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The author looks at the problem of the legitimacy of the 2013 presidential election in Tajikistan as a sine qua non of social and political stability and, consequently, of the country's security and territorial integrity. In Tajikistan's specific case, the election could only be legitimate if the opposition forces, primarily the Islamic Revival Party of Tajikistan (IRP), which comes second after the institution of presidential power as the most influential political force, did not boycott it. Despite the easily predicted results (another term for President Rakhmon), the IRP leaders decided to take part in the process: an Islamic revival could only take place in a politically stable Tajikistan. To gain public legitimacy for their decision, they organized a series of consultations with representatives of the public to formulate and realize the idea of an Alliance of the Reformist Forces of Tajikistan (ORST), which nominated human rights activist Oinihol Bobonazarova as its joint presidential candidate. She did not run because, after failing to present the necessary number of signatures gathered in her support to the Central Election Commission, she was not registered as a candidate. The IRP leaders abstained from voting, but denied all accusations of boycotting the election. President Rakhmon, who won the election, and the IRP, which stuck resolutely to its course and was able to keep the Islamic revival going, were both winners. The country benefited the most-the election did not shake the frail stability, while Tajikistan's enemies lost another chance to interfere in its domestic affairs with destructive intentions.

Tajikistan's relations with the United States are just as important for it as those with Russia and China. While relations with Russia have two equally important components (economic and political, the military dimension included) and its relations with China are economy-dominated, Tajikistan's contacts with America cannot be described in figures, at least to a much lesser extent than the relations with the two other members of the Big Three. Today, the political element, with military technical cooperation as its component, is the only significant aspect of Tajik-American relations. This absolute domination of the political element in bilateral relations is unlikely to be changed, at least in the near future. From the very first days of its independence, Tajikistan has regarded its stable relations with the United States as a strategic task, a guarantee of its newly acquired sovereignty, which, in its turn, guaranteed the Tajiks' ethnic security and a stronger Tajik statehood. Security was, and still is, interpreted as the sum total of the political, economic, and other conditions under which the Tajiks will survive as an ethnos with an ethnic identity of its own. The Tajik leaders were absolutely convinced that as soon as the Soviet republic adopted its declaration of independence, the United States would hasten to recognize Tajikistan's new status as an independent state. They argued that this would have been a logical political move for a country that had been the Soviet Union's political and ideological foe for many years and that had been working toward the U.S.S.R.'s disintegration. The West and the United States, however, did not hasten to take this step. This did not happen until the Soviet Union fell apart de jure.

The idea of an independent integrated Central Asian expanse was born when perestroika in the Soviet Union was on its last legs. There was the strong feeling that the crisis of Soviet statehood gave rise to numerous and multiplying challenges that needed to be opposed by all means. For the first time in their Soviet history the local republics were confronted with a very real need to act on their own to cope with the problems created by the Union center's loss of ideological, political, and administrative competence. In the past, the Central Asian republics developed under Moscow's supervision; the center-initiated perestroika reforms led to a breakdown in economic ties between the region and Moscow. The Central Asian republics found themselves in a quandary; they gradually became convinced that they had reached the point of no return. Under these conditions, the local political elites tried to compensate for the lost economic ties with the center by establishing contacts among themselves. It was tacitly accepted that they would stay within the Soviet Union, while the Union itself would transform (without dropping its Soviet nature) from a unitary into a genuinely federal state (which meant it would acquire the form it should have had from the very beginning). As distinct from the Baltic and some other republics,neither the political community, nor the ruling circles, nor society in the Central Asian republics as a whole wanted any other arrangement prior to August 1991, which brought new political forces to power in Russia. The frantic efforts of the Central Asian republics at the late stage of perestroika to organize regional integration fell through. The Soviet Union collapsed when the Soviet government was liquidated; the Central Asian republics, one after another, declared themselves independent states. This was done in a hurry under the pressure of fear that the new rulers in Moscow would try to restore pre-Soviet, albeit modernized, order across the still Soviet expanse. After beginning to fill their theoretical independence with real content in 1990 by declaring their national sovereignties within the U.S.S.R., they found this prospect distasteful.

On 13 December, 2004 President of Tajikistan Emomali Rakhmonov signed a Decree on the next elections to Majlisi namoiandagon (Representative Assembly) scheduled for 27 February, 2005 and the Majlisi milli (National Assembly) scheduled for 24 March (two chambers of the Majlisi oli, the Supreme Assembly). The new election cycle brought in by the February elections to the already fully developed (where its form and structure were concerned) representative branch of power was expected to put an end to the revolutionary epoch to bring in sedate lifestyle and even routine functioning of the new, post-Soviet Tajik state that had on the whole taken shape: domination of the presidential form of government which had monopolized entire power and the most important political initiatives in the near and mid-term future. The parliament had lost some of its political weight to the same extent that the president was gaining his. In fact, the legislature had no role to play. The same fully applies to other CIS countries; the Russia under Putin was no exception. In this respect the form of statehood the republic has finally acquired and the evolution of parliamentarism in it are not unique. They reflect the processes and general regularities typical of all CIS countries at the present stage.

The events that took place in Central Asia in the first half of 2005 changed the geopolitical situation in the region to a certain extent. I have in mind the political crisis and the regime change in Kyrgyzstan, the clashes in the Uzbek city of Andijan, the request the SCO summit addressed to the United States to specify the terms for withdrawing its bases from the region, and finally Tashkent's official demand that the United States should remove its base from Khanabad in 180 days. This was the first time in the post-Soviet era that Washington was confronted with political difficulties in the region. One of the factors behind the new developments is the changed attitude toward the United States obvious both at the top and at the grassroots level: the original welcome has gradually waned to be replaced with a guarded attitude. The region has never been overly enthusiastic about the United States: in the first couple of years of their independence, the former Soviet Central Asian republics still looked at the U.S. from the Soviet viewpoint. At all times, however, local ideas about the United States differed greatly from those in the European part of the U.S.S.R. Most of the local people are Muslims, therefore a Western lifestyle was at no time accepted as an alternative to the Soviet way of life. The values were different, even though there were exceptions to this rule too.