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TAJIKISTAN

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Quick Facts:

Official Name: Republic of Tajikistan
Local Name: Jumhurii Tojikiston
Population: 7,320,815 (July 2006 est.)
Capital City: Dushanbe
Languages: Tajik (official), Russian widely used in government and business
Official Currency: somoni
Ethnic Groups: Tajik, Uzbek, Russian, Kyrgyz, other
Religions: Sunni Muslim, Shi'a Muslim, other

Flag

Three horizontal stripes of red (top), a wider stripe of white, and green; a gold crown surmounted by seven gold, five-pointed stars is located in the center of the white stripe. The flag of Tajikistan was officially adopted on November 24, 1992.
Tajikistan 's flag still displays colors from its original republic flag, when it was a part of the former Soviet Union. Red is from the Russian flag; green is symbolic of its agricultural products, and white represents the cotton crop. The centered crown with seven stars is said to represent the country's independence.


The Tajik people came under Russian rule in the 1860s and 1870s, but Russia's hold on Central Asia weakened following the Revolution of 1917. Bolshevik control of the area was fiercely contested and not fully reestablished until 1925. Tajikistan became independent in 1991 following the breakup of the Soviet Union, and it is now in the process of strengthening its democracy and transitioning to a free market economy after its 1992-1997 civil war. There have been no major security incidents in recent years, although the country remains the poorest in the former Soviet sphere. Attention by the international community in the wake of the war in Afghanistan has brought increased economic development assistance, which could create jobs and increase stability in the long term. Tajikistan is in the early stages of seeking World Trade Organization membership and has joined NATO's Partnership for Peace.

In creating the new Central Asian republics in the 1920s, the central political leadership arbitrarily defined national identities, which until that time had had little political importance. In the case of the Tajiks, this meant not only differentiating them from the Uzbeks, with whom they had much in common despite their different native languages, but also from fellow Persian-speakers outside the Soviet Union. Although the labels "Tajik" and "Uzbek" were not Soviet inventions, they had little meaning to many of the people to whom they were suddenly applied. This circumstance led to much confusion when people were required to identify themselves by one of these two national designations.

The Tajiks' language, which they traditionally had called Persian (Farsi), was relabeled Tajik. Major Persian-language writers were called Tajiks, even if they had not used that term to describe themselves and had not lived in Central Asia. Tajik, like the other Central Asian languages, underwent a two-stage alphabet reform by order of the Soviet regime. First, the Arabic alphabet was abandoned in 1929 in favor of the Latin. Then, in 1940 Moscow declared Cyrillic the official alphabet of the Tajik language.

Meanwhile, during the 1930s and 1940s Tajik culture was redefined and Sovietized to suit the political requirements of the central government of Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin. In the renewed wave of Stalinist repression after World War II, Tajik intellectuals were purged for being nationalists, a loosely defined offense that could be applied to any form of opposition to central government policies.

By the time Tajikistan became an independent republic in 1991, its multiethnic population included an ethnic majority of Tajiks and an even larger religious majority of Muslims.

Information and maps above taken from Library of Congress Country Studies and the CIA World Fact Book. Unless otherwise specified, images sourced from Wikimedia Commons.

Tajikistan Internet Resources

This page contains convenient starting points for exploring web sites related to Tajikistan. To make this page easier to load and use, we generally have limited the list to those sites which contain substantial collections of links to information on these subjects. The views reflected on any web site linked below do not necessarily reflect the views of the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center. We provide these links as a service to the public.

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