Tajikis say goodbye to Russian

Diversity, multi-ethnicity and one language.

When everything falls apart, changes are not always good. As in other areas of the former Soviet Union, Tajikistan finds going it alone can be difficult.

“In June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law obliging foreign labor migrants to pass a Russian-language proficiency exam. By most estimates, over a million of those migrants are from Tajikistan. They make Tajikistan the most remittance-dependent country in the world, according to the World Bank. Last year, Tajik laborers sent home the equivalent of 47 percent of GDP, the Bank said in November. Most of that cash came from Russia.”

“’I clearly remember my childhood at the end of the Soviet epoch,’ Akhmedov recalls. ‘In Dushanbe [we had] Germans, Koreans, Ossetians, Armenians, Jews. We were friendly. My classmates spoke their languages at home, but in the street and at school we all communicated in Russian; and that always brought us closer together.’”

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66262

(When new countries threw out the old Communist masters, the masters’ language often went as well.)

More on Tajikistan labor migration:

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66225