Tajikistan harkens to the Samanid Empire (819–999). The Tajik people came under Russian rule in the 1860s. The Basmachi revolt broke out in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and was quelled in the early 1920s during the Russian Civil War. In 1924, Tajikistan became an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of the Soviet Union, the Tajik ASSR, within Uzbekistan. In 1929, Tajikistan was made one of the component republics of the Soviet Union – Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic – and it kept that status until gaining independence 1991 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Tajikistan is nestled between Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan to the north and west, China to the east, and Afghanistan to the south. Mountains cover 93 percent of Tajikistan's surface area. The two principal ranges, the Pamir Mountains and the Alay Mountains, give rise to many glacier-fed streams and rivers, which have been used to irrigate farmlands since ancient times. Central Asia's other major mountain range, the Tian Shan, skirts northern Tajikistan. Mountainous terrain separates Tajikistan's two population centers, which are in the lowlands of the southern and northern sections of the country. Especially in areas of intensive agricultural and industrial activity, the Soviet Union's natural resource utilization policies left independent Tajikistan with a legacy of environmental problems.
Fergana Valley is a valley in Central Asia, lying mostly in eastern Uzbekistan, extending into southern Kyrgyzstan and northern Tajikistan.
The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, also known as Soviet Uzbekistan, the Uzbek SSR, UzSSR, or simply Uzbekistan and rarely Uzbekia or Red Uzbekistan, was a union republic of the Soviet Union. It was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Communist Party, the legal political party, from 1925 until 1990. From 1990 to 1991, it was a sovereign part of the Soviet Union with its own legislation.
The Fann Mountains are part of the western Pamir-Alay mountain system in Tajikistan's Sughd Province, between the Zarafshan Range to the north and the Gissar Range to the south. In an east-west direction, they extend from the Fan Darya to the Archimaydan River.
Khujand, sometimes spelled Khodjent and formerly known as Leninabad from 1936 to 1991, is the second-largest city of Tajikistan and the capital of Tajikistan's northernmost Sughd province.
Russian Turkestan was the western part of Turkestan within the Russian Empire’s Central Asian territories, and was administered as a Krai or Governor-Generalship. It comprised the oasis region to the south of the Kazakh Steppe, but not the protectorates of the Emirate of Bukhara and the Khanate of Khiva. It was populated by speakers of Russian, Uzbek, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Tajik.
The Zarafshon is a river in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. Its name, "spreader of gold" in Persian, refers to the presence of gold-bearing sands in the upper reaches of the river. To the ancient Greeks it was known as the Polytimetus. It was also formerly known as Sughd River. The river is 877 kilometres (545 mi) long and has a basin area of 17,700 square kilometres (6,800 sq mi).
The Emirate of Bukhara was a Muslim-Uzbek polity in Central Asia that existed from 1785 to 1920 in what is now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. It occupied the land between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, known formerly as Transoxiana. Its core territory was the fertile land along the lower Zarafshon river, and its urban centres were the ancient cities of Samarqand and the emirate's capital, Bukhara. It was contemporaneous with the Khanate of Khiva to the west, in Khwarazm, and the Khanate of Kokand to the east, in Fergana. In 1920, it ceased to exist with the establishment of the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic.
Sughd Province, also referred to as the Sogdia Region, is one of the four administrative divisions and one of the three provinces that make up Tajikistan. Centered in the historical Sogdiana, it is located in the northwest of the country, with an area of some 25,400 square kilometers and a population of 2,707,300, up from 2,233,550 according to the 2010 census and 1,871,979 in 2000. The capital is Khujand. The Province's ethnic composition in 2010 was 84% Tajik, 14.8% Uzbek, 0.6% Kyrgyz, 0.4% Russian and 0.1% Tatar.
The Yaghnob is a river in Ayni District of Sughd Region, Tajikistan. Together with the Iskander Darya, it forms the Fan Darya, a major left tributary of the Zeravshan.
Jangal is a village in north-west Tajikistan, part of the city of Panjakent in Sughd Region. It is a western suburb of Panjakent, located on the river Zeravshan on the border with Uzbekistan. It lies on the road from Panjakent to Samarkand.
One of the northern extensions of the Pamir-Alay system, the Turkestan Range stretches for a total length of 340 km from the Alay Mountains on the border of Kyrgyzstan with Tajikistan to the Samarkand oasis in Uzbekistan. It runs in the east–west direction, north of the Zeravshan Range, forming the southern boundary of the Ferghana Valley in Tajikistan and Golodnaya Steppe in Uzbekistan. The highest elevations are in the east, near the border with Kyrgyzstan. The maximum elevation is the Pik Skalisty at 5,621 metres (18,442 ft). Glaciation occurs especially in the east. The southern slopes are bare cliffs and mountain steppe; the northern slopes are covered with forests. A highway through the Shakhristan Pass at 3,378 meters (11,083 ft) connects the capital Dushanbe with Khujand in Northern Tajikistan.
Iskanderkul is a mountain lake of glacial origin in Tajikistan's Sughd Province. It lies at an altitude of 2,195 metres (7,201 ft) on the northern slopes of the Gissar Range in the Fann Mountains. Triangular in shape, it has a surface area of 3.4 square kilometres (1.3 sq mi) and is up to 72 metres (236 ft) deep. Formed by a landslide that blocks the Saratogh river, the outflow of the lake is called the Iskander Darya, which joins the Yaghnob River to form the Fan Darya, a major left tributary of the Zeravshan River.
The Pamir-Alay is a mountain system in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, encompassing four main mountain ranges extending west from the Tian Shan Mountains, and located north of the main range of Pamir. They are variously considered part of the Tian Shan, of the Pamir, or a separate mountain system. The term "Pamiro-Alay" is also used to refer to the mountain region encompassing the Pamir, the Pamir-Alay proper and the Tajik Depression.
The Fan Darya is a river located in Ayni District of Sughd Region, Tajikistan. The Fan Darya is 24 kilometres (15 mi) long, and the area of its drainage basin is 3,230 square kilometres (1,250 sq mi). It is a major left tributary of the Zeravshan.
The Iskander Darya is a river in Ayni District of Sughd Region, Tajikistan. The Iskander Darya is 20 kilometres (12 mi) long, and the area of its drainage basin is 950 square kilometres (370 sq mi) long. It is the left source river of the Fan Darya.
The Tajikistan–Uzbekistan border is an international border between Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. It is 1,312 kilometres (815 mi) in length and runs from the tripoint with Kyrgyzstan to the tripoint with Afghanistan.
Mikhail Stepanovich Andreyev was a Russian-Uzbek and Soviet orientalist, cultural researcher of Central Asia, ethnographer, linguist, and archaeologist. He was initially supervised by Vladimir Nalivkin, and was the teacher of Olga Alexandrovna Sukhareva. He was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Zarafshan Bridge is an architectural monument located 7–8 km northeast of Samarkand on the left bank of the Zarafshan River. The bridge was built in the year 1502 by the order of Muhammad Shaybani. It served as a water divider on the Zarafshan River, giving rise to two branches—Akdarya and Karadarya.
