Russian-Tajik Friendship in the Pages of Popular Science Publications of Tajikistan in the Soviet Period

The article focuses on Russian-Tajik relations during the Soviet era. The authors have analyzed articles from two popular science magazines published by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Tajikistan: “Agitator of Tajikistan” and “Communist of Tajikistan”, as well as materials from archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and other documents. The authors identified four categories of articles, depending on their content: anniversary articles, articles about Russian workers-craftsmen, articles about interethnic marriages, and articles about friendship between Tajiks and Russians in Tajik poetry. In the journals “Communist of Tajikistan” and “Agitator of Tajikistan”, articles dedicated to the friendship of these nations were published by people with academic degrees or chairmen of district, city or regional committees of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. Of course, the view from the position in 2024 on the topic of the friendship between peoples in Soviet times differs from the view that the authors held in the 1970s and 1980s. The study showed that the concept of “friendship of peoples” was a super-ethnic concept for Soviet people.