with you.” The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, prematurely severed relations — at least as Tursunzoda had imagined them. Civil war in Tajikistan between neo-communists and an opposition composed of a medley of democratic and Islamist factions followed almost immediately and ravaged the country. Nearly 50,000 people were killed in a country of just over 5 million, and another 1.2 million were displaced. Between 1992 and 1997, when the war finally ended — after sustained Russian intervention and mediation — GDP per capita fell by nearly 66 percent. All forms of employment vanished. “People started looking for opportunities elsewhere,” said Zuhra Halimova, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who, until August, was the executive director of the Open Society Institute Assistance Foundation-Tajikistan, a localaddition to the slow recovery from war, have helped cut poverty dramatically: According to the World Bank, the poverty rate has declined from 72 percent in 2003 to just above 30 percent today. The Sunday before our train departed, we joined a group of Tajik men having an afternoon barbeque on the wide bank of a river outside Somoniyon, a small village in Tajikistan’s rural Rasht Valley, which stretches up toward the country’s northern border with Kyrgyzstan. A drooping, solitary willow tree provided shade on a surprisingly sunny and warm spring day. The windows and doors of an old, secondhand German-made station wagon were open, and Tajik pop music played from the speakers. The bank of the river boasted a series of impressive Soviet ruins. Behind us sat