ABSTRACT
The territorial disintegration of the former Soviet empire and the emergence on its ruins of new state entities were the natural outcome of profound, latently maturing processes which surfaced in the period of glasnost and perestroika. In the early 1990s, developments in Tajikistan were taking the course common to all the national regions in the Soviet periphery in the last years of the USSR’s existence. There are at least two proximate central elements in the conceptual formation of the political parties and movements in Tajikistan and the formulation of their platforms: first, the idea of national renaissance and, second, the attendant social determinants. All the parties and movements in Tajikistan appeal in their programmatic documents to the ‘people’ as their natural social base. Tajikistan’s political parties were set up by representatives of the republic’s ‘educated class’ with its inherently contradictory internal structure. It was only natural and easily understandable that communists should rely on backing of Leninabad and Kulab Oblasts.
