THE FERGHANA VALLEY DURING PERESTROIKA 181
in both the Uzbek and Kyrgyz republics.
4
This was no coincidence. The Ferghana
Valley had long been dominated by strong informal networks that were not al-
ways well connected with the existing political structures. Perestroika destroyed
whatever connections existed, moving to the fore the informal networks. Moscow
knew of this, and gladly played the various elites off against each other. Perestroika
strengthened the local elites and their clans in all spheres of public life, and thrust
these leaders from the Ferghana into the echelons of power.
As the social and economic crises intensified in the USSR during the 1970 and
1980s, the first efforts were mounted to address issues of corruption and false re-
porting in the cotton industry, especially in the Ferghana Valley. The first attempts
to investigate cases of corruption and bribery among high-ranking officials in the
Uzbek SSR date back to the 1970s. Thus, both the chairman of the Presidium of the
Supreme Soviet and the chairman of the Supreme Court of the Uzbek Republic were
on the verge of being prosecuted as early as 1975. However, thanks to the influence
of an Uzbek woman, I.S. Nasriddinova, then chair of the Soviet of Nationalities of
the
Supreme Soviet, Leonid Brezhnev dropped both investigations.
5
The Ferghana economic region of the Uzbek Republic (Ferghana, Andijan, Naman-
gan) occupied only 4.3 percent of the republic’s territory and numbered only five million
inhabitants.
6
Yet it produced 22.9 percent of all the republic’s crops.
7
Although the region
also produced silk, fruit, and wine, as well as industrial goods, it was cotton to which 80
percent of the arable land was devoted. Of the twenty-four cities in the Ferghana region,
many were rapidly expanding thanks to the rise of the oil and light industry. Since the
farmers were otherwise occupied, immigrants flowed in from elsewhere, leading by 1979
to a high population density of 34.4 persons per square kilometer and growing social
problems in both the cities and countryside.
8
Even though production of foodstuffs in
Ferghana was up to five times greater than in other parts of the Republic of Uzbekistan,
it did not suffice to meet local needs. This was partly disguised by false reporting on
production which, according to the Academy of Sciences, led to an overstatement of
production in all sectors by anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent.
9
Strong controls built into the five-year planning process assured that none of these
economic problems were adequately examined. Household heads could not institute
changes even in such rudimentary areas as weed eradication, watering, and cotton
harvesting without first receiving instructions from higher Party organs. Only in 1983
did decisive change begin, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union decreed a “cadre revolution” in the country.
10
Under the instructions
of the Procurator General of the USSR, a 200-person investigating team was set up
under the leadership of one Telman Gdlian. Even though corruption of every sort was
rampant across the Soviet Union, the commission began its work in Uzbekistan.
11
This
choice was logical, since the government categorically excluded the possibility that
the problems might arise from the Soviet system itself and was therefore all the more
eager to pin blame on corrupt or incompetent “cadres”—administrators. Investiga-
tors assigned to work on the “cotton affair” refused to consider the causes of all the
misreporting, which in fact arose from the “top down” system of setting production
182 SHOZIMOV,
BESHIMOV,
YUNUSOVA
quotas and its demand for results, with little or no concern for improving the system
in order to achieve them. Court records indicate that 198 people were convicted
and then acquitted in the Ferghana province alone, with 145 people convicted in
the Andijan city court. Gdlian’s team indicted twenty executives of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs, four secretaries of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
of the Republic, eight secretaries of the provincial Party committees, and others—
altogether sixty-two senior officials went to trial and were convicted of bribery.
Some thirty-five criminal cases reached trial by May 1989. During the previous
half-decade the team considered more than 800 criminal cases and brought to trial
600 senior officials and ten Heroes of Socialist Labor.
12
By the time the “Cotton
Affair” had ended, charges had been brought against 4,018 people in Uzbekistan,
most of them collective farm officials in the Ferghana Valley.
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