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DUSHANBE, Tajikistan — Every district’s main town here has a government center, where the functionaries of the police, the commissar, and the KGB are rolled together into a small building that often looks shuttered. Most district centers in this remote corner of the former Soviet empire still bear statues of that discarded deity of distribution and allocation, V.I. Lenin, as if they are waiting for disposal instructions from the dysfunctional capital. Perhaps Vladimir Ilych still stands in parks and squares because in Tajikistan, the poorest former Soviet republic, life was markedly better under Moscow’s rule. Unlike other corners of the […]