The 1979 Soviet census revealed an unprecedented increase in the (largely Muslim) population of Soviet Central Asia. In Soviet Kazakhstan and the republics abutting the Afghan frontier—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan—the numbers were up by over 25 percent since 1970. Over the course of the following decade, whereas the Ukrainian population would grow by just 4 percent, that of Tajikistan increased by nearly half. European Russia, as it seemed to its leaders, was under demographic threat from its internal minorities:
