“Tajikistan, Tajikistan, I’ll never forget this land, and the men left behind to die on the rocks.”

An excerpt from a Russian war song, this stanza encompasses the blood spilt in the creation of the eponymous nation in a tragic, yet poetic way. Paul Bergne’s The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic (henceforth referred to as The Birth) delves deeper into the creation of the republic. It starts from the ideals of Tajik identity forged in the fires of war between the Russian Titan and the local Turkish emirates, to the division of the Tajik Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (TASSR) from the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (UzSSR), and eventually the creation of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (TaSSR).

At the Crossroads of Central Asia

Now, whether the effort that went into establishing the fledging ethno-state was worth it or not, is still up in the air, with the Republic of Tajikistan still reeling from the civil war that only ended in 1997 after five long years of bloodshed. The current dictatorship under President Emomali Rahmon has not made life any easier for the average Tajiki, with the only advantage they have over the civil war years being the uncomfortable national stability brought about at the cost of individual freedom.

However, such an exchange would not be of much relief, if it were not for the situation across the Pyandzh — the river that follows Tajikistan’s Southern border. Afghanistan, stuck in the last vestiges of the hopeless war against the Taliban, lacks even the most basic of human necessities that Tajikistan has managed to cobble together since the end of their own civil war. In light of such chaos on the other side of the border, Tajikistan starts to look a lot better comparatively — a view further reinforced when the Tajikistani embassy refused access to Afghan president Ashraf Ghani after he fled the country with bags full of cash.

So, what exactly set the Tajiks apart from their Southern cousins? The Birth, as aforementioned, takes a closer look at the history of the nation from the emerging Tajik identity during the Soviet era. Before the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) started its National Territorial Delimitation (NTD) project — a programme where the Soviet government delimitated its internal republics by ethnicity — the Eastern Iranian Tajiks were subjugated under the Turkic yoke for over a thousand years. During this period, they crafted a unique identity that was neither fully Turkic nor fully Iranian. “In this Islamic Central Asian environment, where ethnicity was of little consequence, the process of assimilation between the latest arrivals, the Uzbeks, and the Iranian/Persian/Turkic/Arab cocktail of peoples whom they found, produced in due course a composite identity of mixed make-up,” explains Bergne, and that “this composite identity became known as ‘Sart’ (lit. Town Dweller).”

History, however, was not as kind to the Tajiks, or the so-called Sarts, as it was to its Turkic neighbors. As soon as the chaotic storm of the Basmachestvo — an Islamic anti-Russian movement that rebelled against the post-WWI conscription programme — settled in Central Asia, the Stalinist purges had their hand in draining the already barren land. And the highlands of Tajikistan, already devoid of human resources, were hit the hardest by the red wave of Soviet cleansing. Yet, one can deduce from this situation that perhaps this cleansing was precisely what differentiated the fate of the Tajiks from the Afghans, who nominally maintained their independence from the Russians. The removal, or at the very least the attempted removal of all potential roadblocks against the Sovietization of Central Asia was what cleared the path for progress post-NTD. As the remnant strains of influence of the Emirs of Khoqand, Khiva, and Bukhara in Central Asia disappeared from the lands, so too did the tribalist feuds, much akin to the ones that retard Afghanistan’s development even today.

The Past and the Present

Now this is not to say that the Soviet method was flawless. Even today, many a scholar holds the opinion that the NTD was naught more than Stalin’s ever-present paranoia dividing the Central Asian Muslims into republics that would never bind together into a resurgent Turkestani revolution. What can be said however is that the 20 year-long American journey in Kabul could have gone better if they had taken note of the different methods the U.S.S.R. used to settle Dushanbe and Kandahar — or more specifically to follow the former and avoid the latter.

Whilst Bergne’s work may not have been written with knowledge of the current situation in Afghanistan, as it stands now, it heavily implores readers to beware of the pitfalls in nation-building. As he put it himself, “while the Soviet solution had seemed to offer a form of national identity… …they were to prove disastrous in a country that was unprepared for the responsibilities of an independence that had been thrust upon it.” The uncanny similarity to the abrupt demobilisation of American troops notwithstanding, The Birth is a haunting note to all readers, and whether Bergne had intended it to be or not, it serves as a very context appropriate guide to nation-building — one where the occupying country does not leave empty-handed after almost 20 years of bloodshed.

As the Spanish philosopher George Santayana put it, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The crucial mistakes that caused the American disaster in Afghanistan had already been tried in Central Asia — and even a short look into history would have proved that the American method of pacifying the Taliban was doomed to fail.

Book Information

Title: The Birth of Tajikistan: National Identity and the Origins of the Republic

Author: Paul Bergne

Publication Year: 2007

Publisher: I.B. Tauris

Pages: 207