Sharof Rashidov

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Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov (Russified form Sharaf Rashidovich Rashidov Russian: Шараф Рашидович Рашидов is also used) (6 November 1917 [O.S. 24 October] - 31 October 1983) was a Communist Party leader in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic.

Born the day before the Russian Revolution to the poor peasant family in Jizzakh, in what would be the Uzbek SSR of the Soviet Union, Sharaf Rashidovich Rashidov worked as a teacher, journalist and editor for a Samarkand newspaper. He returned home in 1942 with wounds suffered on the German front in World War 2. He became head of the Uzbekistan Writers Union in 1949, and was elected to the post of Chairman of the Praesidium of the Uzbek Supreme Soviet in 1950. In 1959, he became First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, a post he held to his death in 1983.

To the common Russians his name became synonymous with corruption, nepotism and the Great Cotton Scandal of the late Brezhnev period. As orders from Moscow to grow more and more and more cotton spiraled in, the Uzbek government responded by reporting miraculous growth in land irrigated and harvested, and record improvements in production and efficiency. Today it would seem that most of these records were falsified. Uzbek leadership used these exaggerated figures to transfer substantial amounts of wealth from central Soviet funds into Uzbekistan. Rashidov died in office shortly before satellite imagery revealed the true extent of the massive fraud, unparalleled in Soviet history.

During the decade following the death of Rashidov, Moscow attempted to regain the central control over the Uzbek SSR that had weakened in the previous decade. In 1986, it was announced that almost the entire party and government leadership of the republic had conspired in falsifying cotton production figures. A massive purge (only 1 minister survived the purge) of the Uzbek leadership was carried out, with prosecutors brought in from Moscow, leading to widespread arrests, executions, and suicides. It may never be know how high the corruption extended, as Brezhnev’s own son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov was implicated in the affair. In the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan became synonymous with corruption even though such corruption was widespread throughout the USSR. It would seem that central government had singled Uzbeks out unfairly in order to move attention away from the rest of the corruption; in the 1980s, this resentment led to a strengthening of Uzbek nationalism. After Uzbekistan independence, Rashidov has re-emerged as a national hero. He is seen as having been a strong leader who found a way to cleverly defy Moscow and "beat the system” while managing to create a situation where Uzbekistan became autonomous of central control.