On September 5, 2026, the 95th anniversary of the opening of the Tajik State Pedagogical University named after Sadriddin Aini in Dushanbe will be celebrated. We tell the story of how the first pedagogical university of the republic was created and what role it played in the development of its education.
In April 1930, the government of Tajikistan made a decision to establish a higher pedagogical educational institution in Stalinabad.
The Stalinabad Pedagogical Institute was opened on September 5, 1931. However, due to a lack of teaching staff and students, classes in the first academic year began with considerable delay.
On September 27, the “rules for admission to the Tajik Agro-Pedagogical Institute” were published. The institute had 3 departments: language and literature, pedagogical, and agrobiological. The duration of study was set at three years.
Established under the name “Pedagogical Academy,” it was reorganized three years later into the Tajik State Pedagogical Institute. Despite the three-year duration of study, the pedagogical institute managed to produce its first graduation only in 1938, that is, seven years later.
The fact is that the first organizers and lecturers of the institute were mostly Russian teachers who came from Moscow and Leningrad; they did not know the Tajik language, and the students did not know Russian. Therefore, in the early years, classes were conducted with the help of interpreters, which took a lot of time and slowed down the progress of curricula and programs by half.
Credit must be given to the teachers of the pedagogical institute in the 1930s – they strived to master the Tajik language deeply. Over time, many of them began to understand and speak Tajik well. Among them was Lyubov Vladimirovna Uspenskaya, a candidate of philological sciences and professor, who came to Stalinabad in 1935 and was the author and compiler of the Russian-Tajik and Tajik-Russian dictionary.
In the late 1930s, a new building for the Tajik State University was constructed according to a project by architect Dmitry Bilibin. Historical, literary, and geographical faculties were established.
In the 1939-1940 academic year, alongside the department of Tajik language and literature on the literary faculty, a department of Russian language and literature was created. In 1939, the physics and mathematics faculty was established, and in 1940, the faculty of foreign languages.
In connection with the 125th anniversary of the birth of poet Taras Shevchenko, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Tajik SSR, by Decree of March 8, 1939, assigned his name to the Stalinabad Pedagogical Institute.
In 1981, the institute was awarded the Order of Friendship of Peoples.
Since 1991, the university bore the name of Kandil Duraev, and was later renamed the Tajik State Pedagogical University named after Sadriddin Aini.
Today, TSPU is one of the main educational, scientific, and educational centers for training scientific-pedagogical and engineering-pedagogical personnel of the republic. Here, students are trained not only to become teachers in all school subjects, but the university also graduates psychologists, speech-language pathologists, translators, sociologists, and managers.
The university has scientific schools, and students and faculty participate in research. The university assists teachers in schools and other educational organizations.
All photos in the material are from the archive of Gafur Shermatov
