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.
Kazakh Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic August 1920, and was a part of the RSFSR. Before the Russian Revolution, Kazakhs in Russia were known as "Kirghiz-Kazaks" or simply "Kirghiz" (and the Kyrgyzes as "Kara-Kirghiz"). This practice continued into the early Soviet period, and thus the Kirghiz ASSR was a national republic for Kazakhs. However, on 15–19 June 1925 the Fifth Kazakh Council of Soviets decided to rename the republic the Kazak Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic. The capital of the former Kirghiz ASSR, Ak-Mechet, was retained as the seat of the Kazak ASSR but was renamed Kzyl-Orda, from the Kazakh "red centre". In 1927 or 1929 the