Forgotten President | TIME  Monday, Jan. 15, 1934

 When President Roosevelt 
sent his historymaking first telegram to Soviet "President" Kalinin (TIME, Oct. 
30) he ignored the Constitutional quirk under which Russia has not one president 
but seven, all supposedly equal. Each heads a constituent Soviet Republic of the 
Soviet Union. Comrade Kalinin is President only of "Russia proper." As new 
republics are added so are new presidents. Thus should the U. S. join the Soviet 
Union tomorrow (as Communists hope all countries eventually will) Franklin 
Delano Roosevelt would be the eighth Soviet president. He and the other seven 
would preside in rotation at Moscow—in theory. In practice presidents of the 
lesser Soviet republics are very much forgotten men. For the first time in 
months, one of them was mentioned last week when Moscow's Government newsorgan 
Izvestia tucked away at the bottom of its last page a tiny notice headed Meeting 
of the Central Executive Committee of the Tajik Republic.
The meeting deposed both President Maksum Nusratulla and Premier Khadjibaiev of 
the Tajik Republic. They had been found guilty, said Izvestia, of "a 
Bourgeois-Nationalist deviation from the party line." Translated, this means 
that one of the "equal" presidents of Russia was cashiered because he and his 
premier did not do exactly as they were told by the Secretary of the Communist 
Party, J. Stalin. Whether Tajiks got a new president or not Izvestia did not 
bother to report. Speaking a language which is almost Persian, nearly 2,000,000 
Tajiks live on 56,000 fertile square miles bounded by Afghanistan. Chinese 
Turkestan, Soviet Uzbekistan and the Soviet Kirghiz. To remind Tajiks who is 
master, their capital, Dushambe, was renamed Stalinabad.


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