Culture, Religion and Ethnicity
Following a series of migrations, mostly predating Soviet rule, that displaced the autochthonous Iranian peoples, most of the inhabitants of Soviet Central Asia were speakers of either Kipchak languages (such as Kazakhs) or Uyghuric languages (Uzbeks). Those populations were nomadic and settled, respectively. There remained traces of some settled farming and urban Iranic communities like the Tajiks and Bukhara in the south, and nomadic Mongolic Kyrgiz on the order with China. The Slavic community was would grow very rapidly under communism and Russians would eventually become a major ethnic group in the region. The Slavic population followed Orthodox Christianity, while the rest were mostly Sunni Muslims. Various nationality, such as the Meskhetian Turks and Volga Germans would get banished to the region. The Bolsheviks would quickly set about closing mosques and churches throughout the USSR. This became particularly prevalent in the 1930s, but had been fully abandoned by the 1980s.
Read more about this topic: Soviet Central Asia
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“Is there any religion but this, to know, that, wherever in the wide desert of being, the holy sentiment we cherish has opened into a flower, it blooms for me? If none sees it, I see it; I am aware, if I alone, of the greatness of the fact. Whilst it blooms, I will keep sabbath or holy time, and suspend my gloom, and my folly and jokes.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)