The Tajikistani Badakhshan as distinctive polity with its contemporary Western borders and the Russian designation GBAO was created as autonomous republic in 1925. Later in 1929 this was changed to autonomous oblast, of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (Tajik SSR). The Soviet Orientalists' obsession with categorization of peoples led to the fixation of among others the identity category of Pamiris, or 'Mountain Tajiks' in the Soviet ethnogenesis. During the Soviet Union a lot of resources had been allocated to Gorno Badakhshan as borderland of the Soviet Union, for instance through privileged access to higher education and the construction of infrastructure like the Pamir highway in 1935, which is still remembered nowadays as a time of modernity. Therefore, people from the Pamirs used to have facilitated upwards mobility and access to political offices in the Tajik SSR. In scholarly discourse this is regarded as a measure to saveguard loyalty to state socialism of the subjects at the strategically important Soviet 'frontier'.
