SUMMARY:

This article examines the intellectual genealogy of a central tenet of contemporary nationalist discourse in Tajikistan, namely, the Aryan myth as the idea of the Tajiks’ Aryan descent. The origins of this myth are discovered in Late Imperial Russia. Over the first decades of the twentieth century, through the early Soviet period, the Tajik Aryan myth would transform from a narrative legitimizing Russian imperial rule to a myth of Tajik national identity. The article shows how Tajikistan’s imagining and formation as a nation-state was inextricably linked to the Aryan myth and to the way it was articulated by imperial scholars-turned-Soviet orientalists, such as Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Semenov (1873–1958). Taking the microhistorical perspective of a single life allows the author to highlight the local Central Asian dynamics of the complex imperial situation that paved the way to and accompanied Bolshevik nationalities policy. As a scholar with a certain political weight, Semenov managed to exploit the leeway for action in accordance with his own research interests (rather than acting as a mere instrument of the imperial and Soviet regimes in Central Asia). Consequently, the article argues that the process of delimiting borders and identities in 1920s Central Asia was influenced not only by Moscow-based Bolsheviks and leading Central Asian Muslim political figures but also by Russian orientalists as distinctive historical actors.