ABSTRACT
On the one hand, the movements which sprang up in Dushanbe in the perestroika years were strongly conditioned by the history of Tajikistan itself, a former Soviet Republic which surfaced on the map ex nihilo, after the ethno-territorial division of Central Asia under the aegis of the Russian Bolshevik party.2 The primary characteristic of the Tajik situation was that the Republic’s national intelligentsia, which was to play the leading role in the changes that took place in the 1980s, did not have available to it any political references of its own in modern history other than the Communist heritage. Firstly, because the difference between Communists and non-Communists in the political elite of Tajikistan in the last five years has been reduced to the distinction between those who are and those who have been.
