A Few Broken Eggs: Collective Punishment of Kin in Tajikistan

In early November 1937, Joseph Stalin said at a reception at the Kremlin that enemies should be eliminated, root and branch. “And we will eliminate every such enemy [of the state]... we will eliminate his entire lineage, his family!” As historian Golfo Alexopoulos noted in a 2008 article about collective punishment practices in the early Soviet Union, “Only the ‘politicals,’ that is, people accused of disloyalty, treason, or other counterrevolutionary activity experience terror as family units. It was the collective punishment of kin that made political repression under Stalin truly a mass phenomenon.”

Collective punishment, specifically of kin, didn’t die with Stalin. One place it lives on is in Tajikistan, as a recent chain of events illustrates clearly.

In late September, the five Central Asian leaders descended on Berlin for a summit with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. As Rahmon was on his way, via motorcade, to be welcomed at the Chancellery, Tajik activists – who had gathered to protest along the route, holding signs proclaiming Rahmon a “dictator” – pelted his car with eggs. In photos of Rahmon exiting the vehicle, eggy bits can be seen smeared down the window.

The Tajik government’s reaction was swift. In the two days after the incident, as many as 50 relatives of protesters present in Germany were detained by law enforcement back in Tajikistan; more were visited by authorities and questioned.

Farhod Odinaev told RFE/RL, for example, that “They asked my mother why [the opposition abroad] threw eggs at the ‘Leader of the Nation’s’ car.”

Odinaev is a Germany-based Tajik activist. He was formerly a member of the Islamic Renaissance Party (IRPT), a once-legal Islamist political party, which Dushanbe branded extremist in 2015 and essentially hounded out of existence. In 2019, Odinaev – based in Russia at the time – obtained a Polish visa so he could take part in an annual human rights event orchestrated by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He was detained, however, at the Poland-Belarus border at Tajikistan’s request and spent 43 days in detention, fearing extradition. After he was released, he relocated to Europe – but like many Tajik activists forced into exile, much of his family remains back in Tajikistan.

The same is true of the family of Sharofiddin Gadoev.

Gadoev is one of the founders of the Tajik opposition movement Group 24. His cousin, Umarali Quvvatov, was Group 24’s first leader – until he was assassinated in Istanbul in March 2015.

In February 2019, Gadoev arrived in Russia from the Netherlands, where he had obtained asylum some years before. He was soon detained and forcibly returned to Tajikistan, where he was tortured and forced to confess his “crimes.” At the same time, the authorities recorded him “happily” interacting with his family. As Human Rights Watch explained it:

… Russian officials nabbed Gadoev in Moscow, placing a cellophane bag over his head and tape over his mouth, and drove him straight to the Moscow airport.

There, officials circumvented passport control and placed him onto a flight to Tajikistan, where Tajik officials took custody of him, brutally beating him. They beat him so violently during the four-hour flight to Dushanbe that on arrival his clothes were soaked with blood.

Gadoev later told Human Rights Watch that his interrogators interrupted the beatings just long enough to threaten him, “You have three options: cooperate, go to prison for 25 years, or die.”

In the following week, Tajik authorities broadcast crude choreographed videos of him ostensibly happy to be back with relatives and friends and confessing his “crimes.” But Gadoev was never outside the presence of security services, not allowed access to an attorney, nor able to call his wife, who was terrified at home in the Netherlands.

Pressure began to mount immediately for his release: Dutch parliamentarians agitated; Germany diplomats began asking questions. Gadoev’s colleagues back in Europe released a video he’d recorded before leaving for Russia in which he preempted his own kidnapping: “If you see this video, it means I have been murdered, kidnapped or that I have gone missing… If I suddenly turn up on state television or on YouTube declaring that I am in Tajikistan and that I have returned of my own free will, you must not believe this. I would under no circumstance ever return to Tajikistan of my own free will.”

Gadoev was released and returned to Europe. But his mother, and other relatives, remained in Tajikistan. And so, with Gadoev leading the protests against Rahmon in Germany, the authorities paid a visit to his 72-year-old mother, Oishamo Abdulloeva. She was detained on October 1.

Gadoev told RFE/RL that when his mother was being taken from her home, the authorities “angrily asked her why her son calls [Rahmon] a dictator, why he threw eggs at the president’s car in Berlin, [why] can’t he just live calmly?”

Abdulloeva was released after eight hours, but the punishment did not end.

On October 11, Abdulloeva’s home in Farkhor district was unexpectedly visited by electricity workers who cut her powerline.

"I told the electricity workers that I am not in debt and I pay the electricity bill every month,” she told RFE/RL’s Tajik Service. “‘Why did you cut the cable to our house?’ They said that your son criticized the president in Germany, it was an order from above. They did not listen to what I said.”

Dozens more kin of activists – mothers, fathers, cousins, siblings – have been detained or harassed in Tajikistan, a volume of stories that won’t fit into this column in their entirety but should be appreciated for their weight and what they tell us about the Tajik government.

Earlier this year, Tajikistan expert Edward Lemon, president of the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs and a research assistant professor with the Bush School, Texas A&M University, told The Diplomat that “fear is central to the government’s grip on power in Tajikistan.”

He went on to explain: “Every arrest, case of torture, extrajudicial killing and kidnapping sends a signal to journalists, activists, community leaders, and lawyers about the cost of challenging the regime. This leads to many withdrawing from public life, leaving the country, or self-censoring.”

Activists like Gadoev and Odinaev are often referred to as ”self-exiled,” a term that suggests a genuine choice was made to stay or to leave. For men whose relatives have been killed, or jailed, or had their electricity cut at the edge of winter, what is there to return to in Tajikistan?

The Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago, but its legacy – and Stalin’s cruelty in particular – lives on in how thin Rahmon’s skin is and what his government is willing to do to see retribution for critiques, insults, and a few broken eggs.