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.
Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic In 1991, the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic succeeded the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic from which the PMSSR seceded was created in 1940 following the Soviet annexation of territory belonging to inter-war Romania. When Bessarabia was ceded to the Soviet Union as a result of an ultimatum, it was combined with a strip of land on the left bank of the Dniester which had formed the nucleus of a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR), with Tiraspol as its executive capital, throughout the interwar period. The newly fused territory became the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, and