…….

Tajik youngsters on Rudaki Avenue.

“Tajikistan - why does that place even exist?” was among my last thoughts before embarking on a journey to Central Asia’s most anonymous nation. If Tajikistan is a country, why not Utah, too?

A memorial Afghan tank overlooks a Dushanbe motorway.

Dushanbe has all the highlights you’d expect from a post-Soviet backwater capital: poorly constructed classical administrative buildings, a memorial Afghan war tank, broken fountains and slow-moving trolleybuses. As poor as it is, little has changed since the good old days of subsidies from Moscow - even the statue of “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of what would become the KGB, still stands along a street bearing his name.

A statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, known for putting the "Iron" in "Iron Curtain."

Most Felix statues in the region have been torn down, as a large majority of the countries decided they’d rather not relive the Soviet experience. But, like Transdnistria, Tajikistan apparently hasn’t made up its mind just yet. After all, independence hasn’t been so kind to this neglected son of the communist project; the place was plagued by electricity outages throughout bitter winters, food shortages, broken infrastructure and economic irrelevance even before a civil war killed 50,000 and displaced five times more in the 1990s.

Emomali Rahmon, Tajikistan's president.

A rarity for the region, I only found one photo of Tajik President Emomali Rahmon in the center of the city, covering a dozen windows of the state university, condemning the students to the dark and cold. He was reassuringly ever-present in the villages, however. Note of advice to aspiring megalomaniacs: when you rely on foreign aid to feed your citizens each winter, it’s advisable that you not deify yourself in their neighborhoods.

This place borders mountains to the east and north, a war zone in the south, and sworn enemies to the west. One feels oneself at the precipice of the Earth, in the same way that inspired Alexander to give up on the region and head for the coast some 2,300 years ago. He was not the last emperor to arrive here and see no reason to continue; Tajikistan has been the forgotten edge of empires through the centuries. As a result, post-independence nation-building has netted a hero-leader and a poet-laureate who never actually lived on the territory and haven’t been around for more 1,000 years. The egregiously kitsch new statue of the former is referred to by my colleagues as the “Husband of the Statue of Liberty.”

Statue of Isma'il Samani, father of the Tajiks.

This was the last prize in the Great Game for control of Eurasia between Britain and Russia, the last land retaken by the Soviets after the Revolution, and the last capital on a three-day train ride from Moscow. No one really wanted Tajikistan, but the Russians ended up with it. And, as we learned in South Ossetia, Russia is willing to conquer anything that’s available, regardless of its intrinsic value.

What economic activity there is in the capital is centered on the outskirts of the markets downtown, where, as in every other old Soviet creation, people sell whatever they can scrounge up for whatever income it can generate. Highlights included wheelbarrows full of cheap Chinese textiles, pulled up on the sidewalks. Half the façade of the market was still smoldering from a recent fire.

Statue memorializing the Red Army's campaign against the Basmachi resistance.

Lining the blocks around the bazaar were “tourist agencies” which promised young men freedom in the form of one-way tickets to Russia, where they will find immediate enslavement at 80-hour/week skyscraper building site gulags. Daily flights to Russia bring back 300 deported able-bodied men in black shoes, black pants, and black jackets, with almost no luggage. Ask anyone in the region to describe a Tajik guy, and they will sketch out someone who rushed to a funeral immediately following a street fight.

Statue memorializing the Red Army's campaign against the Basmachi resistance.

One interesting statue is of Red Army forces, united with locals, tracking down the last of the Basmachi resistance to communist rule in 1924. A nice piece of revisionist history, it shows the locals helping the Soviets, when most evidence from the time suggests the locals couldn’t have cared less. This was shortly before the deportations began.

Open drunkenness is a sign of Tajikistan's instability.

Drunkards passed out in the street and children openly beating the daylights out of each other belie the underlying instability of the country. It is desperately overpopulated. Almost all national income derives from remittances, trafficking Afghan heroin to Russia, or from producing aluminum in the cancer-inducing smelter nearby. Its cripplingly irrational jet ski-shaped borders were drawn by Stalin, in order to split the people from their power base in nearby Bukhoro while meeting the population requirements of republic status within the USSR.

Worse, a 700-meter deep lake hovers above the plains, a product of earthquake-induced landslides. Seismologists predict another earthquake would free the water, creating a deluge of biblical proportions which could sweep away one hundred years of civilization in an afternoon.

A public bus in front of Dushanbe's presidential palace.

Foreign aid organizations continue their work here, as if their efforts could reverse the geographical, historical, cultural, or political realities that are keeping the country off the globalization trolley - as if anything could.

It’s possible that the best favor the international community could do for Tajikistan would be to spring its people from Tajikistan itself - give them seven million visas and one-way tickets to anywhere. You’re closed, Tajikistan. In the modern world, some places simply aren’t cut out to be countries.

(Photos and story by Myles G. Smith)