The focus of this book is the political power struggle that surfaced in Tajikistan in the late-Soviet period and escalated into a civil war that lasted from1992 to 1997. As background, Iraj Bashiri also provides an overview of the Emirate of Bukhara (which controlled part but not all of what is now Tajikistan) in the nineteenth century and the Soviet impact on the Tajiks and Tajikistan. Of particular interest is the author's account of his experiences living in Dushanbe, the capital, when he went there to do research in 1993. At that point, the worst of the fighting in the city itself was over, but tensions, rumors, food shortages and inconveniences remained. Bashiri also provides the complete text in translation of several documents pertaining to the political power struggle.

Bashiri makes extensive use of sources in Tajik as well as some in Russian, which is all to the good, but for the fact that he tends to accept too much of what those sources say at face value and rely too heavily on some of them. For example, almost all of chapter five (roughly eighty percent of the citations) and lengthy passages elsewhere are based on the writings of Safarali Kenjaev. He was a major player in the events of the power struggle so his views are relevant, but that also makes him a partisan source of information. The author paints a favorable portrait of Kenjaev, but his source for that is Kenjaev's own words (144, 213.) Some of the author's negative statements about the Opposition come from Kenjaev, who was on the other side in the power struggle. Similarly, the source for the author's assertion that Opposition fighters who fled to Afghanistan traded refugee children for weapons from Afghan fighters is a speech by Imomali Rahmon, who came to power through the defeat of the Opposition (243.) Some of the author's assertions have no identified source: for example, that the Saudis funded the Islamic revival starting in the mid-1970s in Tajikistan or that those revivalists instilled a hatred of communists in children.

A number of the points made in the book are inaccurate or at least less clear-cut than the author seems to think. For example, the thoroughly discredited Testament of Peter the Great appears among the reasons given for Russia's expansion into Central Asia in the nineteenth century, “Russia intended to satisfy Peter the Great's wish to reach the warm waters of the Indian Ocean” (64.) The depiction of kulaks as “those who did not report their wealth to the collective” (104, n45) and “the greatest stumbling block” to progress (104) is highly debatable. The same applies to the assertion that under glasnost, Soviet citizens “mostly abandoned atheism for Orthodox Christianity” (225.) The author depicts the Popular Front, fighters who battled the Opposition during the civil war and at times flew the Soviet flag on their vehicles, as performing “peace-keeping activities” (185.)

There is a recurrent tendency to present a black-and-white contrast between communists and Muslims. The author describes a member of the Islamic “official clergy,” to use Soviet terminology, Haidar Sharifzoda, simply as a Muslim, without mentioning that he was also a staunch supporter of the hardline communist regime in Dushanbe in the early 1990s. For much of the book, the regime that came to power at the end of 1992 and its head, Imomali Rahmonov (now Rahmon), who has been in power ever since, are depicted in favorable terms as reformist, democratic, and benevolent toward the country's inhabitants. Not until late in the book is there a brief mention of the way Rahmon has concentrated political and economic power in his and his relatives’ hands.

There is already a body of scholarly literature in western languages on the topics covered by this book. Yet some important contributors are cited only rarely, such as Tim Epkenhans and John Heathershaw. Others are not mentioned at all, including the authors of a book on a similar topic, Kirill Nourzhanov and Christian Bleuer (Tajikistan: A Political and Social History, 2013), as well as Paul Bergne, Artemy Kalinovsky, Shahrbanou Tadjbakhsh, Stephane Dudoignon, Edward Lemon, Sophie Roche, Adeeb Khalid, and others. Readers would do well to consult these works for other perspectives on the topics covered in this book.