The four militants allegedly responsible for the murder of at least 139 concertgoers in Moscow’s Crocus City Hall theatre were all citizens of Tajikistan, a little post-Soviet republic in Central Asia, as has become known.
Does their admitted violence have anything to do with their nationality? Some Russians are likely to agree.
Tajikistan, a coastal state of 10 million sandwiched between Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and China, is the most underprivileged of the former Soviet states. Since 1994, it has endured under President Emomali Rahmon’s iron-fisted law, which it is known for and is known for.
About one-third of the Tajik people overall, there are estimated to be well over three million Time living in Russia. Most of them hold the precarious position of “guest employees”, holding lower- paying jobs in development, produce markets or perhaps cleaning open toilets.
Despite Russia’s declining people, its workforce increasingly relies on foreigners to meet these demands, despite the country’s general attitude toward people from Central Asia and the Caucasus.
It’s similar to the American myth about Mexicans that Donald Trump thus famously expressed in 2015:” They’re bringing medication. They’re bringing violence. They’re offenders”.
Non-Slavs are consistently discriminated against in Russia, and they have been disproportionately conscripted and sent to Ukraine as front-line cannon fodder since 2022.
Some historical places have seen their position suffer such a dramatic decline as the Time have over the previous 100 years, as I have previously noted in a new book.
The Tajiks, Persian-speaking ancestors of the old Sogdians who ruled the Silk Road, remained Central Asia’s social elite for more than a decade.
Time were the main scholars and bureaucrats of Central Asia’s big cities up until the Russian Revolution, when their money, Bukhara, came into competition with Baghdad as a center of Islamic teaching and high culture.
The popular medieval scholar Avicenna was an cultural Tajik, as were the scriptures collector Bukhari, the Sufi writer Rumi, and many others.
However, the Bolsheviks viewed Tajiks as the most important exporters of Central Asia’s Islamic culture as a bleak tradition that communism aimed to end.
The Tajiks were essentially spared from the huge social and political reform that Central Asia underwent in the first decades of the Soviet Union, with the majority of their traditional province being given to the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks, who were perceived as being more malleable.
Just as soon as 1929 were the Time given their own nation, consisting mainly of marginal, mountainous country and deprived of any big urban centres.
The Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic, which dominated the former Soviet Union during the 20th century, has remained that terrible position ever since its independence in 1991.
The land was plunged into a destructive civil war that ravaged what system remained from the Soviet era between 1992 and 1997. Since that point, Rahmon has resisted the risk of resumptive civil unrest.
The threat of extreme Islam emanating from neighboring Afghanistan, where Tajik populations are significantly higher than those in Tajikistan, has provided more justification for Rahmon’s oppressive plans.
Even those with a college education in today’s Tajikistan are finding it nearly impossible to make a salary that would allow them to establish a standard family life.
They are easy targets for radical Muslim preachers who give them a sense of worth and goal because they are oppressed and humiliated by the system.
One of the suspects in the recent Moscow attacks reportedly told his Russian interrogators that he was promised a cash reward of half a million Russian rubles ( roughly US$ 5, 300 ) to carry out his alleged atrocities. This is an explosive cocktail.
Everyday, regardless of how justifiably their perpetrators commit criminal acts, regular, sane people are horrified by them, and Tajikistan’s long-suffering population makes no exception.
However, the circumstances under which a small number of extremists view the death of innocent civilians for money or philosophy remain unresolved are not improving.
Russia’s ludicrous try to eke out a connection between the Moscow attacks and Ukraine is a careless diversion from its relations with Central Asia.
Richard Foltz is Professor of Religions and Cultures, Concordia University
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