When a Pound Weighed a Ton: The Cotton Scandal and Uzbek National Consciousness

During the reign of Leonid Brezhnev as General Secretary of the Soviet Union, corruption was hardly uncommon. Even by the standards of the era, the web of illegal activity that developed in the Uzbek S.S.R. was astonishing. Sharaf Rashidov was the man largely held as responsible for bringing about the massive amount of corrupt activity in Uzbekistan by utilizing cotton, Uzbekistan’s most important export, to build his network.Rashidov siphoned billions of rubles away from Moscow by falsely reporting cotton harvest numbers. But simply labeling Rashidov as a corrupt official or what became known as the Cotton Scandal as a typical example of Brezhnev-era corruption does not answer several important questions: was the scandal inevitable, what motivated Rashidov to engage in falsifying cotton reports, how did the exposure of the scandal impact how other Soviet citizens viewed Uzbekistan and finally, how did Uzbeks view themselves? This paper will examine the potential causes and motives of the scandal by exploring Rashidov’s life before taking control of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1959 as well as the cotton procurement policies dating back to the Stalin era. By calling attention to these factors, it will become clear that several intertwining factors led Rashidov to pursue the policy of extensively altering cotton procurement reports.Perhaps the most important aspect of the cotton scandal was not the huge sums of money pilfered by Rashidov, but rather the fallout after it was reveled to the Soviet public. The investigation conducted by Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov led to the Uzbek S.S.R. and its people being cast as thieves and naturally corrupt. The repeated accusations and typecasting of being corrupt and “backwards” fed into an “us versus them” mentality and a reactionary way of self-identification on the national level. The culmination of this method of identifying oneself as an Uzbek in the face hostility came to fruition at the onset of independence. Islam Karimov, the president of independent Uzbekistan, saw Rashidov as representative of Uzbek strength and someone who fought for the benefit of the Uzbek people, and chose to use him in building an Uzbek national symbol.This analysis of the Cotton Scandal and its influence on the growth of Uzbek national consciousness will show that the scandal itself, as well as Rashidov, was anything but simple. Unfortunately, Rashidov is all too often portrayed as simply corrupt, without analysis of possible motivations or reasons that led him to doctor procurement figures. Here, a critique of existing scholarship is in order to identify some of the common shortcomings of research on Rashidov and offer criteria in order to better and more completely evaluate the man behind one of the largest incidents of corruption in the history of the Soviet Union.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Arts

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Slavic and East European Studies

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Peterson, Derek Edward

Contributors dc:contributor

• Liu, Morgan

• History
• Slavic Studies
• Rashidov
• Sharaf
• Cotton Scandal
• Uzbekistan

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366199014

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1366199014