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.
Soviet republic (system of government) republics were short-lived communist revolutionary governments that were established in what had been the Russian Empire after the October Revolution and under its influence. These states included some such as the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic and the Latvian Socialist Soviet Republic which won independence from Russia during the civil war period. Others such as the Ukrainian Soviet Republic and the Socialist Soviet Republic of Byelorussia later became union republics of the Soviet Union and are now independent states. Still others such as the Kuban Soviet Republic and the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic were absorbed into other polities and no longer