Back to the Future

Dedicated viewers of Tajik TV yesterday were treated to a silly all-encompassing tribute to an impromptu holiday: a National Day of Solidarity in Honor of the Construction of the Rogun Hydropower Station. Or something along those lines.

Basically Rogun (technically "Roghun" in Tajik) has been the quiet theme of all the ever-present yet continually changing large billboards in Dushanbe throughout December. New Year's wishes couldn't be avoided, so Rogun couldn't have center stage all to itself, but it was there waiting in the wings.

Once New Year's was over, Rogun quickly jumped in to dominate the billboards: "Have YOU contributed to the foundation of Rogun HPS??" sternly queries the banner hung over the recently opened and now smoothly asphalted Tursunzade Avenue. (Somehow they resisted the urge to have a photo of either President Emomali Rahmon or national historical hero Ismoili Somoni there with a finger pointing, a la Uncle Sam or the Soviet equivalent.) Billboards in the usual places were joined by those at unfamiliar points, like right outside the recently constructed (in grandiose post-Soviet style) Youth Palace where we hope to take a try at the sauna this weekend, and at other random street corners where you normally just see a guy in a quilted chapan wobbling by on his bike with a pile of brooms tethered to the rear.

Then yesterday it all really reached its zenith, with performances on those unexplained stages that had been erected on Opera Square and right by aforementioned Youth Palace, and (somewhat small) crowds and TV cameras gathered round. And it was all capped off by the simultaneous TV coverage at night: as far as I could see all the stations were broadcasting the same thing, kind of like during a State of the Union address with the American president on at least all the network channels as you surf through them.

Rogun power station was started under the Soviets but abandoned after the union's collapse and Tajikistan's slide into civil war, in the mid 1990s. Now, plagued by the difficulties of being dependent on other independent countries (mainly the spiteful one in Uzbekistan) for power at the colder points in the year, when Tajikistan's means of generating power tends to be all locked up in snow and ice, Tajikistan is intent on completing Rogun and gaining true energy independence.

The trouble is, to build it they are "requesting" that the population of the country -- one of the poorest around -- invest in the construction and buy shares in the company. Yesterday was dedicated to that, and the TV coverage jumped all over the map of the country -- interviewing people in the South, in the North, in Hissor, in Khujand, everywhere -- about their pride in that investment and what it means for the future of their country (and interspersing these mini-interviews with silly music videos of songs dedicated to Rogun). Interesting how nobody they talked to seemed to have any problem with giving their hard-earned money over for this purpose...

To me the whole thing is so very sad: where will this well earned and saved money really go? Why couldn't the government gain the confidence of any foreign investors in this project? How many of the somoni invested will truly go toward supporting the project? For that matter, will the station even really get built?

And as if all of the forced hoopla to mobilize support for heroic, earth-moving projects meant to wrench a country out of its misery and into modernity and independence didn't give Russian historians enough deja-vu, true to form, just as Dan predicted (and those who've read Richard Stites will chuckle to learn), today a little baby boy named Roghunshoh (King Rogun) came into the world in a district close to Khujand.

(I'm surprised to learn that, not only could he possibly be rocked by great-grandma Elektrifikatsiya or dandled on the knee of great-grandpa Traktor, but he could conceivably have a cousin in Russia named Viagra?! I guess say what you will, but at least in Tajikistan, the more things change, the more they really do stay the same -- for better and for worse.)