The controversy about Tajikistan’s history textbooks

Among its Central Asian neighbours, Tajikistan’s history textbooks still most closely resemble official accounts from the Soviet era. They stress the evils of the Russian Empire’s expansion to the region. At the same time, they also remain fairly positive about Tajikistan’s Soviet experience, underlining the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic’s contribution to the Soviet state. Perhaps as a result, they have been caught in Russia’s crosshairs.

School textbooks are telling examples of official interpretations of history. They exemplify the narratives that are taught to children as part of their civic socialization controlled by governments. In countries that gained independence after the Soviet collapse, the shifts in historical narratives have been intrinsically linked to the reimagining of these countries’ Soviet past by attributing them with new meanings through the prism of post-Soviet nation-building processes. With Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the debates about history textbooks gained a new momentum, and a new meaning.