbe, where the reforms ­were implemented and the consequences felt. By drawing on a wide variety of primary source materials, including memoirs, con­temporary newspaper reports, interviews, and personal documents, it attempts to provide as many perspectives as pos­si­ble on the events of the final Soviet years. Politicians and economists in Moscow had one belief about the direction the USSR should take; their contemporaries in Dushanbe had another. The residents of major Soviet cities in Rus­sia and Ukraine held strong views (generally negative) about the state of affairs in the USSR in the mid-1980s, views that w ­ ere contradicted by their fellow citizens in Tajikistan, many of whom ­were increasingly content with the results of the Soviet proj­ect. This book works to express ­these individuals’ voices, and to weave t­ hese voices together into a narrative of change, breakdown, and collapse. More than anything e­ lse, however, the narrative is built upon the archival rec­ord left by the Soviet state and Communist Party as currently held in Moscow and Dushanbe. Many exemplary accounts of the late Soviet and early post-­Soviet periods have been written by drawing upon memoirs, interviews, and newspapers; very few have delved solidly into the archival documents of that era, especially ­those from the Soviet periphery in a place like Dushanbe.22 ­These documents, on which this book is in many ways based, provide a new perspective on both the attempt to rebuild the House of Soviets that Gorbachev enacted and the long-­term impact his attempt engendered. The story told in this book is unavoidably steeped in and reflective of the documents and time and place about which it is written: the Soviet Union in the final years of the 1980s and Tajikistan and Rus­sia in the first years of the 1990s, still beleaguered by the history of the USSR. It is a book about a dif­fer­ent world, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which no longer exists. The USSR truly was a dif­fer­ent place, both from the West and from what the West

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i­ magined it to be; life t­ here simply was not the same in many ways. In depicting that world, the story told in this book uses many of the terms and names exclusive to the state and social structure of the Soviet Union, from “Chairman of the Supreme Soviet” (essentially, “speaker of parliament”) to the “population unengaged in social production” (read: “unemployed”). Yet the purpose of building a narrative based in part on the documents produced by the Soviet state is neither to reproduce that state’s own narrative of difference and exclusivity nor to exclusively repudiate it. Just as the Soviet Union was a place very dif­fer­ent than the familiar settings of mid-­twentieth-­century Western states, it was in other ways very similar, from the be­hav­ior of many of its citizens, to its actions on the world stage, to the long-­term development of its economy. In much the same way, the actions and document chain left by its politicians and bureaucrats should also be understood as would ­those of self-­interested but productive public servants anywhere: not always exactly what they claimed to be, but hardly an empty or performative activity and nearly always referencing some deeper level of social and po­liti­cal real­ity.23 The rich archival rec­ord that the Soviet Union left, which historians have been mining for the past few de­ cades, has opened up many previously forgotten corners of the state’s development, as well as unheralded information about how Soviet citizens lived and experienced life ­under the USSR.24 If it is pos­si­ble to accept both the uniqueness of the Soviet world and its inclusion in the broader universality of ­human experience in the twentieth c­ entury, the documents produced by the state can be used to re­create that world—­not by simply accepting their statements, but by contextualizing them in the wider spectrum of documentation available in memoirs, interviews, and other materials. In many ways, unfortunately, ­there is simply too much in ­these documents to include in one book; this narrative cannot pretend to fully describe all aspects of Soviet Tajikistan, or perestroika, or even the reforms enacted by Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow and implemented in Dushanbe. Flooded with nearly infinite sources, perspectives, and histories, this book, like most modern histories, has been forced to reduce its focuses. This has meant the partial or entire exclusion of certain topics often deemed central to histories of the USSR and post-­Soviet space in the 1980s and early 1990s: the Soviet-­Afghan War (1979–1989), the role of Islam and religion, the Miners’ Strikes, or the end of the Cold War. T ­ hese ­factors have been omitted or played down partly b­ ecause of their significant coverage in other works, and partly ­because, from the perspective of the Soviet periphery and especially in Dushanbe, they w ­ ere not the most prevalent or perspicacious ele­ments of life in the 1980s. As ­will be explained in ­later chapters, ­these historical phenomena simply do not provide as clear causal explanations for the shape of the Soviet collapse as occurred in

12 I N TROD U CTIO N

late 1991 or the vio­lence that erupted in its wake as does the ­actual—­and, importantly, overlooked—­content of reforms passed and implemented in the years immediately before the collapse. The remainder of this book can be divided into three sections. The first section, covering chapters 1–4, provides an overview of Tajikistan’s place within the Soviet Union before and during perestroika and the initial wave of reforms passed and implemented by the central Soviet government in 1985–1989. Chapter 1 depicts life in Tajikistan around 1985 at the height of late Soviet stability. For the Tajik Republic, it argues, de­cades of economic growth and improving living standards, though ­limited and unequally distributed, led both Tajikistani politicians and average citizens alike to view the Soviet economic and po­liti­ cal system with a modicum of satisfaction. T ­ here was l­ ittle impetus for structural reform, nor a clear understanding of why it might be necessary. In contrast, chapter 2 shows how Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers ­were convinced that radical reform was necessary to save the Soviet economy. This chapter pre­sents Gorbachev’s theoretical and po­liti­cal justification for structural reform and the laws passed to liberalize the Soviet economy. At the same time, central politicians, and especially Gorbachev, remained blind to both the consequences of reform and the po­liti­cal situation outside of Moscow. In chapter 3, the conflict between Moscow’s vision of reform and Dushanbe’s seeming intransigence is shown, with Gorbachev and his advisors aggressively promoting change. With ambiguous initial results from the reform program beginning to assert themselves, moreover, Gorbachev and his advisors also began to accuse the Communist Party itself of holding back perestroika, leading to personnel changes in Dushanbe and pressure to engage in glasnost and open criticism of the party. Closing this section, chapter 4 moves from the development of reforms to their application in Dushanbe and across the USSR, demonstrating how Moscow’s push for social and economic reform had both been successfully implemented and was now undermining the very fabric of Soviet society. Chapters 5–7 constitute the book’s second section, collectively describing the pro­cess by which economic recession and po­liti­cal disorder descended into protest and vio­lence in 1990 and 1991. The section opens with chapter 5, which provides a detailed analy­sis of the February 1990 unrest in Dushanbe, an event that remains controversial and much argued about t­ oday in the Tajik capital. This chapter argues that the riots ­were caused by a combination of economic downturn and po­liti­cal intransigence: local politicians w ­ ere simply unable to tread their way through the changing socioeconomic conditions. At the same time, it emphasizes how Moscow remained instrumental in both fanning and putting out the flames of vio­lence during the riots. Following the reestablish-

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ment of order a­ fter February 1990, and covering the period between the riots and the infamous putsch of August 1991, chapter 6 provides an overview of the state of Tajikistan’s economy and society in 1990 and 1991. This chapter shows how in Tajikistan the structure of the Soviet state had essentially disintegrated by mid-1991, even as no one in the periphery was willing to admit this. Closing the section, chapter 7 brings the historical narrative through to the failed August 1991 putsch, the final collapse of the USSR in December 1991, and the Tajik state’s attempts to stabilize in early 1992. It highlights the officially in­de­pen­dent Tajik state’s attempts to remain solidly in Moscow’s shadow and Moscow’s moves to separate itself from its former periphery. The final section of the book begins with chapter 8. This chapter brings the story of the Soviet collapse in the periphery full circle, returning to the vio­lence of the Tajik Civil War hinted at e­ arlier in this introduction. This chapter demonstrates how the Tajik state’s contradictory attempt to become in­de­ pen­dent and yet remain bound to Moscow, combined with politicians’ populist refusal to compromise, led to a final breakdown of economic and social control in early 1992. With no resources left to distribute, the state was unable to provide citizens with any alternative to vio­lence, and the latter increasingly turned to radical politicians and ultimately warlords for answers. Making ­matters worse, the nascent Tajikistani state had been left without a mono­poly of vio­lence in its own territory: it failed to take control of Soviet-­era military assets left in Tajikistan, instead ceding them first to the collective military of the Confederation of In­de­pen­dent States (CIS) and then the Rus­sian Ministry of Defense. By May 1992, this chapter shows, this volatile mix had exploded into the open, with warring camps of po­liti­cal protesters engaging in street ­battles in Dushanbe, demonstrating the shape of the war to come. Fi­nally, the book’s concluding chapter, “War,” provides a brief narrative of the Tajik Civil War, focusing on the first six months of the conflict (May–­December 1992), which represented both the bloodiest and most militarily decisive period in the war. The chapter demonstrates both the extremes of this conflict and the ways in which Dushanbe’s relationship with Moscow continued to play a decisive role. Fi­nally, it shows that Tajikistan’s experience of extreme vio­lence and civil war was anything but an outlier: it was emblematic of the broader spectrum of vio­lence that grew out of the conditions of the Soviet collapse. Across the USSR the transition to markets and in­de­pen­dent republics occurred ­under the haze of smoldering fires; this book tries to peer through the smoke and discern how and why vio­lence exploded in the first place.

C h a p te r   1

The Periphery before Perestroika O pumpkin!—­the chinar answered along The day is too young for comparison, but hold on: Soon the autumn wind ­will bring along the cold— And who is high and who is low ­will be known and told. —­Nasir-­I Khusraw, Divan 256

Mikhail Gorbachev never visited Dushanbe. Had he done so, he would have found a teeming city of more than half a million residents, full of “­people bustling and arriving at bus stations,” hurrying about their business, and hardly even stopping to say hello to one another. To the residents of the Tajik SSR, their capital was a “­g reat city,” impressive for its wide ave­nues and the tall and leafy Oriental plane trees (chinar) that lined the roads and provided shade from the harsh summer sun.1 Home to both the republican government of the Tajik SSR and its central industries, including a major refrigerator factory, steel mill, and textile plant, Dushanbe was a heterogeneous Soviet city of many ­peoples and languages. Tajiks represented at best half of the population, with thousands of Rus­sians, Ukrainians, Germans, Uzbeks, Caucasians, Tatars, and many ­others filling out the population and the city streets. It was also as calm a provincial periphery as could be found in the Soviet Union: Tajikistan rightly had the reputation in the USSR as a place where even po­liti­cal changes in Moscow could hardly shake the quiet and undisturbed course of local events. The capital, like the entire Tajik SSR, had also grown enormously since the founding of the USSR. ­Little more than a village with a large Monday bazaar in 1924 (hence the name; Dushanbe means Monday in Tajik), the city had become a fitting capital for Tajikistan. Initially folded into the USSR as part of the former Turkestan region during the Rus­sian Civil War, Tajikistan was ­later 14

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made an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic in 1924, and ultimately a full Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929.2 Incorporating parts of both the relatively more developed Ferghana and Zarafshon valleys in the north as well as the undeveloped South (“Eastern Bukhara,” as it was then called), the Tajik SSR was quickly singled out by Soviet planners in the 1930s as a region deeply in need of investment and modernization. Massive proj­ects, such as the Vakhshstroi, a g­ iant irrigation and agricultural proj­ect in the Tajik SSR’s southern Khatlon region, ­were put in place to grow the Tajik economy and bind it tightly to the rest of the Soviet superstructure.3 By the 1980s this proj­ect had proven successful: Tajikistan was closely linked to Moscow and the rest of the Soviet economy through a thousand strands of finance and production. Most notably, the republic produced hundreds of thousands of tons of cotton each year; in exchange, the Soviet center was generous in its development funds, and both Dushanbe and the republic grew accordingly. Many of the capital’s residents ­were rightly proud of the improvements they saw growing around them. This chapter provides a glimpse of Dushanbe at the height of its pre-­ perestroika stability in 1985, before the ruptures and changes to come. It considers the individuals leading the republic in the Communist Party of Tajikistan (CPT) and the republican government, as well as the millions of Soviet Tajikistani citizens living in small towns, villages, and the republican capital. By intertwining their lives with the economic and social development of the Tajik SSR in the de­cades prior to 1985, it attempts to describe the world of Soviet Tajikistan in all of its contradictory coherence: its reliance on cotton monoculture, its poorly developed villages, and its low status within the USSR, as well as it’s population’s general sanguinity and loyalty to the Soviet state, sense of increasing well-­being, and the republic’s objective economic growth.

Tajikistan’s Proud Leaders Among ­those proudest of the social growth and economic accomplishments observed in Dushanbe in 1985 was Nizoramoh Zarifova. Born in 1923 in a small village in the south of Tajikistan near Kulyab, Zarifova had risen through the ranks of the Tajik Komsomol and Communist Party: as head of the CPT’s “­Women’s Division” in the early 1950s, she was a constant presence at party meetings across the republic, where she would advocate for ­women’s inclusion in the workforce and education. Appointed the CPT secretary for ideology in 1956, she would be promoted a de­cade l­ater to the position of deputy chair of the Tajik Supreme Soviet—­formally, the deputy head of state of the Tajik Republic. Zarifova would hold this position for twenty-­three years ­until her retirement in 1989,

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continuing to travel from her new home in Dushanbe across Tajikistan and Central Asia to spread ideas of Soviet pro­gress. A calm but forceful presence at party meetings, gatherings, and Supreme Soviet sessions, Zarifova never tired of advocating on behalf of Tajikistan’s ­women and the less fortunate. She was proud of Tajikistan’s pro­gress and optimistic about the f­uture; for her, the Soviet system had been a g­ reat success: “I could never have i­magined that I, a girl from a poor provincial ­family, who arrived in the capital to study on the back of a truck one cold and snowy December day from Kulyab, would be lucky enough to represent my country from such a high position.”4 While exceptionally talented and successful, Zarifova was not a unique figure for Dushanbe in the 1980s. Many of her generation’s po­liti­cal leaders had followed similar paths from rural poverty to the heights of the CPT and republican government. Guljakhon Bobosadyqova, the CPT secretary for ideology in 1985, had followed Zarifova’s path through the Komsomol and party a de­cade ­later, establishing herself as a voice of Soviet conservatism in the CPT from the 1960s on. She too, had been born in a small village—in her case, in the north of the country near Leninabad—­and had arrived in Dushanbe to study at university.5 Kahhor Mahkamov, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR, had been born in a mud hut in the northern village of Ghoziyon in 1932; his f­ather was a baker, and he also arrived in Dushanbe a broke and hopeful fifteen-­year-­old in 1947. By 1963, however, having been sent to Leningrad for an engineering degree and back to the north of Tajikistan to oversee a mining fa­cil­i­ty, he was appointed head of Tajikistan’s State Planning Committee (Gosplan), one of the republic’s most impor­tant government positions, where he would work u ­ ntil his promotion to chairman of the Council of Ministers in 1982.6 In the Supreme Soviet, Zarifova’s newly appointed boss, Ghoibnazar Pallaev, had lived and worked throughout the republic before taking his post as chairman of the Supreme Soviet in 1984. Raised in an orphanage in the republic’s inhospitable Pamir mountains, Pallaev had overseen cotton production in both the north and south before settling in central Tajikistan as first secretary of the Kurgan-­Tyube Oblast Party Committee in 1974. A de­cade ­later, he would make it to the highest echelons of Dushanbe politics.7 The effective boss of all politicians in Tajikistan, the first secretary of the CPT, Rahmon Nabiev, had been born in 1930 in a northern village. An engineer by training, he had entered party work in the 1960s and had since worked in the CPT and the Tajik SSR’s Ministry of Agriculture before becoming chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR in 1973. Elected to the position of first secretary in 1982, Nabiev followed in the footsteps of Jabbor Rasulov, a much-­loved figure in Tajik politics, who was known for eschewing the trap-

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pings of power, living frugally, and ­dying at his desk with just one suit hanging in his closet.8 Similar biographies could be found throughout the CPT, Tajik ministries, and many government agencies. Leaders and their subordinates shared many of the same characteristics: technical educations, practical experience on collective farms, and long government ­careers. Most came from working class and poor backgrounds and had been born in many dif­fer­ent regions of the republic. Power was not passed hereditarily from one generation to another, and much as in the highest echelons of Soviet politics, the Tajik elite actually allowed for a good deal of social movement.9 While largely growing up in poverty, the po­liti­cal elite of the Tajik SSR had all benefitted greatly from the Soviet system and w ­ ere dedicated civil servants. This conservative loyalty to the Soviet state and ideology was based partially on their own experience of social betterment (and the similar improvements they observed in their hometowns and villages), and also on their long-­term tenure in positions of power and within the urban milieu of Dushanbe. Like Mahkamov or Bobosadyqova, many of the leaders of the Tajik SSR and their subordinates in the party and government w ­ ere born and raised in villages; they came to Dushanbe in their teenage years to work or study. Having arrived at university or their place of employment, however, they would spend most of their lives in the relative privilege of Dushanbe, completing their studies ­there and only leaving for brief periods of further education in Moscow or Tashkent or practical work in the regions of Tajikistan. Job tenure, too, was secure in most po­liti­cal and government positions: leading figures in the Tajik SSR held their roles for many years and even de­cades. Zarifova worked as the deputy chair of the Tajik Supreme Soviet for twenty-­three years, while Bobosadyqova had held one unchanging position since 1961.10 In addition, the republican finance minister, Jonobiddin Lafizov, had been in his post since 1973, and Mahmudullo Kholov, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet Presidium, had just calmly retired in 1984 ­after twenty-­one years in his post.11 Altogether, this had a tendency to both undermine their links to their regional homes and to inculcate them in the multiregional and multinational po­liti­cal networks of patronage and support in the Tajikistani capital. “I moved to Dushanbe when I was 17,” a former leader of the CPT, now around eighty years old, laughed sardonically when asked about her background. “Does this make me a northerner? Or a Dushanbe resident?”12 Even party and government workers who arrived ­later in Dushanbe w ­ ere folded into the many layers of Soviet po­liti­cal acculturation. Another member of the CPT Bureau (the party’s leadership committee) alongside Mahkamov and Bobosadyqova in 1985 was Hikmatullo Nasreddinov, who had been

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raised in orphanages in the republic’s distant southeast.13 Receiving an education in Dushanbe and Moscow, Nasreddinov went to work as an irrigation specialist in another southern district, Farkhor. In Farkhor, the local first secretary of the District Party Committee was Akbarsho Nekushoev, a Pamiri from Tajikistan’s eastern edge who was friends with Rahmon Nabiev. When Nabiev became chairman of the Tajik SSR’s Council of Ministers in 1973, Nekushoev recommended Nasreddinov to Nabiev and Ivan Dedov, another member of the CPT Bureau. Nasreddinov arrived in Dushanbe at the age of thirty-­four to work for Nabiev on agricultural development; the next year Dedov, an ethnic Rus­sian born in Kazakhstan who had worked in Tajikistan for de­cades, brought Nasreddinov to work as the CPT Central Committee secretary for agriculture and village development. By 1980 Nasreddinov had been appointed minister of irrigation of the Tajik SSR, a position he combined with his party duties. As Nasreddinov l­ater recalled in his memoirs, for most of t­ hose working in the CPT and Tajik SSR’s government, personal background, upbringing, and heritage tended to fade in importance as compared to dedication to the Soviet proj­ect. “For [them],” he wrote, “­there was no difference as to who was from which region of Tajikistan. For [them], in the world t­here simply existed two types of p­ eople: the hardworking and the bad.”14 For t­ hose forming and constituting the networks of po­liti­cal patronage in the CPT and the Tajikistani state, loyalty was above all to the Soviet Union, its ideology, and the material benefits it could bring to the Tajik SSR.15

The (Generally) Satisfied Populace The Tajik SSR’s elites ­were not alone in their sanguinity about the Soviet Union. In the mid-1980s, many residents of Dushanbe and Tajikistan’s other towns and villages ­were equivalently positive and hopeful about their lives and the promises of Soviet development practice. Standards of living ­were on the rise throughout the republic, salaries ­were increasing, and life appeared to be improving in both cities and villages. Per capita annual income reached nearly 1,000 rubles per year in 1985, and salaries continued to increase each year, ­whether in absolute terms or if adjusted for inflation.16 Although salaries remained among the lowest in the USSR—on average around 160 rubles a month compared to a Soviet mean of about 200 rubles a month—­they ­were rising at rates faster than in most republics.17 Importantly, moreover, with increased salaries came increased access to goods: each additional ruble earned meant an additional ruble of consumption, as the provision of goods and ser­vices kept pace with salary increases.18 In 1985, for example, consumers in Tajikistan had access to and purchased

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5.5 ­percent more goods than they had the year before.19 Clothing and diet improved, as did access to refrigerators and other kitchen appliances, and more families ­were able to purchase cars and vacations outside of the republic. Deficits and shortages grew increasingly rare.20 Local statisticians tracked how purchases of “non-­food goods” and “cultural-­household ser­vices” grew while equivalent expenditures on basic foodstuffs decreased as a percentage of income, a common indicator of increasing material well-­being.21 As Arslanbek Gazibekov, a Tajik economist, summarized the situation around 1980, “the basic conditions in the village grow close to ­those in the city.” Moreover, he emphasized that “the variety of available goods has expanded . . . ​both the quality and quantity of ser­vices provided to the population is improving.”22 Not only did Tajik Soviet citizens have increasing access to material goods and ser­vices, but the more basic trappings of modernity also continued to spread. By the 1980s, as Buri Karimov, the late 1980s chairman of the Tajik SSR’s State Planning Committee (Gosplan), recalled l­ater in his memoirs, the majority of ­houses even in small towns ­were equipped with “centralized heating, hot ­water and electricity, and ­running ­water, that is, with all of the basic living conditions associated with cities.”23 Many villages remained without ­running ­water and centralized heating, although electrification had, by the late 1970s, reached the vast majority of the Tajik Soviet population.24 But that population could still, year by year, see concrete positive changes in their lives. As a result, rather than making horizontal comparisons to life in other Soviet republics or foreign countries where standards of living may have been higher, they made temporal comparisons to the past. At worst, they would have made comparisons to close neighbors such as Af­ghan­i­stan, where t­ hings w ­ ere clearly worse in the 1970s and 1980s. In the novel Dushanbe, for example, one of the characters says, “Lenin is pointing in the direction of Af­ghan­i­stan. He is saying: ‘we have taken all the lands, but Af­ghan­is­ tan is left.’ ”25 This characterization of Af­ghan­i­stan as the backwards neighbor was in fact very common in Soviet Tajikistan. In ­either case, Tajikistan came out looking better, and, compared to de­cades past, life in the republic was clearly and inarguably improving. Sitting in his idyllic garden in a village outside of Leninabad in 1984, the local village chairman Kh. Kenjaev would have had no doubts about his cause for sanguinity. A veteran of the war with Germany and Hero of the USSR, Kenjaev had watched his republic grow exponentially in the past forty years. As he sat reading a book to his laughing grandchildren, it would have been impossible to convince him that life was ­doing anything but getting better.26 Perspectives such as Kenjaev’s would have been common throughout the Tajik SSR, much as they w ­ ere in many less developed Soviet republics. So­cio­log­ic­ al surveys frequently demonstrated particularly high levels of social satisfaction

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and optimism among the citizens of Central Asian republics.27 One multiyear study conducted around 1979–1980, for example, found that 80 ­percent of surveyed Soviet citizens in Uzbekistan thought that “life was getting better” with time, whereas only 60 ­percent of ­those surveyed in Estonia felt the same.28 Another study from around the same time confirmed this trend, emphasizing that Azerbaijani respondents ­were more “satisfied” with their lives than the Soviet average—­and that agricultural workers across the USSR ­were more satisfied than better paid industrial or ser­vice workers.29 One of the few so­cio­log­i­cal studies conducted in Tajikistan in the 1980s, a survey of Dushanbe residents conducted by the Tajik Acad­emy of Sciences, equivalently concluded that “notwithstanding its many limitations, the majority of workers all the same believe in the success” of Soviet policy in the republic.30 In Tajikistan, the idea that life was getting better was shared across a variety of social groups and geographic regions. Even for the Tajik villages, as a visiting British anthropologist noted, this was a time of “po­liti­cal stability and rapid economic growth.”31 ­Today, moreover, numerous Tajikistanis who came of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s recall the period as one of expanding opportunities. Their homes in outlying towns and villages w ­ ere modernizing, while they ­were able to study in Dushanbe or Moscow and receive job placements in the republic’s hospitals, schools, and many government agencies. The salaries they received w ­ ere more than sufficient to support themselves and their families—­and, as one man recalled, even enough to occasionally hire a taxi, drive out with a friend to the local Teacher’s Institute, and take a ­couple of girls studying ­there out on a double date.32 For many, moreover, ­there was ­little doubt that ­things would continue to improve: as one local engineer recalled, ­there was a “feeling of being part of a g­ reat development proj­ect,” and Tajik Soviet citizens ­were proud of their growing republic and its increasing economic potential.33 “We felt lucky,” the former Tajik Gosplan worker Rahmat Khakulov l­ater summed up, “to have been living during the heyday (rastsvet) of Soviet development.”34

The Promise of Soviet Development Tajikistan truly is a beautiful and verdant land: a place of rolling hills and green valleys, deep gorges and falling rivers, with the white peaks of mountain ranges ever-­present on the horizon. Orchards of apples, peaches, cherries, walnuts, and lemons are scattered across its hills, while the lowlands are filled with cotton farms. Goats and sheep roam high pastures in the millions. Villages rise up out of clouds of wild­flowers on high plateaus, small dots of brown roofs

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in a sea of green and red and blue. The natu­ral beauty and wealth of the republic have never been in question, and easily lend themselves to both the lyrical poetry so common in Tajikistan and the wistful reminiscences of youth. Bending this natu­ral world to ­human ­will and the needs of ­human society—­ the under­lying goals of the Soviet proj­ect everywhere—­was a more challenging endeavor. The same land to inspire poets and artists with its mountain peaks and sharp gorges does not inspire road engineers; the fertile soil of mountain pastures and hillside slopes does l­ittle for large-­scale mechanized farming; the idyll of an outlying mountain village is broken by the need to build schools, and modern housing, and simply get in and out. The challenge of bringing “Soviet development” to the republic was nothing if not daunting. Yet the improvements to daily life and economic growth observed and experienced by Tajikistan’s elites and broader population in 1985 ­were more than just the product of politicized pride, impression, or l­ ater nostalgia. The republic was undeniably growing and developing in the mid-1980s; in some ways, the Tajik SSR’s economic prospects could hardly have been better. Although the republic experienced out-­migration of Rus­sian, Ukrainian, and other Eu­ ro­pean minorities to their titular republics in the 1980s, its relatively high birthrate more than made up for this loss.35 In 1985, the population of the Tajik SSR reached 4.65 million and would continue to grow on average by 3 ­percent a year.36 Significantly, industrial growth and investment w ­ ere outpacing the population, with the former reaching 5 ­percent per year in the mid-1980s.37 This was higher than the Soviet average, and between 1975 and 1985, rates of fixed capital investment in Central Asia ­were significantly greater than in the country’s developed republics. Rates of capital investment per capita in the region, for example, w ­ ere two to four times higher than in the Rus­sian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).38 As Izatullo Hayoev, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR, ­later summarized: “In our republic alone g­ reat sums have been invested—­during the 10th and 11th five year plans [1976–1985] 2.3 billion rubles ­were invested.”39 ­These sums meant that industrial production was increasingly vis­i­ble: new factories ­were opening; older factories, such as the enormous Tajik Aluminum Factory, w ­ ere expanding; and hydroelectric dams ­were being built up and down the Vakhsh River. Upriver in Roghun, the largest of the array of dams was just underway, intended to be one of the tallest and most power­f ul in the world. A general focus on “the use of largescale energy power and the energy-­heavy production of non-­ ferrous metals” underpinned plans for the republic’s theoretical move ­toward “increased levels of industrialization.”40 While the Soviet dream of industrial society remained beyond the horizon of Tajikistan’s mountains in the 1980s, the groundwork was being laid, from

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the hydroelectric dams in Roghun and along the Vakhsh to the ­simple building of roads and railroads. Between 1970 and 1990 electricity production in the republic increased by a f­actor of five.41 Notwithstanding Tajikistan’s difficult and mountainous terrain, new roads ­were constantly being built in the republic; according to one set of calculations, by the mid-1980s the Tajik SSR actually had more roads per square kilo­meter of territory than the Soviet average.42 In 1985, moreover, plans ­were outlined and approved for a full-­scale broad-­gauge railway (shirokokoleinaia zheleznaia doroga) between the southern Tajik cities of Kurgan-­Tyube and Kulyab to replace the previous narrow gauge (uzkokoleinaia) track.43 Improvements came slowly and with difficulty, but resources ­were clearly being spent to modernize and develop Tajikistan’s economy. The fact that t­ here was still a g­ reat deal of work to be done to reach modernity actually underlined the population and leadership’s hopes for improvement: ­there was ongoing pro­gress and additional opportunities for development. As Petr Luchinskii, then the second secretary of the Tajik Communist Party, argued in the mid-1980s, “­There is no republic in the USSR with more ideal conditions for industrial growth than our own.”44

And the Delivery of Soviet Cotton Unfortunately, not every­thing was developing as smoothly as it seemed to the residents of Dushanbe in the mid-1980s. Tajikistan’s growing economy hid many structural imbalances and growing inequalities u ­ nder its calm surface of societal aplomb, held in check only by the economic superstructure of the USSR and the support provided to Tajikistan from the central Soviet authorities. Most obvious was the Tajik SSR’s unchanging position as the USSR’s most agrarian republic. Even as centralized investments and ongoing industrialization brought increased manufacturing and productive capacity to the republic, an absolute majority continued to live in rural areas and work in agriculture. By the ­middle of the 1980s, for example, 67 ­percent of the population of the Tajik SSR lived outside of cities, making the republic the least urbanized in the Soviet Union.45 Agriculture also dominated the economy, with more than 40 ­percent of the entire population of the Tajik SSR employed in the sector, also among the highest rates in the USSR.46 Worse, and uniquely among all Soviet republics, Tajikistan had actually deurbanized over the past decade—­ the republic was becoming more rural over time, rather than less.47 Deurbanization and an unending emphasis on agricultural output went against all Soviet princi­ples of development and modernization, yet no ­matter how much money was spent opening factory “outlets” in rural areas or ex-

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horting the Tajik population to move to cities, the Tajik SSR proved unable to change the distribution of its population. Several f­ actors exacerbated the situation, but the central culprit for this structural intransigence was unavoidable: cotton. While long-­term economic projections called for equal levels of industrialization across the USSR, short-­term plans and the constant strug­gle to meet growing output targets meant that the Soviet Union relied upon a “division of ­labor” (razdelenie truda) among its vari­ous regions to boost production through economies of scale. When cotton was incorporated into the Soviet economy in the 1920s, t­ here seemed l­ ittle cause for argument about the place Tajikistan should take in this division: with an almost complete lack of industry in the republic, agriculture was the economic sphere that offered the most reward. Expanding on the tsarist heritage in the region, the early Soviet government expanded cotton production across Tajikistan, filling in swamps and building irrigation canals in order to fill local fields with a cash crop in high demand by Soviet enterprises and on the world market as a source of hard currency.48 Thus Tajikistan had long been assigned the role of an agricultural producer, and more than anything ­else, a cotton producer. Over time, this emphasis on cotton created strong incentives for workers to remain in villages (and for the state to keep them ­there), in turn driving the growth of the rural sector and the statistical deurbanization worried over by Soviet economists. By the mid-1980s cotton dominated the Tajik economy. Each year cotton was planted on kolkhozes and sovkhozes (collective and state-­owned farms, respectively) throughout Tajikistan, where nearly half of the republic’s total farmed acreage was seeded with cotton.49 Nearly 1.2 million agricultural workers toiled on specialized cotton-­producing farms that generated 75 ­percent of the republic’s cotton.50 On average, the Tajik SSR produced approximately 900,000 metric tons of raw cotton each year in the de­cade before 1985, for which its farms and enterprises w ­ ere paid hundreds of millions of rubles annually. This figure reached nearly 800 million rubles in 1984 and 1985 and was consistently 15–17 ­percent of the republic’s national income, the total value of all goods and ser­vices produced and consumed on its territory (see figure 1).51 It also accounted for more than the rest of the republic’s agricultural production combined.52 No other single product or even productive sector could compete with cotton in the Tajik SSR. While cotton helped to guarantee a steady stream of rubles to the Tajik SSR during the 1980s, the exclusive emphasis on its production had over the de­cades led to a number of seemingly insurmountable economic contradictions. First and foremost, cotton kept the republic agrarian, insofar as the greatest proportion of funding was directed to the farming, tending, and harvesting of cotton in rural areas. Notwithstanding frequent demands to change the situation,

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Figure 1.  Cotton Production in the Tajik SSR, 1975–1985.

moreover, even the primary pro­cessing of raw seed cotton (khlopok-­syrets) into cotton lint (khlopok-­volokno) occurred outside of the republic: in the 1980s only a third of local seed cotton was pro­cessed in the Tajik SSR, with the majority ­going for pro­cessing to Rus­sia and Ukraine.53 Cotton pro­cessing could have boosted employment and economic growth in regional cities, but the shipment of the majority of the republic’s raw cotton to other regions for pro­cessing blocked this opportunity. This meant that jobs remained outside of cities, helping to guarantee the population’s retention in rural areas. In addition, cotton helped to keep salaries particularly low in the Tajik SSR. While agricultural salaries had increased significantly in comparison to rises in industrial and ser­vice workers’ pay since the 1960s, they continued to lag significantly b­ ehind in absolute terms. In Tajikistan, salaries ­were often even lower than average Soviet agricultural payments. Agricultural production in the USSR was divided between kolkhozes, collective farms where the workers ­were members and received a mix of set salaries and performance-­related pay, and sovkhozes, directly state-­run farms where the workers received standardized salaries. Considered more efficient by Soviet economic planners, sovkhozes ­were incentivized by higher payments for agricultural products, and ­were able to pay higher salaries to their workers.54 In practice, kolkhoz workers in the mid-1980s received approximately 15 ­percent less than sovkhoz workers—as ­little as 150 rubles per month on average across the USSR.55 In Tajikistan, the equivalent figure was even lower—­around 130 rubles per month.56 While this might have been enough to provide for the basic needs of one or two p­ eople, it was hardly sufficient for a f­ amily with c­ hildren. Unfortunately, moreover, many kolkhoz workers in Tajikistan earned far less than

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even this minimum. For the w ­ hole of 1986, for example, it was reported that in the village of Shamtuchi in Aini district “the husband and wife Sultan Kurbonov and Zebi Sultonova . . . ​earned 910 rubles.” The journalist writing about their lives was aghast: “Is this r­ eally enough for a f­ amily of 7 p­ eople? Can this suffice for [their] yearly earnings?”57 The question was rhetorical—it was clearly far from sufficient. Attempts to improve the lives of agricultural workers only seemed to complicate ­matters. Considering the lower efficiency and ­labor productivity (proizvoditel’nost’ truda) of kolkhozes in comparison to sovkhozes—as well as the long-­term ideological goal of uniting cooperative and state property—­the Soviet state had since the 1960s engaged in a union-­wide policy of merging kolkhozes into sovkhozes.58 Combined into larger sovkhozes, former kolkhozes became more efficient by taking advantage of economies of scale, as well as by shedding workers, which increased productivity rates. In Tajikistan, for example, in 1965 t­ here ­were 419 kolkhozes and 55 sovkhozes; by 1984 this ratio had shifted to 158 kolkhozes and 175 sovkhozes. On average, however, each sovkhoz employed only around 3,000 workers, far less than the equivalent figure of 8,250 on the average kolkhoz.59 As the Soviet ethnographer Sergei Poliakov first pointed out in the late 1980s, this emphasis on sovkhozes and improving agricultural productivity effectively pushed a notable part of the rural population out of employment.60 While the statistics are unclear, numbers produced by the Soviet Central Statistics Agency in 1985 appear to show that up to 200,000 “pos­si­ble” kolkhoz members in the Tajik SSR had ended up unemployed.61 Unemployment was the unavoidable risk that lurked b­ ehind all attempts to improve agricultural salaries and the lives of rural workers in the Tajik SSR. While the phenomenon of unemployment was always hidden in official Soviet discourse b­ ehind euphemisms such as “­labor over-­availability” (trudoizbytochnost’) or the “population unengaged in social production” (ne zaniatoe v obshchestvennom proizvodstve naselenie), as early as the late 1960s it was clear to every­one involved that the Tajik SSR was not “engaging” the ­whole of its population in work.62 By 1985 figures varied, but it was calculated that between 120,000 and 270,000 workers in Tajikistan w ­ ere “outside of work collectives.”63 As resources had shifted to improving agricultural outputs and productivity— as well as workers’ salaries—an increasing number of workers ­were being left ­behind. This was the same riddle the state faced in its strug­gle to increase the use of cotton-­picking machines. On the one hand, mechanized cotton harvesting improved per-­acre yields, boosted both productivity and salaries, and appeased the central planners in Moscow and Dushanbe who ­were always advocating for more and more combines. On the other hand, mechanizing the

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harvest further reduced the need for laborers. As A. Maksumov, the chairman of Tajikistan’s State Agricultural-­Industrial Committee (Gosagroprom), l­ater mused, “­There was a strong feeling that harvesting cotton by hand provided the possibility of engaging ­free ­labor resources from the rural population.”64 As a result, the cotton harvest was a constant strug­gle between central planners pushing for mechanization and local harvesters trying to save money (hand-­picking was cheaper) and keep their local kolkhoz members employed.65 Mechanization grew, but slowly, paralleling the slow rise of unemployment in Tajikistan’s rural areas.66 This was not the path Tajikistan’s modernization was supposed to have taken. As one of the USSR’s less developed republics, the Tajik SSR was privy to the Soviet policy of “equalization” (vyravnivanie), which was meant to help bring the levels of economic development in less advanced republics up to the standard of Rus­sia, the Baltic republics, and other more eco­nom­ically advanced regions of the USSR. In the de­cades prior to 1985, this policy had underpinned many of the billions of rubles in centrally directed investment to the Tajik SSR, as well as the republic’s ability to retain the majority of locally produced tax revenue.67 By any metric, however, equalization failed in Tajikistan: standards of living improved, but remained far below the Soviet average; industrialization continued to exist somewhere beyond the horizon and not in the republic’s valleys. Without industry and its associated infrastructure and higher-­paying jobs, Tajikistan’s population remained among the poorest in the USSR, provided with among the least ser­vices, and more likely to be picking cotton than occupied in any other economic niche. Ultimately, the Tajik SSR’s contradictory attempts to concurrently improve agricultural outputs and livelihoods while also guaranteeing rural employment and retaining the necessary population to produce massive quantities of cotton cheaply only exacerbated the situation. As the sociologist Vladimir Mukomel argued during the final years of the USSR, republics such as the Tajik SSR created a status quo in which rural citizens ­were provided with many of the benefits of Soviet modernity without its attendant social change. Promoting equalization and modernization, the Soviet state had built roads, phone lines, electricity poles, r­ unning ­water and pumps, schools, and many other accoutrements of modern society in villages and kolkhozes, such as t­hose tasked with producing thousands of tons of cotton a year. At the same time, even as many kolkhoz workers might have been factually or partially pushed out of work, opportunities and incentives w ­ ere not created for them to urbanize or leave the village. Job creation in urban areas was spotty, inconsistent, and concentrated in a few large cities that w ­ ere often relatively geo­graph­i­cally inaccessible. In addition, Soviet restrictions on movement, built around the institu-

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tion of propiska or registration, meant that rural workers w ­ ere denied access to resources if they moved to cities without official sanction. Thus, the very guarantees and strictures of the Soviet system ­stopped rural Tajik workers from organically overcoming the localized unemployment they faced in their villages and moving to the republic’s cities.68 Remaining in rural areas was often the most comfortable, if not the only, option available. As Mukomel pointed out, by avoiding urbanization, the rural citizens of the Tajik SSR had ­little reason to embrace many of the norms of Soviet society. This tended to further exacerbate the same social contradictions the republican leaders in Dushanbe had long been trying to address. ­Limited in their access to Rus­sian speakers and Russian-­language education, but still structurally encouraged to pursue higher education, rural citizens of the Tajik SSR overwhelmingly chose to study language, lit­er­a­ture, and other humanities, which privileged their Tajik-­language schooling (technical subjects and the sciences w ­ ere almost exclusively taught in Rus­sian).69 In the early 1980s, for example, 41 ­percent of surveyed tenth-­form students in Tajikistan expressed a desire to pursue a humanities degree, while only 10 ­percent ­were interested in technical or science degrees.70 As a result, fewer students applied to technical schools each year than to universities, even though the republic was constantly in need of welders, tractor ­drivers, factory workers, and other blue-­collar specialists.71 This further slowed the mechanization of agriculture: by the mid1980s the state had plenty of tractors and combines, but simply could not produce enough properly trained ­drivers.72 Lit­er­a­ture specialists and translators, on the other hand, ­were unable to find jobs. As the recent gradu­ate B. S. Avezova complained at a meeting with Tajik Communist Party leaders in 1986: Four of us graduated from TGU [Tajik State University] with degrees in Eastern languages, but a­ fter receiving our degree we ­don’t know what to do with ourselves. . . . ​When we studied, we thought that we would work as Hindi lit­er­a­ture translators, but, as it turns out, our profession ­isn’t needed.73 The f­actor that made of all of t­hese difficulties exponentially worse, moreover, was the unrelentingly high birth rate in Tajikistan’s villages. Across the USSR, urbanization and its attendant social changes had long been linked to lowered birth rates; in Tajikistan, the opposite trend t­oward deurbanization had helped to guarantee a birth rate that remained among the USSR’s highest. While the rate had dropped since de­cades past, it still remained at around 5.7 ­children born to each rural Tajik ­family in the mid-1980s—­far more than enough to guarantee a rapidly growing population.74 As a result, the republican leadership’s attempts to increase rural employment and pay, ­labor productivity, or even ­simple school

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construction kept r­ unning into the dead end of more and more mouths to feed. “It is impossible not to see,” the chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers Izatullo Hayoev noted in the mid-1980s, “that GNP per capita figures are worsening in connection with the high rates of population growth” in the republic. As a result, he concluded, overall “standard of living growth” was also coming to a standstill, unable to keep up with the growing population’s demand for resources.75 By the mid-1980s, resources w ­ ere stretched increasingly thin across the w ­ hole of the Tajik SSR as high birth rates, growing unemployment, and workers’ low salaries all dampened the republic’s long-­term prospects for growth and development.

A Thousand Threads of Financial Stability Surveying the state of Tajikistan’s social and economic development in 1985, the leaders of the Tajik SSR would have faced a fragile but stable status quo. On the one hand, Tajikistan’s place within the Soviet “division of ­labor” as a producer of cotton had led to serious challenges. By the mid-1980s, Tajikistan was the USSR’s most agrarian republic, and one that boasted some of the lowest rates of ­labor productivity. Industrialization, including the construction of some of the world’s largest hydroelectric dams, appeared to have done l­ ittle to change the under­lying agrarian focus of the republic’s economy. Unemployment, officially denied but unofficially recognized by every­one in Tajik politics, was growing, especially in rural areas. The consistently high birth rate in the republic, moreover, meant that more and more p­ eople ­were added to the waiting lists for housing, schools, and even kindergartens each year.76 As one minister sighed in the late 1980s, “­We’ll never get ahead of kindergartens or schools ­unless we do something decisive.”77 The Tajik SSR never got ahead of kindergartens, the construction of which remained throughout the 1980s woefully insufficient. It never got ahead of most of the economic quandaries it faced. Yet it remained stable, with a growing economy, content populace, and loyal po­liti­cal leadership. Part of the reason for this aplomb in the face of structural and perhaps intractable economic imbalances was, as this chapter has described, a sense that life was all the same improving, and that further improvements ­were around the corner. Another reason was the fact that Tajikistan’s economy—­and society for that m ­ atter—­did not exist in a vacuum. It was instead bound to Moscow and the rest of the USSR by a thousand threads of plans, fulfillment ­orders, spare parts, raw materials, finished goods, and work directives. Bauxite was mined in Siberia and brought for pro­cessing in Tursunzade to the south of Dushanbe. In the capi-

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tal, Pamir-­brand refrigerators ­were manufactured and shipped across the USSR, where they w ­ ere considered one of the best appliances available. More than anything ­else, however, cotton was harvested in Tajikistan and shipped to Rus­ sia and Ukraine for pro­cessing; in exchange, hundreds of millions of rubles of investment and many finished goods ­were brought to the republic. During the final years of the USSR, t­ hese financial and goods transfers to the Tajik SSR and other Central Asian republics would become a ­matter of approbation, “subsidies” wasted on the periphery with ­little result. Since the collapse of the USSR, discussion has abounded about the supposed level of subsidies in the region; Moscow is said to have provided 45 ­percent of Tajikistan’s annual bud­get in direct transfers.78 It was no secret that Tajikistan received financial transfers from the Soviet center. Official republican bud­get documents openly listed “funds from the Soviet bud­get,” and the USSR’s statistical agencies in Moscow frequently calculated the difference between income earned in the Tajik SSR and income spent t­ here. Money was clearly flowing into Tajikistan, but rather than a series of subsidies, this was instead understood as a financial reflection of the Soviet Union’s “division of ­labor,” which required the republic to produce cotton. “The relationship between national income produced and used” in a par­tic­u­lar republic, the Soviet Union’s State Statistics Committee explained in a late 1980s memo, was largely based on the physical location of raw materials. “It is significant,” the memo continued, “on which republics’ territories agricultural goods are produced and industrially pro­cessed, insofar as the turnover tax (nalog s oborota) from agriculture is realized in final consumer prices.”79 In other words, cotton taxes ­were not provided directly to the Tajik SSR but collected elsewhere in the rubles paid for cotton clothes and other products.80 Denied ­these taxes, both the Tajik bud­ get and economy consistently needed additional revenues, which w ­ ere provided by the Soviet center year ­after year. Instead of subsidies or wasted transfers, however, ­these funds represented an impor­tant part of the larger Soviet financial system; they in fact helped to stabilize the superstructure. Both Soviet calculations and recent reconstructions of tax revenue figures have pointed to a largely balanced ledger: each year, a similar amount of rubles was spent supporting the Tajik SSR’s economy as was received elsewhere in additional tax revenue.81 In good harvest years, the Tajik SSR may have actually provided to the USSR more value than it received, while in fallow years the small percentage it received back—­generally no more than 5 ­percent of its national income—­tended to make up for previous years. This was in no way equalization and did l­ ittle to address the structural inequalities between the Tajikistani economy and t­hose of Rus­sia or the Baltic republics. But it did stabilize the balance sheets and allow the Tajik SSR to find

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cash for road construction, new buildings, or the occasional kindergarten. Of course, with centralized transfers came the need to appeal almost constantly to Moscow. As the former head of Tajikistan’s Gosplan ­later said, “We came to Moscow literally ­every month—­every­thing had to be de­cided through the center.”82 Many new initiatives had to be approved in Moscow, and the archives are full of requests for additional monies: for roads, for reconstruction ­after an earthquake, for new factories, and even for expansions to government buildings. That the archives also show most of t­hese requests w ­ ere approved attests to the thousands of financial threads stretching from Moscow south to Dushanbe. The multitude of financial ties connecting the Tajik SSR to Moscow kept the republic stable; even as structural imbalances built up, the Soviet superstructure was able to keep them in relative check. As a result, the leaders of the Tajik SSR continued to oversee consistent, if incremental, growth and enjoy consistently lengthy stays in power; the populace saw its standard of living, salaries, and access to goods inch upwards. Life in the republic remained by all accounts overwhelmingly calm, quiet, and safe. Recorded thefts of both private and state property (always a significant worry in the state-­dominated Soviet economy) w ­ ere relatively low and even decreased in the early 1980s; the majority of all such crimes, moreover, w ­ ere essentially misdemeanors, leading to l­ittle more than fines.83 Even in Dushanbe, where the urban environment statistically leaned t­ oward higher crime, Tajik citizens enjoyed exceptionally low rates of murder (