St Joseph Church, Dushanbe St Joseph Church, Dushanbe St Joseph Church is a parish of the Roman Catholic Church located near Dushanbe International Airport in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Masses in the church for the small Catholic community are held in Russian and English. The church follows the Roman or Latin Rite and is part of the mission "sui juris" of Tajikistan. In the same area there is another parish church that is dedicated to St Roch. Parishioners are from different ethnic groups or nationalities including Germans, Lithuanians, Russians and Tajiks. This diversity stems from the deportations in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s.
Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic created at the same time within the predominantly Turkic Uzbek SSR as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik ASSR) – one rank below a Soviet Socialist Republic in USSR geopolitical hierarchy. The new autonomous republic included what had been eastern Bukhara and had a population of about 740,000, out of a total population of nearly 5 million in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as a whole. Its capital was established in Dyushambe, which had been a village of 3,000 in 1920. In December 1929, Tajik ASSR was detached from the Uzbek SSR and given full status as a Soviet Socialist