Particularly bitter debates accompanied the partition of the Uzbek and Tajik SSRs in 1929, focusing especially on the status of the cities of Bukhara, Samarkand, and the Surxondaryo Region, all of which had sizeable, if not dominant, Tajik populations. The final decision negotiated by the Uzbek and Tajik parties, not without strong involvement of the Communist Party, left these three largely Tajik-populated territories within the Turkic-populated Uzbek SSR. The Tajik SSR was created on 5 December 1929 as the home for most of the ethnic Tajiks in Soviet Central Asia within the boundaries of present-day Tajikistan.