Inomjon Buzrukovich Usmonxo‘jayev (in Cyrillic Uzbek

Uzbek language

Uzbek is a Turkic language and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 25.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia...

: Иномжон Бузрукович Усмонхўжаев ; in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

: Инамджан Бузрукович Усманходжаев Inamdzhan Buzrukovich Usmankhodzhayev) (born on 21 May 1930) served as the eleventh General Secretary

General Secretary

The office of general secretary is staffed by the chief officer of:*The General Secretariat for Macedonia and Thrace, a government agency for the Greek regions of Macedonia and Thrace...

 of the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR. Usmonxo‘jayev became General Secretary following the disastrous "Cotton Scandal".

The Cotton Scandal

Usmonxo‘jayev succeeded Sharof Rashidov, who had been General Secretary since the 1950s. 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. During the decade following the death of Rashidov, Moscow attempted to regain the central control over the Uzbek SSR

Uzbek SSR

The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic , also known as the Uzbek SSR for short, was one of the republics of the Soviet Union since its creation in 1924...

 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 one 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 Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Brezhnev

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev  – 10 November 1982) was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union , presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982. His eighteen-year term as General Secretary was second only to that of Joseph Stalin in...

’s own son-in-law, Yuri Churbanov

Yuri Churbanov

Yuri Mikhailovich Churbanov was the son-in-law of Soviet politician and longtime General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev.-Life and career:Chubranov was born on 11 November 1936. As a young boy he was an active member of the Komsomol. He attended the Moscow State University in the 1960s and studied...

 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.

Usmonxo‘jayev's term

It was while Usmonxo‘jayev was General Secretary that satellite images showed that the Uzbek government's reports were false. Usmonxo‘jayev held his position throughout the scandal, serving as a puppet of Moscow as the Central Committee tried to strengthen its grip in Uzbekistan. Usmonxo‘jayev was General Secretary from 3 November 1983 until 12 January 1988. His replacement was Rafiq Nishonov

Rafiq Nishonov

Rafiq Nishonovich Nishonov served as the twelfth First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Uzbek SSR....

.