Lyceum No. 5

In 1926, literacy among Tajik women stood at 0.1 percent. Over the following decades, the Soviet government built an extensive system of state schools across Central Asia, carrying classroom education into communities where only a small fraction of the population had previously attended formal schools.

Lyceum No. 5 in Dushanbe, with its bold Cyrillic lettering stretched across a red-and-white facade, belongs to the educational landscape that emerged from that transformation. By the final years of the Soviet Union, more than a million students were enrolled in thousands of schools across Tajikistan, making mass literacy one of the era’s most consequential and complicated legacies.

The school now stands in a capital actively reconsidering its Soviet inheritance. Soviet-era landmarks have given way to glass towers, ceremonial avenues, and monumental buildings drawing upon Tajikistan’s older Persian and Islamic identity. Lyceum No. 5 remains a visible product of another chapter: its Cyrillic lettering still mounted across the facade as students pass through a city continually deciding how much of its Soviet past to preserve, replace, or reinterpret.