quick calculations of cost — how much for tickets, visas, housing, bribes — and lengthy discussions of work conditions at various construction sites. Tajikistan has long been tightly yoked to Russia. In the middle of the 19th century, tsarist forces conquered much of Central Asia — including much of what is now Tajikistan — for its cotton. Later, in the 1920s, Soviet administrators in Moscow carved the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic from what is now Uzbekistan, as a means of establishing greater control over the region. Under the Soviets, the flow of people and goods went both ways. Tajikistan remained the poorest of the Soviet republics, but, in exchange for its cotton, the production of which Soviet agriculturalists assiduously expanded, Soviet engineers erected dams and factories. Soviet plannersconverted what had been a dusty village town, Dushanbe, into the capital of the fledging republic; sprawling, brown concrete apartment complexes and pastel-colored, surprisingly graceful schools and universities turned the village into a city. Russian citizens came, too, sent mostly to serve as an upper-class management elite. By 1979, Soviet census data show that more than 10 percent of the population was ethnic Russian. Mirzo Tursunzoda, perhaps the greatest Tajik poet from the Soviet era, enthused of the kinship between Russia and Tajikistan in a poem: “And my Tajik people are now forever / Joined with you.” Mirzo Tursunzoda, perhaps the greatest Tajik poet from the Soviet era, enthused of the kinship between Russia and Tajikistan in a poem: “And my Tajik people are now forever / Joined