HISTORY
The current Tajik Republic
hearkens back to the Samanid Empire (A.D. 875-999), that ruled
what is now Tajikistan as well as territory to the south and west,
as their role model and name for their 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.
After a series of attacks
beginning in the 1860s during the Great Game, the Tajik people
came under Russian rule. This rule waned 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," attempted
to resist but was eventually defeated in 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 one of the independent Soviet socialist republics
in 1929.
