Russian-Tajik War: 1992-1997

Each post-Soviet conflict of the early 1990s has its own history and motives, but the reason has always been the same – the communist nomenklatura tried to maintain its influence over the remnants of the Soviet Union. In Abkhazia and Karabakh, Russian generals managed to exploit old ethnic disagreements between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Georgians and Abkhazians, while in Tajikistan, they found another reason – religious.

Photo: Internet

This sounds absurd, but the People’s Front, created by Russian military intelligence, fought against a population that had experienced a communist period of atheism and the prohibition of Islam. For 70 years of Soviet power in part of the territory of the former Bukhara Emirate, the communists destroyed mosques and madrasas, any opportunity to preserve traditions that were over a thousand years old, just as churches in Russia or cathedrals in Ukraine and Belarus.

A similar situation occurred in the 1920s and 1930s when the Bolsheviks seized power; the resisting population was called “basmachis.” The Red Army, commanded by Mikhail Frunze, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and more than a million emigrated from the former Bukhara Emirate to neighboring Afghanistan. Eighty years later, the tragedy repeated itself – in Tajikistan, over 150,000 people died in five years of war, and more than a million emigrated, most of them again to Afghanistan.

Tajik Perestroika

Tajikistan is an artificial country created by the Bolsheviks in 1924. Before that, there were several states in Central Asia with their own histories spanning several centuries, but they never had ethnic ties. In the Bukhara Emirate, the rulers were always representatives of the Turkic-speaking “Mangyt” tribe, but the state language of documents was Persian. During the artificial division of Central Asia and the creation of new national territories, Tajiks lost their traditional cultural centers – Samarkand and Bukhara, which were handed over to Uzbekistan by Stalin’s decision.

Stalin decided to create national republics with their own state languages from this vast territory of multilingual people. To ensure that the new republics were dependent on Moscow, in 1929, Persian and Turkic languages were transliterated from Arabic script to Latin, then to Cyrillic, and were named Tajik and Uzbek. The languages of two nomadic peoples were divided and named Kazakh and Kyrgyz, and they were also forced to write in Cyrillic. Peoples, primarily Persian-speaking, lost the ability to read their classical literature in the original, a vast number of works dating back to the 10th century.

The perestroika of Gorbachev in the late 1980s was taken literally by Tajiks – an intellectual movement called “Rastokhez” (Revival) emerged, which began to publish a newspaper of the same name underground. Active individuals in the poorest Soviet republic created discussion clubs, causing concern for the KGB. Tajikistan became the first Soviet republic to adopt a law on the state language – Persian, which regulated the use of the language in official documents for ten years, as well as a transition to Arabic script.

Panic began among the Russian-speaking population of Tajikistan: Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Tatars came to Tajikistan through various means, mostly to work in factories, and therefore were not interested in either the culture or the language of the Tajiks. The adoption of the law became a cause for concern for them. Moscow decided to respond with provocation, conducting an operation to discredit the emerging political opposition.

On February 11, 1990, people gathered in the center of Dushanbe demanding better living conditions from the authorities. In response, shots rang out from the building of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan – snipers from the KGB’s “Alpha” unit were not shooting at the protesters but were searching for targets in neighboring residential buildings, killing not Tajiks to incite panic among the Russian-speaking population. Gorbachev responded by declaring a state of emergency and sending Soviet troops into Dushanbe.

This was the first attempt to destroy the democratic opposition – the KGB began to persecute protest leaders, and a disinformation campaign to discredit dissenters rose in Soviet propaganda. The communists could not suppress the opposition; a year and a half later, during mass protests against the Supreme Soviet, the statue of Lenin, a symbol of Soviet power, was toppled. For several days, a rally continued at the empty pedestal, with several tents set up. The first president of Tajikistan, who was also the leader of the Communist Party, Kakhhor Mahkamov, resigned. The Soviet parliament also decided to ban the Communist Party in Tajikistan.

The Rampage of Democracy

All attempts by the KGB to suppress the emerging opposition led nowhere; in November 1991, under pressure from Moscow, the communists held presidential elections, in which the communist Rahmon Nabiev won again by a narrow margin. After the elections, a large group of Russian generals flew from Dushanbe to Moscow, who helped the new authorities to win. They were also supposed to show the Russian-speaking population and all those nostalgic for the Soviet Union that Russia would protect them.

The perestroika law abolished the one-party rule of the communists, and by the end of 1991, 16 (!) parties were registered in Tajikistan, and 32 independent newspapers of the widest spectrum – from religious to liberal – were published. The authorities were forced to register not only the Democratic Party and the “Rastokhez” movement, consisting of university and academic intellectuals, but also the Islamic Revival Party, which was becoming mass and popular, especially in the southern part of Tajikistan.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the situation became dual: on one hand, the political opposition was strengthening, on the other hand, supporters of Soviet power had a president, a weak-willed and alcoholic self-satisfied representative of the old nomenklatura. But for Moscow, this was not enough – Tajikistan was already slipping out of Kremlin control.

Moscow was irritated by discussions of democracy and the restoration of ancient culture, and even more frightened by the revival of Islam, which, in the best Soviet traditions, was portrayed by Moscow propaganda as dangerous. The former Soviet, now Russian propaganda began another campaign to discredit the Tajik opposition, and since television channels were traditionally watched by the majority of the population, the propaganda techniques were the same – to scare more. Reports from Tajikistan increasingly showed mosques and rows of praying people, not to talk about the revival of religion, but to frighten – look what awaits future Tajikistan.

Russian presence in Tajikistan was in the form of the 201st Motorized Rifle Division, numbering about five thousand people with two regiments stationed in the south of the country. The entire border between Tajikistan and Afghanistan was controlled by the Russian border service, which was also involved in drug trafficking, and Russian military personnel were stationed at stratospheric communication stations. In early 1992, a Russian embassy was established, headed by former Soviet consul in Gdansk Mieczysław Senkiewicz, who began preparing a coup.

Tajik “Maidan”

When a round-the-clock rally began in March 1992, preparations for an operation to neutralize the increasingly popular opposition began in Dushanbe and Moscow. The Kremlin decided to change the scheme of power distribution that existed under Soviet rule, when the first secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party were from the northern regions of the republic, and the heads of governments and the Supreme Soviet were appointed from the southern regions, mountainous areas, and Pamir. Now Moscow decided it was time to hand power to the southerners, but for some reason, the choice fell on representatives from the Kulyab region, the most economically backward, believing that they would not engage in intrigues and would be sufficiently obedient. And, of course, geography played a role – the north is separated from Dushanbe by two mountain ranges, and all events were taking place in the southern part of the country.

Photo: Internet

Most likely, the final decision on a forceful resolution of the situation in Tajikistan was made after the round-the-clock rally began in Dushanbe. The occasion was a public insult of the Minister of Internal Affairs Mamadaez Navjovonov by the Chairman of Parliament Safarali Kendjaev. And since the meeting was broadcast live on television, the insulting words about “wild mountaineers” were heard by the entire country – in the morning, people began to gather in the central square.

For almost two months, the center of Dushanbe was boiling – several dozen tents stood in the square, and tens of thousands of people were constantly present, with several hundred thousand residents from almost all of Southern Tajikistan having participated in the rallies over the two months. It was a tent city – with its own security service, kitchen, medical station, and even its own radio station.

It was difficult for Russia to start a new war. When the Soviet Union collapsed, each of the new countries received a share of the legacy of the Soviet army – some got ships, tanks, or planes, while Tajikistan received not a single bullet. The first government of independent Tajikistan did not even have a Ministry of Defense, only a national guard with a few armored vehicles.

Frightened by the scale of the protest, President Rahmon Nabiev on May 1, 1992, distributed 1,800 automatic rifles from the guard’s arsenal to his supporters, and on May 3, the first shots were fired, killing several opposition members. At the same time, an alternative rally was organized by government supporters in a neighboring square. They held placards saying “No to Islam,” “We are for Democracy.” Democracy, in their view, was embodied by the former chief communist of Tajikistan.

At this alternative rally, the People’s Front was formed, a semi-criminal armed group supported by the authorities. The choice of Russian military intelligence (GRU) fell on crime, which the Chekists had already used against the opposition in February 1990. Now they needed an authority figure, and that turned out to be the criminal hierarchy’s “bakhlan” Sangak Safarov, who had spent six terms in prison totaling 23 years. Russian propaganda immediately began to “cleanse” the bandit, portraying his life as that of an angel, making strange conclusions – “yes, he was once a buffet worker, but he never diluted beer with water.”

The name Sangak began to resonate when he, in November 1992, wearing a muskrat hat, a striped shirt, and a jacket, with a golden tooth, stepped onto the podium of the Supreme Soviet and clearly stated: “We will destroy the democratic scum in Tajikistan and reach Moscow.” This criminal had political views that fully matched the sentiments of Moscow generals and Chekists. Later, when the People’s Front was already equipped and supplied with Russian armored vehicles, red Soviet flags waved on the armored personnel carriers – they did not hide what they were fighting for.

Rivers of Blood.

Moscow created another conflict using the old scheme, applied many times before, exploiting regional differences and contradictions. On one side were people with democratic views, supporters of the Islamic Revival Party, predominantly mountaineers and Pamiris, as well as supporters of Davlat Khudonazarov – a Pamiri, film director, chairman of the Union of Cinematographers of Tajikistan and previously the USSR, and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from the interregional “Sakharov” group. He was a presidential candidate in November 1991, who lost due to the activity of the Moscow nomenklatura.

A biography was quickly concocted for Sangak Safarov, claiming he was the son of a repressed individual from 1935. The reasons and accusations for this repression were not specified. Just as it was impossible to distort the reason for Sangak’s first sentence – for car theft in 1951. Later, he ran over a pedestrian, and then stabbed a person whom biographers called a “Chechen racketeer,” from whom Sangak allegedly defended himself.

From the recollections of GRU Colonel Alexander Musienko: “Our group worked in Kurgan-Tyube, and when the main part returned, I remained as part of the operational group. To somehow legalize ourselves, we came up with the name ‘People’s Front of Tajikistan’ (NFT). Our main support became the criminal authority Sangak Safarov, an elderly man who had spent 23 years in prisons. He was a born leader with excellent organizational skills, a heightened sense of justice and patriotism — he led the NFT…”

In 1993, criminal lawlessness began – the new government of the country consisted of compatriots and relatives of the new leader, Emomali Rahmonov, from the same Kulyab region. More straightforward places began to be seized by authoritative militants and commanders of the People’s Front. The “winners” received bonuses – people who had recently been in criminal reports appeared in ministries. This no longer surprised anyone, as the Minister of Internal Affairs was appointed a well-known Dushanbe racketeer, twice convicted Yakub Salimov.

The name of Yakub Salimov surfaced in February 1990 in another chronicle – as an accomplice in the pogroms initiated by the KGB to discredit the opposition. In December 1993, he was appointed Minister of Internal Affairs, received the rank of Major General, which was unthinkable for a criminal. Two years later, he was released and appointed as Tajikistan’s ambassador to Turkey, then appointed head of the Customs Committee, and in 2003 was detained in Moscow and sent to the pre-trial detention center in Dushanbe on charges of a coup. He was released only in 2016.

Another individual close to criminal circles who soared to great heights was Gaffor Mirzoev, nicknamed “Sedoy.” He also participated in the events of 1990, in the war on the side of the People’s Front, and in the new government received the position of commander of the presidential guard and the rank of Lieutenant General. In 2004, he was appointed director of the Drug Control Agency of RT, and six months later was arrested on charges of organizing a coup, and in 2006 was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Post-Soviet Feudalism

One can imagine the atmosphere under such power, when there is a lot of uncontrolled weapons in the hands of criminals, the “winners” continued to establish their order, instilling fear in peaceful residents. In 1996, two well-known medical professors were killed in Dushanbe – the rector of the medical university Yusuf Iskhaki and the pro-rector of the same university Minkhodj Guliamov; in the same year, the president of the Academy of Sciences Muhammad Asimi was killed. The situation resembled that of February 1990 under the leadership of the KGB, and now it was across the entire country.

The participation of bandits in state building is not new; this is how Soviet power was created, led by an undereducated lawyer Lenin, who called for terror in his articles, a bank robber Stalin, and a huge number of smaller bandits who joined the Bolsheviks. One of the most famous was the “Bessarabian Robin Hood” Grigory Kotovsky.

Modern Russian history is being filled with new names. For example, Major General Ramzan Kadyrov. Or Lieutenant Colonel “Motorola” – Arseniy Pavlov, or Lieutenant Colonel “Givi” – Mikhail Tolstykh: the first recently worked as a car washer, the second as a driver of a diesel loader at a cable factory. They have no special military education, nor do they have any education at all, except for secondary education, and Kadyrov’s is incomplete. There are a huge number of such colonels and generals in the post-Soviet space, especially where local separatist wars initiated by Russia have arisen.

Modern Tajikistan is a corrupt state under complete Russian control. About two million migrant workers are undergoing a process of assimilation, turning from carriers of ancient Persian culture into ordinary “Russians,” as has happened over the last centuries in the Russian Empire. Tajikistan is on the list of the 30 most corrupt countries in the world. In the rankings of human rights organizations, the country is listed as unfree, with a high level of censorship and numerous cases of suppression of freedom of speech. During the war from 1992 to 1997, 73 journalists were killed, and not a single case has been investigated to this day.

Now Tajikistan is an ordinary Moscow colony, where the internal situation is controlled by a Russian military base, which has units stationed throughout the country. The economy is so weak and unprotected that Russia, as the initiator of the Eurasian Economic Union, does not even insist on Tajikistan’s membership. The country has a high level of nepotism, and the political system is close to what happens in the wealthier Turkmenistan and other dictatorial countries. For Moscow, it is important that Tajikistan remains within its sphere of influence; the rest is absolutely unimportant – neither the state of democracy nor human rights.

Oleg Panfilov

(Original published in the Czech-Polish-Slovak publication “Ukrajinský žurnál,” No. 1, 2021)