ABSTRACT

When Tajikistan declared its independence from the crumbling USSR in September 1991 the Soviet armed forces in the country were composed of three elements: 201st Motor Rifle Division (MRD), a regiment of the Air Defence Forces (PVO) and KGB Border Guards along the Afghan and Chinese borders. In addition the traditional military commissariat system existed throughout the country, to mobilise conscripts and reserves. The 201st MRD formed part of the 40th Army in Afghanistan during the Soviet intervention; it was deployed in the Kunduz area, just south of the Tajik border. With the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in February 1989 the division returned to its pre-war garrison area in the Tajik Republic. After the collapse of the Soviet Union some of the constituent republics took the armed forces stationed on their territory under their own jurisdiction; this was the case in most of the Central Asian republics. Tajikistan was one of those who were unable to do this, leaving the armed forces there in limbo, from which they passed under CIS and eventually Russian control. Thus the Russian General Staff in Moscow never had to make a strategic assessment of the positive reasons for stationing troops in Tajikistan. The strategic justifications for their presence there were basically negative. Russia was happy to retain responsi­ bility for guarding Tajik (and other former Soviet) borders rather than

pay for a new system of frontier protection along its own national boundaries. If Russian border troops were to be left on the border with so unstable a state as Afghanistan they might require support from heavily-equipped combined-arms units. In any case, Russia was already swamped by the burden of relocating forces from Eastern Europe and did not want to increase the number of homeless military families. 201st MRD, therefore, remained in Tajikistan, recruiting its conscript soldiers largely from Tajikistan, but with an overwhelmingly Russian professional cadre of officers and warrant officers. The newly independent Republic of Tajikistan had no armed forces of its own, other than a Presidential Guard of about 1,000 men and some weak Interior Ministry forces.