A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

226 A history of Inner Asia
besides minority languages, is not limited to Uzbekistan, and myriad
examples could be cited, from the dialects of Germany and Britain to
Ebonics and Spanish of the United States.
This is not to say that there cannot be cases where a minority ceases
to be a minority, whether for reasons of sheer numbers or other circumstances
such as the geopolitical ones.Kazakhstan displays both these
aspects.Its large and fairly compact Slavic population, further swelled
by two post-delimitation immigration waves, presents a perhaps intractable
problem if the integrity of the republic’s borders is identified with
the identity and loyalty of its citizens.Tajikistan struggles with a somewhat
contradictory problem: it even lacks the minimal cohesion offered
by tribal formations and confederations, characteristic of Turkic
nomads, that might help its people develop a sense of a national identity;
at the same time, the one element that should cement Tajik society
as a viable polity grounded in a politically defined territory, Persian language
and civilization, is too vast and associated with other cultural and
political centers to inject the necessary dose of patriotism in the minds
and feelings of Tajik educated elites.Such places as Samarkand,
Bukhara, or Shiraz are felt to be their historical and cultural centers, in
comparison with which Tajikistan – even its capital, Dushanbe – may
have difficulties shedding the stigma of provinciality or irrelevance.
The foundations of Soviet Central Asia’s five republics were laid, as
we have said, by October 1924.The framework that was the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics had been formed two years earlier, in
December 1922, setting the stage for each of the non-Russian groups of
the former Russian empire to find its niche in the new structure.The
niche varied according to the label assigned to an ethnic group by the
planners in Moscow, and some labels were modified or reshuffled in
the course of time.This happened also in Central Asia, but by 1937 the
process was completed, and the area acquired the political physiognomy
that would last until the end of the Soviet regime.The hallmark of this
political physiognomy was its ultimate uniformity.Each of the five
republics acquired the status of a union republic – Uzbekistan and
Turkmenistan as early as 1924, Tajikistan in 1929, Kazakhstan and
Kyrgyzstan in 1936 – and a new constitution was adopted by the parliament
of every republic in the spring of 1937 (to be replaced by yet
another, the last Soviet, constitution in 1978).Each was called by its
ethnic name in the adjectival form followed by the epithets “Soviet
Socialist” qualifying the word “Republic”: for example, Uzbek Sovet