ABSTRACT
Presidential rule in post-Soviet Tajikistan is unlike that in any other Central Asian state. The current president, Imomali Rahmonov, is not a former first secretary of a republican Communist Party who made himself president, emulating Gorbachev, before the fall of the Soviet Union and managed to hold on to power ever since (as in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, or Turkmenistan). Nor is he someone who achieved some standing for non-political achievements and was tapped to embody a new kind of political order, intended to be different from the Soviet legacy (as in Kyrgyzstan). There were people in Tajikistan who wanted to play those roles, but they either lost power or never had it. Rahmonov’s main qualification for leadership, at least at first, was his insignificance. Within a few months in 1992, this man who was not yet forty went from being the director of the sovkhoz (state farm) where he grew up, to the speaker of Tajikistan’s Supreme Soviet, at the time, the highest office in the state. At least at the outset, he was the figurehead for other men who wanted to preserve the substance of Soviet-style rule by a self-selected elite and fought a civil war to get what they wanted.
