Tajikistan: History

The current Tajik Republic hearkens back to the Samanid Empire (A.D. 875-999), which ruled what is now Tajikistan as well as territory to the south and west, as its role model and name for its currency. During their reign, the Samanids supported the revival of the written Persian language in the wake of the Arab Islamic conquest in the early 8th century and played an important role in preserving the culture of the pre-Islamic Persian-speaking world. They were the last Persian-speaking empire to rule Central Asia.

The expanding Russian Empire encompassed the territory that is now Tajikistan, along with most of the rest of Central Asia, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Russian rule collapsed briefly after the Russian Revolution of 1917, as the Bolsheviks consolidated their power and were embroiled in a civil war in other regions of the former Russian Empire. As the Bolsheviks attempted to regain Central Asia in the 1920s, an indigenous Central Asian resistance movement based in the Ferghana Valley, the "Basmachi movement," resisted but was largely eliminated by 1925. Tajikistan became fully established under Soviet control with the creation of Tajikistan as an autonomous Soviet socialist republic within Uzbekistan in 1924, and as an independent Soviet socialist republic in 1929. The northern Sughd region, previously part of the Uzbek republic, was added to the Tajik republic at this time.
 

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