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.
Dissolution of the Soviet Union the former national anthem Tautiška giesmė was later reinstated. On February 20, 1988, after a week of growing demonstrations in Stepanakert, capital of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (the Armenian majority area within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic), the Regional Soviet voted to secede and join with the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia. This local vote in a small, remote part of the Soviet Union made headlines around the world; it was an unprecedented defiance of republican and national authorities. On February 22, 1988, in what became known as the "Askeran clash", thousands of Azerbaijanis marched towards Nagorno-Karabakh, demanding information about