Tajik capital parts with Soviet era monuments

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DUSHANBE – Busts of Cheslav Putovsky and Felix Dzerzhinsky, two founders of Soviet state security agencies, were dismantled in Dushanbe on November 27, the mayor’s press secretary Shavkat Saidov said. He said the monuments are now at Tajikistan’s State Committee for National Security.

“The Dzerzhinsky monument was dismantled because the square in front of the Interior Ministry and State Committee for National Security is being reconstructed. The Putovsky monument was removed because it sat on land transferred to the Hyatt Regency Hotel,” Saidov said, adding that both monuments have already been re-erected in the courtyard of the Academy for National Security.

The latest Soviet era monuments to be dismantled follow a number of others in post-Soviet Tajikistan. The last Vladimir Lenin monument in Dushanbe was taken down in March 2007 to allow for the construction of a new city park adjacent to the Palace of Nations that now contains a monument to Abuabdullo Rudaki, a founder of Tajik-Persian classical literature.

The Communist Party of Tajikistan requested that Lenin’s statue be placed at the entrance to its offices, but Saidov said the city’s cultural department and the National Art Fund would decide its fate. The bronze monument made by Vladimir Kozlov in 1926 is an exact copy of the one at Smolny Palace in St. Petersburg.

Along with monuments to the Communist era, Tajikistan is also eliminating old Soviet names. In 2006, the names of the highest peaks in the Pamir Mountains were changed by government resolution from Lenin Peak to Independence Peak, and Revolution Peak was renamed after Abu Ali Ibn Sina, the famous medieval doctor, philosopher and founder of Tajik-Persian poetry known as Avitsenna.

Tajikistan began eliminating Soviet era names in 1999 when the highest point in the former Soviet Union, 7,495-metre Communism Peak, was renamed in honour of Ismoila Somoni, founder of the first Tajik state.