Sin in the Valley of the Saints

This is dedicated to the memory of the Yaghnobis who died as a result of forced migration under Soviet rule.

Yaghnob Valley is a tiny tract of land secluded in the mountains of Tajikistan. Subject to extreme cold and inaccessible to the outside world for eight months of the year, it was home to a peaceful people with a unique language and culture. That is, it was their home until Soviet planning destroyed their way of life forever.

The Yaghnobis are a remnant of the ancient Sogdians, great merchants of Silk Road fame. After the Battle of Mount Mug in 722 CE, many Sogdians sought protection against their Arab conquerors by escaping to mountainous areas. The refugees proved immensely resourceful at adapting to Yaghnob Valley’s inhospitable climate and the people who came to call themselves Yaghnobis after the “Ice River” that was their lifeblood rarely interacted with the outside world. Theoretically forced to convert to Islam under Arab rule, they retained many of their Zoroastrian practices, such a reverence for fire, and they developed a profound sense of place, honoring specific rocks and springs in Yaghnob Valley as sacred and carefully tending the graves of their ancestors.

When Central Asia was incorporated into the Russian empire, tsarist authorities were largely content to leave the Yaghnobis’ traditional way of life undisturbed. In fact, 1895 saw Yaghnob Valley and adjacent mountain areas excused from taxation so as to remove financial burdens which were encouraging voluntary outmigration. Such policies may have been an outgrowth of General Konstantin von Kaufman’s earlier concept of ignorirovanie, a live-and-let-live approach to local practices meant to keep the peace and protect the tsar’s interests in Central Asia.

Soviet authorities were not nearly so tolerant. The Basmachi Revolt, a resistance movement that made Central Asia’s mountains basically ungovernable during the years 1918-1933, left them deeply suspicious of the region’s mountaineers. Numerous attempts were made to institute collective agriculture in Yaghnob Valley, but extreme winters militated against anything but bare subsistence farming. Thus, the Yaghnobis retained a great deal of autonomy under Soviet rule even as late as the 1960s.

But Yaghnob Valley, traditionally regarded as a valley of saints in Central Asian folklore, was a valley of waste and idleness when viewed through the lens of contemporary Soviet ideology. Local authorities lamented the lack of modern amenities in the valley and its economic stagnation. Moreover, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic set an especially high quota for cotton production in 1970. The occasion? The hundredth anniversary of Lenin’s birth! Political thinking which scoffed at traditional lifestyles was about to combine with a need for manpower in the cotton industry to produce disaster for the Yaghnobi people.

On March 28, 1970, the helicopters arrived in Yaghnob Valley. Propaganda specialists went from village to village touting the material benefits of life in Zafarabod, a lowland cotton-producing town, and also warning of the geological instability of the valley. The Yaghnobis took little notice of their guests, and they were skeptical of what they heard. After all, their infrequent trips to the outside had given them knowledge of other lifestyles, which they saw as marred by discord and corruption. When propaganda failed, automatic weapons appeared, and the entire population of Yaghnob Valley, some three thousand people, was relocated to Zafarabod in an operation lasting until September 1971.

Soviet thinking regarded Yaghnobi religiosity as reactionary and superstitious. Sacred books were cast into the Yaghnob River as helpless elders looked on and grieved. More distress would soon follow. Zafarabod was nothing like what had been promised. The Yaghnobis faced extreme heat, houses without windows or doors, and pesticide-contaminated water. Those working in the cotton fields drank from irrigation ditches to slake their thirst, and nobody told them that the quality of this water was far different from that of the pristine Yaghnob River. Naturally, many Yaghnobis sickened and died. The old and the young were especially vulnerable. Some parents buried more than one child during that first hellish year in Zafarabod.

So profound was their attachment to their homeland that some Yaghnobis risked an illegal trip back to Yaghnob Valley. Some of these defectors from Zafarabod managed to reestablish themselves in the valley, only to be deported again in a 1978 roundup carried out with the now familiar helicopters and soldiers bearing automatic weapons. The Gorbachev years saw a thawing of official attitudes toward those who wished to return to Yaghnob Valley, and in today’s independent Tajikistan, the Yaghnobis are free to live in the valley if they wish. There has been a renaissance of academic interest in Yaghnobi history, language, and culture at universities in Central Asia, and the Yaghnobi language enjoys official protection under the law of Tajikistan.

The Yaghnobis prospects for survival as a distinct ethnic group remain precarious, however. There is a distinct generation gap between elders with an attachment to Yaghnob Valley and younger Yaghnobis, whose sense of home lies outside the valley and who value access to modern conveniences over traditional customs. Sheep grazing during the years of deportation to Zafarabod has damaged the environment in Yaghnob Valley. The current population of Yaghnob Valley, which numbers between three and five hundred people, dreams of an access road, but plans have been complicated by both geological and financial factors. While official policy in Tajikistan is generally conducive to Yaghnobi needs, the country’s severe poverty, the devastating effects of the 1992-1996 Tajik Civil War, and political corruption all serve to put Yaghnobi issues on the back burner.

To view the Yaghnobi tragedy as a purely Soviet or communist problem is to miss the point. Civil society was certainly strongly curtailed in the Soviet Union so that citizens had little power to resist government policy. However, the issues involved in resettling indigenous populations and in attempting to integrate such peoples into modern technological societies crop up in nations of widely varying political persuasions. One only need consider the recent history of aboriginal peoples in North America to see that this is the case. While it is naïve to think that lifestyles among less technologically developed peoples represent some sort of uncorrupted ideal, it is arrogant to assume that such ways of life ought to subjected to abrupt change without the consent of the people affected. Reflecting on the destruction brought upon his nation by inappropriate attempts at modernization, Tajik researcher Aziz Niyazi has said, “Do we really need so much steel, oil, concrete, and rockets for human happiness? Perhaps of greater importance for human beings are the sound of a creek, the laughter of a child, the house at the foot of a grand mountain, the garden planted by the grandfather, the plot of cherished land, and the lonely prayer at the approaching dawn in the picturesque canyon.”

Note: Pictures showing Yaghnobi people and customs may be viewed at http://supernew.ej.ru/058/life/04/index.html and http://www2.hu-berlin.de/zentralasien/?section=FotosJaghnob01. The second of these sites is in German, and the link that says “Weiter” is what you press to see the next set of photos.

Selected Bibliography

Abdullaev, Kamloudin, and Shahram Akbarzadeh. Historical Dictionary of Tajikistan. Asian/Oceanian Historical Dictionaries, No. 38. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2002.

Belyakov, Dmitrii. "Poteryavshiiya Narod." Ezhenedel'nii Zhurnal No. 58 24 February 2003. http://supernew.ej.ru/058/life/04/index.html. [RUSSIAN].

Dodkhudoyev, N. Tajikistan: Land of Sunshine. London: Soviet Books, 1959.

Evans, Alfred B. "Developed Socialism in Soviet Ideology." Soviet Studies 29 (1977): 409-28.

Gunya, Alexei. Yagnob Valley: History, Nature, and Chances of a Mountain Community Development in Tadjikistan. Trans. V. Klassen. Moscow: KMK Scientific, 2002.

Levin, Theodore. The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York). Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996.

Loy, Thomas. "Primer Yagnoba - Vspominaya Nasil'stvennoe Peremeshchenie Naselenie Dolinyi Yagnoba v TadzhSSR." IFEAC Working Paper No. 14, April 2005, Yagnobtsyi v Sovremennom Tadzhikistane. Ed. T. Loy and S. Mirzozoda. Tashkent: Institut Français d'Études sur l'Asie Centrale, 2005. 1-25. [RUSSIAN].

Niyazi, Aziz. “Migration, Demography and Socio-Ecological Processes in Tajikistan.”
Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems. JCAS Symposium Ser. 9. Ed. Hisao Komatsu, Chika Obiya, and John S. Schoeberlein. Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies, 2000. 169-78.

Ritter, William S. "Revolt in the Mountains: Fuzail Maksum and the Occupation of Garm, Spring 1929." Journal of Contemporary History 25 (1990): 547-80.

Schoeberlein, John S. "Shifting Ground: How the Soviet Regime Used Resettlement to
Transform Central Asian Society and the Consequences of This Policy Today." Migration in Central Asia: Its History and Current Problems. JCAS Symposium Ser. 9. Ed. Hisao Komatsu, Chika Obiya, and John S. Schoeberlein. Osaka: Japan Center for Area Studies, 2000. 41-64.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998.

Shabad, Theodore. "Soviet Moves 4,000 in Tribe from Asian Mountains to Plain." New York Times 4 May 1971: 6.

Whitfeld, Susan. "From Plov to Paella." Index on Censorship 1 (2005): 125-30.