’Democracy was hijacked. It got a bad name’: the death of the post-Soviet dream | World news | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/08/central-asia-tajikistan-kazakhstan-kyrgyzstan-uzbekistan-turkmenistan
The road out of Kommunizm, a small town in southern Tajikistan, is badly paved and bumpy. Like most things here it was built long ago, when the ruling ideology that gave the settlement its name was still thriving.
Home to just 7,000 inhabitants, Kommunizm was at the very edge of the Russian empire, first tsarist then Soviet; a mere 50 miles from Kunduz in northern Afghanistan.
All around the former collective farm is the once splendid iconography of the Bolshevik order. Busts of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin look on to what used to be the main square, while a trio of heroically poised Soviet archetypes have been cast to one side in a car park