has an interesting regional museum and lies near the remains of the ancient city of Merv, which, through its corrupted form, gives its name to the modern town. Carpets from the region of Merv are sometimes considered superior to the Persian ones. Uzbekistan The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, also referred to as Uzbekistan, was created in 1924 when the new national boundaries separating the Uzbek and Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republics cut off the eastern end of the Fergana Valley, as well as the slopes surrounding it. This was compounded in 1928 when the Tajik ASSR became a fully-fledged republic, the Tajik SSR, and the area around Khodjend was made a part of it. This blocked the valley's natural outlet and the routes to Samarkand and Bukhara, but none of these borders was of any great significance so long as Soviet rule lasted. The Uzbek SSR included the Tajik ASSR until 1929, when the Tajik ASSR was upgraded to an equal status. In 1930, the Uzbek SSR capital was relocated from Samarkand to Tashkent. In 1936, the Uzbek SSR was enlarged with the addition of the Karakalpak ASSR taken from the Kazakh SSR in the last stages of the national delimitation in the Soviet Union. Further bits and pieces of territory were transferred several times between the Kazakh SSR and the Uzbek SSR after World War II. During the Great Purges of Joseph Stalin, many thousands of Chechens, Koreans and Crimean Tatars were exiled to the Uzbek SSR. The State Anthem of the Uzbek SSR was the national anthem of Uzbekistan when it was a republic of the Soviet Union and known as the Uzbek SSR. The city of Tashkent began to industrialize in the 1920s and 1930s, but industry increased tremendously during World War II, with the relocation of factories from western Russia to preserve the Soviet industrial capacity from the hostile invading Nazis. The Russian population increased dramatically as well, with evacuees from the war zones increasing the population to well over a million. (The Russian community would eventually comprise more than half of the total residents of Tashkent by the 1980s.) On 26 April 1966, Tashkent was destroyed by an earthquake and over 300,000 were left homeless. At the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Tashkent was the fourth largest Soviet city and a major center of learning in the fields of science and