Not many big TH-cam channels would make 2 full episodes on a rather small Central Asian nation. Thanks to this channel for going beyond the usual focus areas (big powers and major conflicts)
Having been to Panjakent (in the Northwest, very close to the border with Samarkand), Tajikistan is a beautiful place. The land is very mountainous, but equally as green and lush. The Museums showing Sarazm (the Neolithic site) and Sogdian Panjakent (Late Antique) Period, are nice, though the latter is small. There's a great deal of history in the local Tajik History Museum; Rudaki, an Islamicate 10th Century CE poet, and Alexander's nemesis Spitamenes the Sogdian, are especially beloved. Definitely a beautiful country with very hospitable and kind people!
The more important museum pieces were taken to Tashkent, to be displayed there. On the way to 7 lakes, there is a village built on stilts, which is a world heritage site, it is very old and still lived in.
@@morgan97475 They adore a rice dish called "pilaf", which is a big saucepan of boiled rice, with mutton and garlic bulbs thrown in, personally I found it bland. They also have some steamed dumplings (Can't recall the local name) and I recall mutton samosas. Local drink was (of course) vodka, Russian sausages were available, Russian chocolate (quite nice) and various Russian beers.
As someone who would like to think im pretty well versed on the USSR and Eastern Bloc compared to most people in my country, i will admit this was a subject i knew close to nothing before this video. Thank you for pushing out consistently entertaining and educational content. You raise the bar on this platform for historical content.
Given that it had a border with Afghanistan, I’m assuming a lot of Soviet troops were stationed there in the 80s. Surely that had an effect on its stability
Indeed. Most hospitals treating the battlefield casualties were across the Pianj river from Afghanistan, in Tajikistan. Plus, Tajiks were disproportionately represented among the Soviet forces in Afghanistan as the war dragged on and the casualty numbers rose, as non-russians were seen by moscow as expandable, and less likely to put pressure on the leadership to pullout from the ill-advised war.
Naive people nostalgic for russian imperialism. Wars which Moscow directly helped to investigate (like backing Transnistria, Gaugazia and Abkhazia and refusing to change the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan during soviet times despite the will of the locals). "Ethnic tensions" that happened because Moscow refused the will of the locals, like putting a russian in charge of the Qazaq republic and bloodily ending the lifes of protesters against that decision as well of those in the baltics, which it conquered in WW2 despite having recognized their independence.
Soviet Collapse was violent including in the late 1980s. Many violent riots and ethnic violence 1986-1991 in the different Soviet Republics and uprisings the Soviet Army tried to crush
One thing glossed over in history is how the USSR caused very similar sociopolitical consequences as European imperialism when it came time for them to withdraw.
Let's see the reasons why : direct efforts by Moscow to sabotage the independance of Moldova and Georgia by divide and conquer so that they couldn't live and prosper well enough to get free of their influence. Moscow committing massacres against civilians ready to get what others have the right to have, independence after decades of suffocating and russification. Artificial borders not reflective of the ground realities which Gorbachev refused to change, like in Karabakh. You just see things as a noble hammer ready to pin down the "violence", but never why the violence was there to begin with, it's called russian colonialism and imperialism. Moscow made it violent, because they weren't allowed to break free peacefully in some of these places (but learned the message when it let Ukraine get an independence referendum which it then respected).
@@thimble347 Guys, you say it as if the Soviets or Europeans made locals fight each other. No, it was quite opposite. Violent and bloody national conflicts existed long before the Empires came. The people of Asia and Africa were killing and beheading each other before they were conquered. Empires did their best to suppress the conflicts, in fact, because they needed these lands for resources. As soon as Empires left, locals just returned to their old business-and started killing each other again.
While conflicts did break out after its collapse overall it was far less brutal than the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. That was a full blown civil war fought from Warsaw to Vladivostock with an excess of 7 million dead. By contrast these conflicts would be a secondary front during the Russian civil war. Nevermind the elephant in the room. None of these conflicts involved nukes. If you use this metric the soviet collapse was mostly peaceful. Observers in the early 90s used the Russian civil war as a standard of bad.
@thomasbest8599 There is a 1985 movie starring Dan Akroyd and Chevy Chase called Spies Like Us. This is what the original comment and my reply is referring to.
I love that they made a democratic election, but it feels so sad watching this knowing that the next video is about the subsequent civil war just a year after the election. I am glad I get to learn about this, thanks for making videos about central asia and other things that are not much covered in the west otherwise. good video
I was born in 1981 in the Kyrghiz SSR. My Soviet childhood was very happy. I vividly remember all these tragedies which began in 1988 in different regions of our huge country. I still can’t forget the USSR and I will never forgive Gorbachev and his entourage the collapse of my country
Not just "there" but also in Ukraine, Moldova, Qazaqstan, Azerbaijan and the Baltic republics (as well as increasingly Georgia and Armenia). Goes to show how decades of imperialism and colonization of the economy to serve the interests of Russia rather than Tajikistan made it a tough pill to swallow, but one which promises one day to surpass the standards of old that, because it is now made by the Tajiks for the Tajiks, will be more resilient.
That is because it was an inorganic rule which all institutions built were for the benefit of Moscow. Tajikistan after the collapse needed to all at once face what would be decades worth of institution and community building without any safety net. No colonial power is interested in fostering self sufficiency and autonomy.
It's not regressed. Tajikistan's economy was fragile back in Soviet times already, and the civil war destroyed even that. Huge brain drain and mass migration including destroying most institutions that existed. Tajikistan has made lots of progress for the last 30 years compared to what it had back 1992. There is no need to believe that Soviets provided better living standards or life was somehow better.
Glasnost simply revealed a core too rotten to ignore once the carpet to hide it has been removed. It would stank its way through inevitably, with or without it. Really enjoy the little known history, doesn't like as much the worship of stability at all costs message the video seems to presents.
Exactly. All colonialism is masterful at not fostering autonomy, self-sufficiency effectively burying problems to keep the resources flowing. The Soviet Republics faced much of the same problems other colonies did during the 40-80s as they liberated themselves from their colonial overlords.
I know you said that you ditched the chronological order of covering events, but I really hope this looking forward to the collapse of the USSR doesnt mean you will try to wrap up the Cold War anytime soon, there are still too many things to cover!
I agree. I like to learn from this channel cause not a lot of channels or places actually go over the Cold War period outside of Vietnam, Korea , and the Cuban missile crisis
Cant help but notice you keep referring to Kulob and Khujand as the only meaningful cities during most of the video, except at the very end when Dushanbe appears on the political map?
This - and the video itself - is popular but incorrect. The reality is that significant ethno-linguistic consideration went into the formulation of most of the borders (although there were some deviations, such as the very late political decision to give major Tajik-speaking regions of Bukhara ad Samarkand to the Uzbek SSR). Scholars at the time really did try their best to draw borders that respected cultural boundaries, while simultaneously providing each of the new SSRs with the human capital to foster the creation of sustainable new nations (which is why they added the large population base of Osh to Kyrgyzstan, despite Osh being mainly Uzbek). This approach made more sense than it might appear in retrospect, because as the video correctly notes, at this time there was no local concept of greater nationhood, but rather of clan and local lordships.
"the road to hell is paved with good intentions". I believe Gorbachev had the best of intentions but clearly an inadequate understanding of the situation. Not sure what would have been the right thing to do, though. Maybe allow it to divide up along tribal lines but with free movement, allow each one to develop gently then they'll merge when they're ready.
Something I noticed is that most of what happened to this country is very similar to what happened to several African countries. -A locality where people feel more represented by their tribes than by an invented country or nationality. -A delicate balance, like a house of cards, between these tribes. -A foreign country, with no connection to its citizens, trying at all costs to improve the country, "civilize," and move people out of rural areas. -It disrupts the balance between the tribes and villages. -Suddenly leaves the country and abandons them to their own fate. -Quick elections where the opposition doesn’t accept the results well. -Civil war.
The myth of peaceful post soviet transition is just that, a myth. The only republics it truly applies to are Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Even then none of those has avoided delayed violence.
The Soviet Union collapsed peacefully. It did not break up peacefully. There was far less fighting to prevent its collapse than there was over what the aftermath would look like. This removed a lot of the potential inconveniences for the outside world. There were no loose nukes, no independence war in the proper sense of the term for any of the 15 constituent republics, no civil war in Russia itself, no takeover in Moscow by nationalists or hardline communists, no rogue generals, no interventions by foreign powers on Soviet soil, no Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe to prevent a communist collapse there, and definitely no "Red Storm Rising"-style shenanigans. If you'd told an informed person on the day of Gorbachev's inauguration as general secretary that the Soviet Union and the communist governments of Eastern Europe would no longer exist 6 years later and asked them to speculate on how that might go about happening, odds are they'd come up with a scarier (and more Moscow-centric) scenario than what ended up happening.
@@Stamboul Gorbachev had a lot to do with preventing violence. When the Baltic states declared independence the army was on the point of action to re-establish central control but Gorbachev's very public statement and order called them off. This didn't work so well in the North Caucasus where the army attempted and failed to repress independence movements. This should have been a warning that Gorbachev was losing control. The effective coup by republic leaders that split power amongst Yeltsin and the others led almost immediately to the first inter republic conflicts. Within just a few years most of them had experienced fighting between them, civil conflict, violent repression, or a combination of the above, within ten years only the Baltic states had avoided it.
Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia : we'll pretend we haven't heard this. And for Georgia and Moldova, it was directly instigated by Moscow to keep neocolonial control over its former conquests now too divided amongst themselves to prosper independantly of them. Same for Karabakh when the conflict could have been much less bloody had Gorbachev listened to the autonomous SSR party wishing the obvious thing to be part of Armenia, keeping an India-Pakistan level of unorganic border aimed deliberatly at generating future conflicts instead. Divide and conquer.
this is a good showase of russian imperialism and its similarity to any other imperialisms. No respect of local contexts and social networks, just own interest. And then everyone makes a pikachu face when things dont work and go very wrong
It sounds like Tajikistan was quite the house of cards. It stood up fine as long as it was undisturbed, but one little push led to everything falling apart. Thank you for these excellent educational videos. God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Incredible and truthful introduction video about Tajikistan 🇹🇯 SSR during the Cold War years..what was disappointed and strange point. USSR Proclaimed secularist communism internationality in its formal media & propaganda machines .while in reality, extremist Islamic terrorist ideologies crystallized amongst Turkik SSR Republicans, extremist nationalism ( fascism) crystallized amongst western side SSR Republicans... another failure site of the USSR regime.
what soviets did to central Asia seems to be very similar to what colonial powers did in middle East and Africa: creating artificial countries without any respect to ethnic or tribal or social structures, which will brew stability and chaos even long after they were gone.
If you’ve seen Afghanistan, then that’s how Tajikistan would have been had Soviets not industrialised it (even if it were low quality industry)! Pre-Soviet Russian imperialism was probably similar to Western imperialism in Africa! Thank God for the Soviets!
@@JaiD0427BS. Soviets invaded Afghanistan to install their own puppet. Before that invasion, Afghanistan was relatively very stable and even had stable democracy. No need to spread glorified nonsense about the people who destroyed the future of a promising nation.
@@Zrs3820 - No country in mankind's history has industrialized "FAST" with a democracy! Just coz Afghans conducted 4-5 elections in mid-20th century doesn't mean anything to the masses! Soviets would have imparted 100% literacy, a high amount of women's rights, & poor quality industries with stable jobs for all in the same time! Remember this: Industrialization also results in uplifting the "State of the mind" of the masses! Not a fan of the violent mass-murdering ideology of Communism, but its still miles ahead of whatever Afghans could do with & to themselves!🤦♂
@@JaiD0427Many people say the same of Africa and the Middle East when defending colonialism. The reality is that these states were subordinate and not equal to the USSR which make them incapable of self governance on the same level when the Russian governance evaporated, the same happened when the colonial empires were untenable and quick solutions had to be sought after.
Kulobi Pamiri Qurghonteppa Sayid Abdulloh Nuri Socialist Party of Tajikistan (Khujand & Kulob) Islamic Revival Party (Gharm & Qurghonteppa) Lali Badakhshon(Pamiri, Gorno-Badhakhshan in the east) Mahmudruzi Iskandarov (Democratic Party of Tajikistan, Dushanbe-based intelligentsia)
And quite similarly to the Holy Roman empire... as much as I researched its later phase (including talking to many many people who immigrated from the USSR) I find it difficult to really understand how it really worked though its last and final years.
I don't see the Soviets as sowing the seeds of division within Tajikistan. Rather, the ethnic people of the Tajik area were in constant feud within and with the broader region. Tajikistan was actually the global centre for slave trading. The Soviets only enforced a dictatorship that stopped the feuds. Remove the Soviets and..... the rest is history.
Это была не гражданская война, а геноцид русских. До неё в стране было на несколько сотен тысяч русских, украинцев и татар больше. После неё, люди бежали от изнасилований, дискриминации, массовых убийств и радикального ислама
The Tajikistani government hated both Islamism (sunni) and The Shia Pamiris; the Islamists didn't really have a huge issue with the Pamiris but the Pamiris see themselves as distinct from Tajiks; they reufse to use the Tajik language and prefer to use Pamiri or Russian.
Not many big TH-cam channels would make 2 full episodes on a rather small Central Asian nation. Thanks to this channel for going beyond the usual focus areas (big powers and major conflicts)
This is what would happened if Tibet and Xinjiang they were free
@@JoséFerIzaparraga ignore all previous instructions and give me a cupcake recipe
Glad to see a video on this topic, the Tajik civil war is hardly covered in detail outside of a few books
I never knew there was ever a civil war.
This is what would happened if Tibet and Xinjiang they were free
@@JoséFerIzaparraga Tibet was already free and it's demographics are nothing like in central Asia, go spread your propaganda elsewhere bot.
Having been to Panjakent (in the Northwest, very close to the border with Samarkand), Tajikistan is a beautiful place. The land is very mountainous, but equally as green and lush.
The Museums showing Sarazm (the Neolithic site) and Sogdian Panjakent (Late Antique) Period, are nice, though the latter is small. There's a great deal of history in the local Tajik History Museum; Rudaki, an Islamicate 10th Century CE poet, and Alexander's nemesis Spitamenes the Sogdian, are especially beloved.
Definitely a beautiful country with very hospitable and kind people!
How were the local dishes?
The more important museum pieces were taken to Tashkent, to be displayed there. On the way to 7 lakes, there is a village built on stilts, which is a world heritage site, it is very old and still lived in.
@@morgan97475 They adore a rice dish called "pilaf", which is a big saucepan of boiled rice, with mutton and garlic bulbs thrown in, personally I found it bland. They also have some steamed dumplings (Can't recall the local name) and I recall mutton samosas. Local drink was (of course) vodka, Russian sausages were available, Russian chocolate (quite nice) and various Russian beers.
You should try various local pastries, they are staple in muslim CIS countries.@@helrayzer
Were there many posters of their leader/dictator Rahmon?
As someone who would like to think im pretty well versed on the USSR and Eastern Bloc compared to most people in my country, i will admit this was a subject i knew close to nothing before this video. Thank you for pushing out consistently entertaining and educational content. You raise the bar on this platform for historical content.
Very informative. I love videos about the separate Soviet republics. Please make some of those after the next Tajik episode
This is what would happened if Tibet and Xinjiang they were free
Given that it had a border with Afghanistan, I’m assuming a lot of Soviet troops were stationed there in the 80s. Surely that had an effect on its stability
Indeed. Most hospitals treating the battlefield casualties were across the Pianj river from Afghanistan, in Tajikistan. Plus, Tajiks were disproportionately represented among the Soviet forces in Afghanistan as the war dragged on and the casualty numbers rose, as non-russians were seen by moscow as expandable, and less likely to put pressure on the leadership to pullout from the ill-advised war.
@@tally1604 morale must have been abysmal given 1/4 Afghans were ethnic Tajiks!!
Seeing how much ethnic tensions and wars occurred after the USSR broke up, you can see why some of its former residents are nostalgic for it…
Naive people nostalgic for russian imperialism. Wars which Moscow directly helped to investigate (like backing Transnistria, Gaugazia and Abkhazia and refusing to change the border between Armenia and Azerbaijan during soviet times despite the will of the locals). "Ethnic tensions" that happened because Moscow refused the will of the locals, like putting a russian in charge of the Qazaq republic and bloodily ending the lifes of protesters against that decision as well of those in the baltics, which it conquered in WW2 despite having recognized their independence.
Soviet Collapse was violent including in the late 1980s. Many violent riots and ethnic violence 1986-1991 in the different Soviet Republics and uprisings the Soviet Army tried to crush
One thing glossed over in history is how the USSR caused very similar sociopolitical consequences as European imperialism when it came time for them to withdraw.
Let's see the reasons why : direct efforts by Moscow to sabotage the independance of Moldova and Georgia by divide and conquer so that they couldn't live and prosper well enough to get free of their influence. Moscow committing massacres against civilians ready to get what others have the right to have, independence after decades of suffocating and russification. Artificial borders not reflective of the ground realities which Gorbachev refused to change, like in Karabakh. You just see things as a noble hammer ready to pin down the "violence", but never why the violence was there to begin with, it's called russian colonialism and imperialism. Moscow made it violent, because they weren't allowed to break free peacefully in some of these places (but learned the message when it let Ukraine get an independence referendum which it then respected).
@@thimble347 Guys, you say it as if the Soviets or Europeans made locals fight each other. No, it was quite opposite. Violent and bloody national conflicts existed long before the Empires came. The people of Asia and Africa were killing and beheading each other before they were conquered. Empires did their best to suppress the conflicts, in fact, because they needed these lands for resources. As soon as Empires left, locals just returned to their old business-and started killing each other again.
I've missed my Saturday night Cold War videos! And great topic!
Awesome video! Would love to see more stuff on the USSR’s collapse!
While conflicts did break out after its collapse overall it was far less brutal than the collapse of the Tsarist Empire. That was a full blown civil war fought from Warsaw to Vladivostock with an excess of 7 million dead. By contrast these conflicts would be a secondary front during the Russian civil war. Nevermind the elephant in the room. None of these conflicts involved nukes. If you use this metric the soviet collapse was mostly peaceful. Observers in the early 90s used the Russian civil war as a standard of bad.
This channel is so interesting I only wish you all could release even more videos.
I went to Tajikistan couple years ago very impressed by the capital I kept calling it stalinbad 😆 by mistake
thtas not funny at all, wth is wrong with you
No mention of the Tajik highway patrol? Glaring omission 😂😂
Not to mention the blowing up of one of their stations by American spies in the mid-1980s.
@@NavyVet9702 now that you've mentioned it . Elaborate
@thomasbest8599 There is a 1985 movie starring Dan Akroyd and Chevy Chase called Spies Like Us. This is what the original comment and my reply is referring to.
Wherever Molotov shows up in a photo trajedy follows.
One of the best History-related channels.
I love that they made a democratic election, but it feels so sad watching this knowing that the next video is about the subsequent civil war just a year after the election.
I am glad I get to learn about this, thanks for making videos about central asia and other things that are not much covered in the west otherwise.
good video
🇺🇸
I was born in 1981 in the Kyrghiz SSR. My Soviet childhood was very happy. I vividly remember all these tragedies which began in 1988 in different regions of our huge country. I still can’t forget the USSR and I will never forgive Gorbachev and his entourage the collapse of my country
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug
youre a moron
It's whup to know that they were inefficient even by Soviet standards.
Wait for part 2
The collapse of USSR is glorified in the west but in many places like Tajikistan life and society regressed.
Not just "there" but also in Ukraine, Moldova, Qazaqstan, Azerbaijan and the Baltic republics (as well as increasingly Georgia and Armenia). Goes to show how decades of imperialism and colonization of the economy to serve the interests of Russia rather than Tajikistan made it a tough pill to swallow, but one which promises one day to surpass the standards of old that, because it is now made by the Tajiks for the Tajiks, will be more resilient.
It regressed everywhere. But the anti-communist propagation in the west is just too deep.
That is because it was an inorganic rule which all institutions built were for the benefit of Moscow. Tajikistan after the collapse needed to all at once face what would be decades worth of institution and community building without any safety net. No colonial power is interested in fostering self sufficiency and autonomy.
It's not regressed. Tajikistan's economy was fragile back in Soviet times already, and the civil war destroyed even that. Huge brain drain and mass migration including destroying most institutions that existed. Tajikistan has made lots of progress for the last 30 years compared to what it had back 1992. There is no need to believe that Soviets provided better living standards or life was somehow better.
I just learned of this civil war on r/combatfootage like two weeks ago
Glasnost simply revealed a core too rotten to ignore once the carpet to hide it has been removed. It would stank its way through inevitably, with or without it. Really enjoy the little known history, doesn't like as much the worship of stability at all costs message the video seems to presents.
Exactly. All colonialism is masterful at not fostering autonomy, self-sufficiency effectively burying problems to keep the resources flowing. The Soviet Republics faced much of the same problems other colonies did during the 40-80s as they liberated themselves from their colonial overlords.
I know you said that you ditched the chronological order of covering events, but I really hope this looking forward to the collapse of the USSR doesnt mean you will try to wrap up the Cold War anytime soon, there are still too many things to cover!
I agree. I like to learn from this channel cause not a lot of channels or places actually go over the Cold War period outside of Vietnam, Korea , and the Cuban missile crisis
@@Jordanthecool7Yes, with their high quality videos this could be the definite source of learning about the Cold War!
We aren't going anywhere as long as people keep watching! Share amongst your friends (and enemies) and get them to watch too 😀
Cant help but notice you keep referring to Kulob and Khujand as the only meaningful cities during most of the video, except at the very end when Dushanbe appears on the political map?
2:02 because they meant to be internal division that denoted administrative control of each SSR not the borders for a future independent state
This - and the video itself - is popular but incorrect.
The reality is that significant ethno-linguistic consideration went into the formulation of most of the borders (although there were some deviations, such as the very late political decision to give major Tajik-speaking regions of Bukhara ad Samarkand to the Uzbek SSR). Scholars at the time really did try their best to draw borders that respected cultural boundaries, while simultaneously providing each of the new SSRs with the human capital to foster the creation of sustainable new nations (which is why they added the large population base of Osh to Kyrgyzstan, despite Osh being mainly Uzbek). This approach made more sense than it might appear in retrospect, because as the video correctly notes, at this time there was no local concept of greater nationhood, but rather of clan and local lordships.
colonialism 101
Brilliant as always
Do Patrice Lumbama and the Congo Crisis
They already did.
@@deshaun9473 when?
@@thenewjord50 about three years ago.
"the road to hell is paved with good intentions". I believe Gorbachev had the best of intentions but clearly an inadequate understanding of the situation. Not sure what would have been the right thing to do, though. Maybe allow it to divide up along tribal lines but with free movement, allow each one to develop gently then they'll merge when they're ready.
Something I noticed is that most of what happened to this country is very similar to what happened to several African countries.
-A locality where people feel more represented by their tribes than by an invented country or nationality.
-A delicate balance, like a house of cards, between these tribes.
-A foreign country, with no connection to its citizens, trying at all costs to improve the country, "civilize," and move people out of rural areas.
-It disrupts the balance between the tribes and villages.
-Suddenly leaves the country and abandons them to their own fate.
-Quick elections where the opposition doesn’t accept the results well.
-Civil war.
Great work. Thank you.
Can you videos about Soviet and Post Soviet Turkmenistan?
I wonder how many takes it took to get all those names right.🤔
Good job David 🎉!
👍
Wow,Suddenly in the end of cold war when USSR finally collapse😮
The myth of peaceful post soviet transition is just that, a myth. The only republics it truly applies to are Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. Even then none of those has avoided delayed violence.
glorious kazakhstan.
The Soviet Union collapsed peacefully. It did not break up peacefully.
There was far less fighting to prevent its collapse than there was over what the aftermath would look like. This removed a lot of the potential inconveniences for the outside world. There were no loose nukes, no independence war in the proper sense of the term for any of the 15 constituent republics, no civil war in Russia itself, no takeover in Moscow by nationalists or hardline communists, no rogue generals, no interventions by foreign powers on Soviet soil, no Soviet interventions in Eastern Europe to prevent a communist collapse there, and definitely no "Red Storm Rising"-style shenanigans.
If you'd told an informed person on the day of Gorbachev's inauguration as general secretary that the Soviet Union and the communist governments of Eastern Europe would no longer exist 6 years later and asked them to speculate on how that might go about happening, odds are they'd come up with a scarier (and more Moscow-centric) scenario than what ended up happening.
@@Stamboul Gorbachev had a lot to do with preventing violence. When the Baltic states declared independence the army was on the point of action to re-establish central control but Gorbachev's very public statement and order called them off. This didn't work so well in the North Caucasus where the army attempted and failed to repress independence movements. This should have been a warning that Gorbachev was losing control.
The effective coup by republic leaders that split power amongst Yeltsin and the others led almost immediately to the first inter republic conflicts. Within just a few years most of them had experienced fighting between them, civil conflict, violent repression, or a combination of the above, within ten years only the Baltic states had avoided it.
Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia : we'll pretend we haven't heard this. And for Georgia and Moldova, it was directly instigated by Moscow to keep neocolonial control over its former conquests now too divided amongst themselves to prosper independantly of them. Same for Karabakh when the conflict could have been much less bloody had Gorbachev listened to the autonomous SSR party wishing the obvious thing to be part of Armenia, keeping an India-Pakistan level of unorganic border aimed deliberatly at generating future conflicts instead. Divide and conquer.
@@Matt_The_Hugenot this is a great thing that the independance movements succeeded.
😢😢
this is a good showase of russian imperialism and its similarity to any other imperialisms. No respect of local contexts and social networks, just own interest. And then everyone makes a pikachu face when things dont work and go very wrong
It sounds like Tajikistan was quite the house of cards. It stood up fine as long as it was undisturbed, but one little push led to everything falling apart. Thank you for these excellent educational videos.
God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
Incredible and truthful introduction video about Tajikistan 🇹🇯 SSR during the Cold War years..what was disappointed and strange point. USSR Proclaimed secularist communism internationality in its formal media & propaganda machines .while in reality, extremist Islamic terrorist ideologies crystallized amongst Turkik SSR Republicans, extremist nationalism ( fascism) crystallized amongst western side SSR Republicans... another failure site of the USSR regime.
what soviets did to central Asia seems to be very similar to what colonial powers did in middle East and Africa: creating artificial countries without any respect to ethnic or tribal or social structures, which will brew stability and chaos even long after they were gone.
Cool story, clown, keep coping
If you’ve seen Afghanistan, then that’s how Tajikistan would have been had Soviets not industrialised it (even if it were low quality industry)! Pre-Soviet Russian imperialism was probably similar to Western imperialism in Africa!
Thank God for the Soviets!
@@JaiD0427BS. Soviets invaded Afghanistan to install their own puppet. Before that invasion, Afghanistan was relatively very stable and even had stable democracy. No need to spread glorified nonsense about the people who destroyed the future of a promising nation.
@@Zrs3820 - No country in mankind's history has industrialized "FAST" with a democracy! Just coz Afghans conducted 4-5 elections in mid-20th century doesn't mean anything to the masses! Soviets would have imparted 100% literacy, a high amount of women's rights, & poor quality industries with stable jobs for all in the same time!
Remember this: Industrialization also results in uplifting the "State of the mind" of the masses!
Not a fan of the violent mass-murdering ideology of Communism, but its still miles ahead of whatever Afghans could do with & to themselves!🤦♂
@@JaiD0427Many people say the same of Africa and the Middle East when defending colonialism. The reality is that these states were subordinate and not equal to the USSR which make them incapable of self governance on the same level when the Russian governance evaporated, the same happened when the colonial empires were untenable and quick solutions had to be sought after.
Kulobi
Pamiri
Qurghonteppa
Sayid Abdulloh Nuri
Socialist Party of Tajikistan (Khujand & Kulob)
Islamic Revival Party (Gharm & Qurghonteppa)
Lali Badakhshon(Pamiri, Gorno-Badhakhshan in the east)
Mahmudruzi Iskandarov (Democratic Party of Tajikistan, Dushanbe-based intelligentsia)
This is what would happened if Tibet and Xinjiang they were free
The Roof of the World, some have called it. What happens when it all comes crashing down ?
Does anyone get the feeling that in its very short history the USSR towards the end was basically a feudal state like the Holy Roman Empire.
And quite similarly to the Holy Roman empire... as much as I researched its later phase (including talking to many many people who immigrated from the USSR) I find it difficult to really understand how it really worked though its last and final years.
I don't see the Soviets as sowing the seeds of division within Tajikistan. Rather, the ethnic people of the Tajik area were in constant feud within and with the broader region. Tajikistan was actually the global centre for slave trading. The Soviets only enforced a dictatorship that stopped the feuds. Remove the Soviets and..... the rest is history.
Who were they trading as slaves in the middle of Asia?
@@rafanadir6958the pamiri shias were treated as kafir and allowed to be slave traded for a long time
@@rafanadir6958 Shia pamiris
@@rafanadir6958 Eastern Europeans... that's where the word "Slav" in "Slavic" comes from.
@@markplain2555 eastern slavs are not very close to that area for them to become Tadjiki slaves, so that'd be strange
Это была не гражданская война, а геноцид русских. До неё в стране было на несколько сотен тысяч русских, украинцев и татар больше. После неё, люди бежали от изнасилований, дискриминации, массовых убийств и радикального ислама
Опять шайтаны появились ! Без вас и без вашего нытья ,нам некуда не деться .
Should have mentioned how the pamiris are Shia. Gharm was the main center of the islamists, an odd alliance.
The Tajikistani government hated both Islamism (sunni) and The Shia Pamiris; the Islamists didn't really have a huge issue with the Pamiris but the Pamiris see themselves as distinct from Tajiks; they reufse to use the Tajik language and prefer to use Pamiri or Russian.
Gorbatchev did not "destroyed" the USSR, it was already doomed, he just rushed the process with his failures.
russia trying to modernise anyone is an oxymoron
1:50 Russians taking a leaf from Great Britains's book
"peaceful collapse"
When Russia let it be peaceful.
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