“Some city families spoke only Russian, first to push the children to get ahead, and gradually because their declining Tajik seemed inadequate for what they wanted to say. Many people came to believe that Tajik was intrinsically unsuited to the modern world, useful only for such old-fashioned things as poetry and the language of love. From knowing only the Russian word for, say, matches, it was an easy step to the assumption that had the Russians not come there would have been no matches.”