Resettlement Registration Application (Tajikistan)

This bilingual (Tajik and Russian) registration form / application for resettlement was signed on 1 March 1970 by Juma Rajabov, who was born in the village Piskon in the Yaghnob valley, in the Aini district, in 1931. The form itself, as indicated above on the right, was approved by decree no. 1147 of the council of people's commissars from 14 September 1939. With a green ballpoint pen personal information have been filled in for the kolkhoz worker Juma and his family – his wife Anor (born in 1939) and their three sons (10, 7, and 5 years old) who were listed on the reverse of this application. The applicant had primary education (point 3), his social position (point 4) was a collective farm worker, his nationality (point 5) was given as Tajik, he had no party affiliation (point 6), his main occupation in the collective farm "Tajikistan" in the village Piskon was given as peasant (point 7 and 8). At the time of application, Juma and his family were not included in the Tajik SSR's annual resettlement plan (point 9) and they did not have Soviet passports (point 10).

The lower part of the first page shows how many possessions (2.5 tons) consisting of a cow, a calf and 9 sheep / goats as well as 10 sacks of flour and 15 household items should be relocated with the family to their new home, a kolkhoz/sovkhoz named “40^th anniversary of Tajikistan (“October” crossed out)” in the district of Zafarobod in the lowlands of northern Tajikistan. A resettler-identification card was issued for the family (no. 9929). The form was signed and confirmed by the heads of the local village council (сельсоовет), the medical commission, the regional executive committee, and the resettlement authority. Both the resettlement application and the ID, like hundreds of others from the resettlement of the entire population of the Yaghnob valley in 1970 and 1971, are kept in the Tajik State Archive in Dushanbe. (Fond 1566, 4, 431, 388).

It is significant that the preprinted sentence “Please relocate me as planned in one of the Kolkhozes … in the district … of the republic….” was left blank on the form. Because it was neither the desire of the applicants to leave their home in the high mountains, nor did they know where to start their new life.

On the occasion of the upcoming 100th anniversary of Lenin's birth and in order to raise cotton production, Uzbekistan had ceded an area of 50.000 hectares of the unpopulated “Hungry steppe” to its “brother republic.” The new territory attached to northern Tajikistan was named “Zafarobod” (Place of Victory). Water pumped from the Syrdarya into two newly dug channels turned wasteland into cotton fields. The next step was to bring workers to the newly created kolkhozes. But there was a lack of volunteers. By the end of the 1960s the Soviet strategy for recruiting laborers for cotton producing kolkhozes by means of encouragement and privileges was a failure. In post-Stalin Tajikistan forced resettlement was not practised like before, when up to a third of the republic’s population was relocated from the mountains mainly to cultivate and Tajikize the southern lowlands since the mid-1920s. Now, year after year, resettlement plans remained unfulfilled.

The responsible authorities in Dushanbe and in the provincial center of Aini had an idea. They declared the remote Yaghnob Valley, which was not connected to the Soviet power grid and transport network, to be a “geodynamic zone”. In order to protect the population living there from an imminent natural disaster, work began in late February 1970 to evacuate the first three villages in the middle of the valley. One of these villages was Piskon. Since the valley was snowed in at this time of year, people were flown out in helicopters.

By the end of 1970, most of the 30 villages of the valley were empty. The rest of the inhabitants (altogether 567 households) were relocated to Zafarobod in 1971. Families who did not want to leave their homes were removed by force. Nevertheless, the resettlement campaign was publicized as a Soviet success and a long-cherished wish of the cut-off residents of the Yaghnob Valley. From then on it was used by the district center as a high pasture.

In July 1972, the Council of Ministers of the Tajik SSR was informed that between 1967 and 1971, more than 3,300 households had been moved from the mountains to newly irrigated areas of the republic. Only 8,272 resettlers were declared “able to work” (трудоспособный). All of these resettlers had lived in villages, which were located in areas of “geodynamic processes” and were not fully engaged in “socially useful work”.

In Zafarobod, the newcomers from Yaghnob faced plenty of hardships. They did not know how to produce cotton. The accommodation provided for them was not yet ready and many had to live in tents. The highlanders barely adapted to the hot climate, the bad water quality and the herbicides. Many of them, especially children, elders and women fell ill or died. In the mid-1970s a clandestine return movement to the Yaghnob valley started. In 1978, 45 households out of 12 villages were forcefully removed again. The resettlement of the remaining 24 families from the village of Kiryonte, which was planned for 1979 was not executed anymore. By the fall of the Soviet Union, several families had established themselves again in the valley which since 1971 had the official status of being “uninhabited”.

Additional Literature:
Thomas Loy, Jaghnob 1970. Erinnerungen an eine Zwangsumsiedlung in der Tadschikischen SSR.Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2005.
Thomas Loy, “The Big Fraud – Recollecting the resettlement of the population of the Yaghnob valley,” inRemembering the past in Iranian Societies, eds. Christine Allison, Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2013, 141-164.
Thomas Loy is a Research fellow, Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences