Moscow's Heavy Shadow: The Violent Collapse of the USSR

By Isaac McKean Scarborough

Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of the collapse of the USSR from the perspective of the many millions of Soviet citizens who experienced it as a period of abjection and violence. Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the USSR saw the years of reform preceding the collapse as opportunities for rebuilding (perestroika), rejuvenation, and openness (glasnost). For those in provincial cities across the Soviet Union, however, these reforms led to rapid change, economic collapse, and violence.

Focusing on Dushanbe, Tajikistan, Isaac McKean Scarborough describes how this city experienced skyrocketing unemployment, a depleted budget, and streets filled with angry young men unable to support their families. Tajikistan was left without financial or military resources, unable and unprepared to stand against the wave of populist politicians of all stripes who took advantage of the economic collapse and social discontent to try to gain power. By May 1992, political conflict became violent and bloody and engulfed the whole of Tajikistan in war. Moscow's Heavy Shadow tells the story of how this war came to be, and how it was grounded in the reform and collapse of the Soviet economy that came before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Aug 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501771040

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Cover: Moscow's Heavy Shadow, THE VIOLENT COLLAPSE OF THE USSR by Scarborough, Isaac McKean.

MOSCOW’S HEAVY SHADOW

THE VIOLENT COLLAPSE OF THE USSR

ISAAC MCKEAN SCARBOROUGH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For she who would be queen

So now I’ll turn right round

and unburden an embittered mind

that would rejoice to rejoice

in the second Revolution in Russia

but can’t, because it has got old

and wise and mean and womanly

and says: So. The men

having spent seventy years in the name of something

killing men, women, and children,

torturing, running slave camps,

telling lies and making profits,

have now decided

that that something wasn’t the right one,

so they’ll do something else the same way.

Seventy years for nothing.

And the dream that came before the betrayal,

the justice glimpsed before the murders,

the truth that shone before the lies,

all that is thrown away.

It didn’t matter anyway

because all that matters

is who has the sayso.…

—Ursula K. Le Guin, Poem Written in 1991, When the Soviet Union Was Disintegrating

CONTENTS

Preface

Note on Spelling and Transliteration

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

1. The Periphery before Perestroika

2. Moscow Promotes Perestroika

3. The Winds of Perestroika Drift South

4. 1989

5. The Harsh Reckoning of February 1990

6. The Calm before the Storm

7. Slouching towards Independence

8. The Short Road to War

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

As I completed this book’s final chapters in February 2022, the Russian Federation launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This took the world by surprise: an anachronistic blitzkrieg of tanks and armored columns moving across borders and mowing down civilians in violation of both the accepted norms of behavior in the globalized twenty-first century and the supposedly set post-Soviet order. It took me by surprise: I had spent the months prior repeatedly telling my students that no Russian government would be so foolhardy as to attempt any such assault. I, like much of the world, was wrong and flabbergasted when the invasion occurred. But we should not have been. This was not only because the CIA had been warning of this very outcome for months (although it had been), or because Ukraine had already been at war with Russia over the Donbass region since 2014 (although it had also been), but also because the invasion of Ukraine was simply the most recent bloody chapter of the violent collapse of the USSR.

Although its immediate causes may have been more directly related to the expansion of NATO in recent decades and the Russian president’s own motivations (which remain opaque), the underlying reasons for the war trace back to the collapse of the USSR, the somewhat arbitrary national divisions that resulted, and an ongoing ambiguity about the collapse’s consequences. This has generally been overlooked in the West, but it has been on the minds and the lips of those more directly involved in the conflict. In a piece of incredible and subversive reporting, the Russian journalists Aleksandr Chernykh and Anatoly Zhdanov visited the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol in late April 2022, two months into the ravages of invasion. They were accompanied by a soldier from the army of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), the breakaway region of eastern Ukraine that, along with the neighboring Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), had declared its independence from Ukraine in 2014. Driving through the territory recently occupied by the Russian Federation and the DNR in southern Ukraine, the journalists began taking pictures of abandoned houses and burned-out factories. Their companion from the DNR army laughed at them: That’s not yet the war, he said, That’s history. As soon as the USSR collapsed, everything here began to shut down and disintegrate. And you ask why this all started.¹

This soldier went to war, or was convinced to go to war, in 2014 because when he looked around, all he could see was disintegration. For him, like many others, the collapse of the USSR had led to an unacceptable set of outcomes and a loss of livelihoods, in some places more immediately than in others, that ultimately led to violence as the only plausible or remaining action. Since 1991, those individuals, parties, armies, and states unhappy with the outcomes of the Soviet collapse have often turned to violence to try to reset the scales: to achieve a post-Soviet balance of power more attuned to their own interests. In the West, this has been overlooked, as I have tried to argue in this book, because of the general assumption that the worst (nuclear war) had been avoided and the idea that ultimately the post-Soviet sphere was moving toward Western norms of governance and stability. Any violence along the way was an exception to the rule—except that when the sheer number of these exceptions begins to be listed, the supposed rule begins to look quite shaky. A partial list of conflict zones would include Georgia, Chechnya, North Ossetia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Osh, Ferghana, Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and now Donbass and Ukraine. In recent years the scale of violence and its ongoing nature have become apparent, with Azerbaijan reopening its war with Armenia in late 2020 and successfully resetting the scales of post-Soviet territorial settlement in its favor. The current war in Ukraine should dispel any further doubts: we thought the violent collapse of the USSR was over, but we were wrong: it is very much ongoing.

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This book tells the story of Tajikistan’s experience of the violent collapse of the USSR. It was begun, however, in more peaceful years and represents the conclusion of a long path started a decade ago in Dushanbe. Along this path, it was guided and supported by innumerable individuals, all of whom deserve greater thanks than I can here give: help without which this story could not have been told. Conversations with Abdughani Mamadazimov motivated this project and provided it with an initial form; this form was then shaped into a research project and concrete proposal with the invaluable aid of Michael Kemper. Vladislav Zubok supported the project at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where it became the basis for my PhD thesis, which Professor Zubok supervised and never tired of correcting, promoting, and guiding to completion, much to its final benefit.

Research for this book was conducted in Moscow, London, Texas, Amsterdam, and, more than anywhere else, Dushanbe. I am deeply grateful to the archivists and librarians working on the many collections I have consulted, not all of whom I can list here. I am, however, particularly thankful to RGASPI’s Mikhail Vladimirovich for his insightful suggestion to consult Nikolai Ryzhkov’s files. In Dushanbe, my thanks go to Usmon Usmonov at the National Library’s periodical section for his constant help and friendship, to Api Sayora at the Reading Room of the Library of the Tajik Academy of Sciences for this institution’s especially congenial atmosphere, and to Khusrav at the State Archive of the Republic of Tajikistan, who I hope will one day achieve his dream of musical stardom. In Tajikistan, Matlubakhon Jabborova was an excellent research assistant. Funding for this research was generously provided by the US State Department’s Title VIII Program, the Economic History Society, the Institute for Humane Studies, the LSE Postgraduate Travel Fund, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

Following the completion of research, this book was drafted under the auspices of three institutions, all of which provided support and a welcome academic home. The LSE was always a quiet hub amongst the bustle of central London, and I am especially grateful for the support of the administrative staff in the Department of International History, among them Demetra Frini and Nayna Bhatti. At Liverpool John Moores University, the airy hallways of the John Foster Building were a great place to spend one’s days, as was the Wellcome Trust–funded Growing Old in the Soviet Union project, on which I was employed. I am thankful to the project’s principal investigator, Susan Grant, for her support and advice over the years. The manuscript was completed at Leiden University, where I have been lucky enough to work in the collegial environment of the Institute for History.

As this manuscript developed, chapters and sections were read by Artemy Kalinovsky and Vladislav Zubok, for whose comments I am particularly grateful. Over the many years of this book’s germination, moreover, innumerable individuals have influenced it through their comments, thoughts, seemingly unrelated conversations, and offhand remarks. In no particular order and in no way exclusively, I wish to offer my thanks to Shokhrat Kadyrov, Olga Brusina, Tohir Kalandarov, Max Skjonsberg, Aleksandra Brokman, Botakoz Kassymbekova, Klaus Richter, Jonathan Gumz, Guzel Maitdinova, Aeron O’Connor, Karolina Kluczewska, Isabelle Duyvesteyn, Anita Prazmowska, Zikriyo Akrami, Nurali Davlat, Shodiboi Jabborov, Bahrom Rahmatjonov, Zarinakhon Rahmatulloeva, Madeleine Reeves, Beatrice Penati, Alexander Morrison, Sergei Abashin, Timothy O’Connor, and Riccardo Mario Cucciolla. At Cornell University Press, this book benefited greatly from the sure guidance of Jim Lance and Clare Jones, who have shepherded it through the many twists and turns of the publishing process. Ben Nelson provided the book’s excellent maps. More than anyone else, however, I am forever grateful to my wife, Malika Bahovadinova, who has never tired of commenting on, critiquing, and helping to improve this manuscript. If this book manages to say something valuable, this is to her credit alone.

In closing, it needs to be said that as a work about modern Tajikistan, this book could never have been written without the many individuals who spoke to me about their lives over the years in Tajikistan, from strangers in the streets of Dushanbe to cotton farmers in Qurghonteppa, from the political interviewees cited in this book to the booksellers, shopkeepers, taxi drivers, barbers, art gallery owners, bankers, NGO workers, UN officials, bread bakers, and many others with whom I conversed. I would not have been able to write this book without them, or without the neighbors and friends I came to know and cherish in the country. Tajikistan is a wonderful place: verdant and green and full of some of the most charming and charismatic people I have ever met. It has not, however, had the easiest of decades in the years since the collapse of the USSR, with social convulsion or perturbation seemingly never far beyond the horizon. For all of those who informed my research, and for everyone in the country, I do so very hope—nasip boshad—that the future may be that much easier.

Amsterdam, May 2022

NOTE ON SPELLING AND TRANSLITERATION

This book contains many names and foreign words transliterated from Russian and Tajik, both of which are written in Cyrillic characters. In the case of Russian words and names, the standard US Library of Congress transliteration scheme is used, with the exception of proper names with established English spellings (for example Yeltsin in place of El’tsin). For Tajik, which lacks an agreed-upon standard for transliteration into Latin characters, a slightly modified version of the Library of Congress scheme has been chosen to balance between the phonetics of the language and ease of reading in English. For those characters in Tajik not covered by the Library of Congress standard for Russian, the following table has been employed:

The spellings of toponyms and proper names have also changed extensively in Tajikistan since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. For example, the southern Tajik city of Kulyab has become Kulob, and many politicians and others have dropped the Soviet -ov ending from their last names (Usmonov, for example, becoming Usmon). These changes represent a political choice in the country, but rather than take a stance on the proper spelling of any name or toponym, this book instead uses the place and proper names in the form and spelling employed by individuals and government bodies during the period of study itself. This avoids the historical anachronism of applying modern names to historical cities or applying political lenses from today to the spelling of historical personal names. For these reasons, the city in the south of Tajikistan is consistently spelled Kulyab in this work, and names are listed as per their contemporary, rather than later, spellings and pronunciations. Where multiple versions of one name are contemporaneously used, such as in the case of the opposition politician Tohir Abdujabbor, who during the 1980s interchangeably signed his last name Abdujabbor, Abdujabborov, and Abdudzhabborov, the most common usage has been chosen as the standard. Specialist readers may also note an apparent mixing of Russian and Tajik spelling norms in many names, such that Kahhor Mahkamov, for example, is rendered with the letter h replacing what is either х in the Russian spelling of the name or ҳ in the Tajik equivalent, but with k replacing the к/қ ambiguity. While spellings like this are not in accordance with proper transliteration as per either Russian or Tajik norms, they represent the actual pronunciation of names in late Soviet Tajikistan, which in practice mixed both.

ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Map of the USSR. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

Map of Tajikistan. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

Map of Dushanbe. Courtesy of Bill Nelson.

Introduction

The Long Road to Violence

How terrible it is that the world suffers such,

That friend is pulled apart from friend,

For days we were as close as to touch,

A hundred offenses tear us apart in the end

—Unattributed folk poem (she"ri khalqy)

Death came for Qadriddin Aslonov in December 1992. It came as death does in war—suddenly but inevitably, inexorably slow but over in a moment. Held captive for five weeks on a collective farm near the town of Pyanj on the Tajik-Afghan border, Aslonov fell victim to the miasma of violence and civil war that had engulfed Tajikistan over the previous six months. Appointed acting governor of Tajikistan’s southern Kurgan-Tyube region in October, Aslonov had been the representative of Tajikistan’s central government in a region over which it increasingly had little control. On October 29 he set out for Pyanj to meet with Jahonkhon Rizoev, acting governor of the breakaway southern region of Kulyab. Neither Rizoev nor Aslonov made it to their planned meeting. Rizoev was murdered by a rival for power, Sangak Safarov, on October 28, and Aslonov was captured by Faizali Saidov, one of Safarov’s supporters, on his way to Pyanj. Never allowed to leave his captivity on the collective farm, he was given the chance to call home and speak with his wife and children in the first days of December. Thereafter he was shot.¹

In contrast to many who died in Tajikistan in the summer and fall of 1992, Aslonov was no stranger to the conflict that led to his death; his own actions as a politician had helped, however inadvertently, to bring Tajikistan to this juncture. During the quiet Soviet years of the 1980s, he had been largely unknown outside of the higher echelons of the Communist Party of Tajikistan (CPT), where he had the reputation of an effective if unassuming party manager. A handsome man in his early forties, he was, in the words of his contemporaries, far from politics and deficient in matters of state administration.² Yet in November 1990 Aslonov had been elevated to the position of chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR when the previous chairman, Kahhor Mahkamov, ascended to the newly minted presidency of the republic. Mahkamov was also the first secretary of the CPT, and Aslonov, his deputy secretary, was meant to support him in the Supreme Soviet. He quietly did so until September 1991, when Mahkamov was suddenly forced to resign in the face of strident protests and Aslonov found himself, against all expectations, the acting president of Tajikistan. Under pressure from all sides, Aslonov first bowed to the demands of the anti-Soviet opposition, declaring Tajikistan an independent republic and passing a temporary ban on the Communist Party. As counterprotests rose from those in favor of retaining the old order, however, he folded, resigning his position and retiring from politics.³ Unexpectedly returning in October 1992, Aslonov traveled to Kurgan-Tyube and later Pyanj, knowing full well the danger he faced in what was then the center of the Tajik Civil War.⁴ Perhaps there seemed no other choice to take—both Aslonov’s political stature and the calm and quiet world of Soviet Tajikistan he had known before 1990 had disintegrated, leaving little in its stead.

Aslonov was hardly alone in watching his world collapse, his job become intolerable, and his life and the lives of those around him being snatched away. To one degree or another and in one form or another, this was the fate of millions in Tajikistan during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As the Soviet political order crumbled during the last few years of the USSR, the citizens of Tajikistan watched in confusion, overwhelmingly disagreeing with the need for radical change, growing bewildered with the justifications promulgated by Moscow, and facing a fundamental downturn in their standard of living. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs and livelihoods in 1989–1992 as the economy took a nosedive and former guarantees of employment, salaries, and social support vanished. Moscow’s previous economic coordination and political backing waned, but as its shadow over Tajikistani society lightened, many people found the light of day harsh and uncompromising; others continued to yearn for the shade of Russia’s heavy presence. With nearly all social expectations evaporating, some Tajikistani citizens tried to continue working, sticking to routines and jobs even as protests turned ugly, while others joined the protests, riots, and, by May 1992, the warring camps fighting a bloody civil war. Estimates continue to vary, but at least twenty to twenty-five thousand people were killed during the Tajik Civil War (1992–1997), the vast majority during the first six months of the conflict (May–December 1992).⁵ Nearly seven hundred thousand people were displaced, becoming refugees in Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, as well as in its other major cities and in neighboring countries.⁶

In part, this book is meant to tell Aslonov’s story, along with the stories of tens of thousands who experienced similar fates. Rather than the story of their deaths, however, it is the story of how and why collapse and death arrived; it is not the story of violence, which is often told, but the prehistory of violence, which can easily be forgotten. That Aslonov was executed in an outlying collective farm near Pyanj in December 1992 was neither inevitable nor random, but rather the consequence of the ways in which the USSR reformed, collapsed, and descended into chaos in southern Tajikistan. Before 1985, this would have been inconceivable: Tajikistan was as quiet and stable a corner of the USSR as could be found, free of protest, unrest, or even significant political initiative. Understanding the economic conditions and political environment that predated the violence on display in 1992 requires moving backwards in time, to the point at which the USSR began to change with the initiation of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika (restructuring) reforms in the mid-1980s. This book shows how these reforms to the Soviet Union’s economic and political system undermined Tajikistan’s previous stability, enervated a new class of populist politicians, and led to the outbreak of civil war in May 1992.

It may be easy to think of Tajikistan, and its thousands of Aslonovs, as little more than outliers, the extreme and violent end of a spectrum of perestroika-era and post-Soviet outcomes scattered across the detritus of the USSR. Tajikistan is far away, even from Moscow, and certainly from America or Europe; Aslonov, Mahkamov, Safarov, and other Tajikistani politicians and combatants in the Tajik Civil War have names, lives, and experiences that can seem peripheral and hard to follow. It would be easy to write off Tajikistan as an unrepresentative example of Soviet collapse and post-Soviet trajectory. Yet it would be fundamentally wrong to do so. The violent collapse of the USSR in Tajikistan has much to show about the collapse of the Soviet Union as a whole, and even about social disorder elsewhere in the world.

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Notwithstanding Western triumphalism over the end to the Cold War and the impending collapse of the USSR, the world watched in worry as the Soviet empire crumbled. The Soviet Union had the second most powerful military in the world: its arsenals were vast and spread across Eurasia, from Belarus to Kazakhstan and further east. Even as Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1985, attempted to reform the Soviet economy, oversaw the collapse of that economy, and largely single-handedly surrendered the Cold War to the West, the Soviet military had remained unified and secure. Only in the fall of 1991 did this sacrosanct institution of order also begin to crack, pulled apart by the competing forces of republican independence and central financial bankruptcy. In Moscow, neither Gorbachev, president of the USSR, nor Boris Yeltsin, president of the Russian Federated Republic, had funds to support the whole of the military, while their political rivalry for power made many officers feel like pawns. In the fifteen Soviet republics, the fall of 1991 was a time of political reassessment, with the former support of the central Soviet government, now broke and toothless, replaced with local populism and rule by fiat. Military assets increasingly began to look important to local politicians hoping to hold and retain power.

What most worried the world—and most immediately Western leaders, such as President George H. W. Bush in Washington—was the fate of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.⁷ If the USSR collapsed, it was unclear what would happen to its unified armed forces; if the armed forces broke up, it was unclear what would happen to the nuclear arms located in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. The United States had long been committed to nuclear non-proliferation in an attempt to retain its nuclear hegemony through limitations on other nuclear states, and it had little desire for the sudden arrival of three or more new nuclear-armed powers.⁸ As the Soviet Union came to an end in December 1991 and over the coming years, the United States worked overtime, and quite successfully, to prevent the spread of uncontrolled nuclear weapons. Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Belarus all renounced the nuclear weapons they inherited, and the United States worked with Russia, now enthroned as the single nuclear successor to the USSR, to destroy or remove all of the nuclear arms from elsewhere in the former USSR. The possibility of rogue states had been avoided; the United States and the West could breathe a sigh of relief, knowing the worst had been avoided.⁹

And yet as Washington slept soundly, blood flowed across the former USSR. Lost in the single-minded focus on nuclear armaments had been the banal vastness of the actual Soviet military and its hardware.¹⁰ No military is simply missiles, rockets, or silos; much of any army, navy, or air force is much simpler: tanks, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, boats, rifles, bullets, and soldiers and officers. This equipment makes up most of any military and constitutes the central element of any state’s capacity to produce violence. Throughout the twentieth century, the majority of causalities in war have not been victims of rockets, but those killed by small arms; not those facing the scream of gravity’s rainbow, but those mundanely cut down in the eyesight of man.¹¹ The Soviet military was no exception. As the USSR crumbled, so did its military, with assets as large as air forces and as small as boxes of bullets becoming scattered across its successor states. Some republics were more successful than others in fighting for and acquiring these assets, while others made little attempt to capture what might have formed the basis for a new republican military. As the arms dispersed unequally, however, so did the violence: conflicts predating the collapse in Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and Ossetia grew worse, and new struggles in Chechnya, Transnistria, and Tajikistan became bloody. Across the former USSR organized crime exploded, as did daily violence and murder, as the availability of arms and the emptiness of wallets (and store shelves) both did their part. By 1993 Yeltsin had shelled the Russian parliament, Tajikistan was fully engulfed in a civil war, and Chechnya was about to fight and win its first war of independence from Russia.

For those who lived through the 1990s in the former USSR, this is not a surprising story. It is instead the lives that they lived, and an experience that they can, in one shape and degree or another, recognize. There is good reason why Russians today refer to that decade as the wild 1990s (likhie 90-e), and publications from across the former Soviet space attest to the chaos, violence, and simple difficulties of the years following the collapse of the USSR.¹² For those in the West, however, it came as a surprise that the end of communism did not herald the social and economic renewal that had been promised. Of course, the violence and absolute depravity of the collapse was easy to ignore or write off as the unavoidable tailwinds of socialism. The various wars that occurred in the post-Soviet space in the early 1990s were disparate and peripheral; Moscow was (mostly) not aflame, the nuclear armaments had been secured, and things could have been worse, such as in Yugoslavia. Political scientists have written extensively, for example, about the relative shortness and lower-than-average number of casualties of post-Soviet conflicts, when compared to other civil wars of the twentieth century. When compared to other social collapses, the implication is that the violence following the Soviet collapse was just not as bad.¹³ More importantly for the citizens of the United States and Western Europe, however, the 1990s were a time of relative peace and unheralded economic growth: life was good, and the goods of capitalism were clearly just around the bend for the former USSR, after it overcame the hiccups left from its socialist hangover.

Overcoming and broadening this perspective requires both tying together the many conflicts that started and stopped along the southern and eastern edge of the former USSR and seeing their links not to a lost superstructure but instead to the conditions in which they erupted. This means returning to the period immediately prior to the collapse, the six years now known as perestroika (1985–1991) after the reforms initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev. It means considering the state of the USSR prior to this period of reforms and the actual impact that the reforms had, at first incrementally, and later aggregately. This, in turn, requires focusing on the experiences of former Soviet citizens, and not on a Western-centric geopolitical lens. The fact that life could have been worse does not in any way mean that it was not fundamentally bad. Whatever was happening contemporaneously in Yugoslavia or had happened in earlier decades in Africa or East Asia was completely irrelevant to those caught in the crossfire in Chechnya, or Nagorno-Karabakh, or Tajikistan, or Tambov, just as irrelevant as the predicted trajectory toward consumer capitalism and a stable market.¹⁴

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This book attempts to understand the process by which the Soviet Union’s economy and polity collapsed and the violence this collapse engendered from the perspectives of those who lived through it. It cannot tell the story of the entire USSR, a landmass and a citizenry far too vast to sit within the confines of a single book. Instead, it narrates the history of collapse and disintegration from the perspective of Tajikistan, which experienced one of the worst cases of violence resulting from the end of the USSR. As a case study for the broader collapse, moreover, Tajikistan provides a surprisingly apt and clear perspective. In Moscow and much of Russia, the period of perestroika and the subsequent collapse have been deeply politicized since their occurrence. Today, as a growing body of literature has demonstrated, the collapse of the USSR is an increasingly bemoaned event in Russia—the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century in the words of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, a disaster that could and should have been avoided.¹⁵ Yet even in the face of such criticism, Gorbachev’s defenders remain convinced that the collapse had nothing to do with his policies and changes to the Soviet polity and economy. Western historians, too, frequently give Gorbachev a nearly complete pass, citing his reforms as a failed—but right-minded—attempt to change the USSR for the better.¹⁶ When his work failed, the USSR disintegrated and life became unbearable for millions, but, as this line of reasoning goes, it was the fault of long-suppressed ethnic hatreds and nationalism, the baggage of Stalinism, the inherent inefficiencies of socialism, the structural fault lines built into the USSR’s semi-imperial system of republics, and the inevitable forward movement of history away from authoritarianism that together led to the collapse of communism and the disintegration seen in its wake.¹⁷ It is undeniable that all of these factors had an important role to play in the final collapse of the USSR. Yet in this perspective the period immediately prior to the collapse—Gorbachev’s perestroika—can fade in importance, if not recede entirely as simply lost time.

This is partly because the history of the Soviet collapse that exists today has been largely written from the perspective of the city where it was engineered (Moscow), using documents produced by the architects of reform (Gorbachev and those around him), and avoiding, in many cases, the actual results of the reform program. Consequently, there has been an attempt to remove responsibility from individuals, including Gorbachev, his advisors, and the other Soviet politicians who took advantage of the new order to enrich or empower themselves, and shift it to the forces of history, the centrifugal forces (tsentrobezhnye sily) so loved in Soviet academic literature. From the perspective of life in a Western democracy, it may be tempting to suggest that certain social orders—democracy, capitalism—are inherently better and more desirable than others; if exposed to a free market of ideas, it is suggested, these structures inevitably win out. In this view, all citizens of authoritarian states, the USSR included, are inherently opposed to the states in which they live and are essentially waiting for a chance to reject these states. These assumptions tend to support the narrative of perestroika’s noble failure: Gorbachev’s attempt to reform the structural flaws of the Soviet Union failed, while providing space for glasnost and freedom of expression. Little wonder, then, that provided with a taste of freedom, the citizens of the USSR (and especially its elites) revolted and moved inescapably toward Western models.¹⁸ Yet history does not move on the back of inexorable waves; there is no forward direction to human existence and human order that is not directed by individuals and individual actions. No matter the moral feelings attached to democracy and capitalism, that the former USSR moved in a particular direction was neither inevitable nor even necessarily desired by all involved.

In the end, understanding exactly what occurred during perestroika and why it engendered so much destruction requires analyzing the real content and consequences of the 1980s’ reforms. No matter the long-term struggles, contradictions, and underlying conflicts in the USSR, the state crumbled and collapsed in 1991, not before or after; it is impossible to understand that collapse and its consequences without a detailed and scrupulous examination of the years immediately prior. This, in turn, demands avoiding the screen of politicized discourse and getting out of the long shadow cast by Moscow. This book tries to do so by moving as far away as possible, to the southern periphery of Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

The homeland for which Aslonov died, Tajikistan is today a small and green pocket of land between the Pyanj River to the south and the Ferghana Valley to the north. The farthest southeast corner of the former USSR, it borders Afghanistan to the south, China to the east, and Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the north, with wobbling borders that defy straight lines and clear explication alike. Nearly covered in mountain ranges, from the Hisor range in the south to the Fan in the north to the Pamirs in the east, it is, and always has been, a difficult place to reach. A thousand years ago it became a refuge for an Ismaili Shia population fleeing religious persecution in the Abbasid Caliphate; in the 1930s and 1940s those escaping potential arrest and internment in the Gulag or late Stalinist anti-Semitism in Moscow equally found it a welcoming home. Tajikistan (or, formally, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic or Tajik SSR) was amongst the poorest and least developed of the fifteen Soviet republics that made up the USSR. Its weight in Moscow was limited, and its leaders often had to struggle to have local investment increased or industry boosted. Over time, the leaders of the USSR showed less and less interest in the republic: Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev both visited Tajikistan, but none of their successors did. Gorbachev in particular paid almost no regard to the republic or to Central Asia, confusing its geography and generally disregarding its importance for the USSR. Until the final years of perestroika, as this book describes, this meant that Tajikistan was largely insulated from the machinations of politics in Moscow, left to develop its own quiet and quietest approach to socialism.

Paradoxically, however, although Dushanbe remained on the absolute edge of Moscow’s shadow, this shadow in many ways grew thicker and heavier on the periphery. Because of their limited influence in Moscow and overwhelming reliance on the Soviet economic superstructure, Tajikistan’s leaders were among the most loyal of party cadres, doing their utmost to follow the Communist Party’s decisions, policies, and ideology and eke out what benefit they could. In the years prior to 1985 and the start of Gorbachev’s perestroika, this largely seemed in keeping with Tajikistan’s interests: investment generally increased, standards of living grew, if at times slowly, and the republic remained stable, safe, and calm. After the start of perestroika, however, the leaders of the Communist Party of Tajikistan (CPT) often found themselves confused and privately frustrated