1930s impacted on the NKVD. Even successful provincial NKVD
chiefs were sacrificed at the whim of Stalin’s policy. Information from
the Russian archives suggests that only 23 of 120 senior NKVD offi-
cers appointed by Yezhov survived his fall.UZBEK COTTON SCANDAL. The greatest single financial crime
in Soviet history involved the massive underreporting of cotton pro-
duction in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. Uzbek party
boss Sharaf Rashidov, who ruled the republic from 1959 to 1983,
treated Uzbekistan as his own fief and created a massive criminal
family to run it. Cotton was Uzbekistan’s most important crop, and
every effort was made to grow it. The Uzbek government beginning
in the 1970s massively overreported the amount of cotton delivered
to mills in Russia. These figures were never challenged by Moscow,
and the Uzbek political machine received billions of rubles for
imaginary cotton.
Rashidov’s tactics were well known in Moscow, but his close
friendship with party boss Leonid Brezhnevprotected him from
punishment. Following Brezhnev’s death in November 1982, Yuri
Andropovordered the KGBto begin a massive investigation of the
Uzbek party. Rashidov either committed suicide, died of a heart at-
tack, or was murdered, and the KGB began to roll up his subordi-
nates. Hundreds of party and police officials were tried, and a num-
ber were sentenced to death and shot in 1985–1987. Brezhnev’s
son-in-law, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Yuri Cherbanov, was
tried and imprisoned for his role in protecting Rashidov. The Soviet
press devoted thousands of pages to the story, heralding the punish-
ment of the Rasdidov gang as a triumph for law and order.
The MVDand KGB’s investigation of the “Uzbek mafia,” as it
was called in the Soviet press, caused major problems for Moscow in
the long run. Many Uzbeks believed that their nation had been sin-
gled out for racial or religious abuse, and that worse crimes had been
committed in the European parts of the Soviet Union. Rashidov had
tolerated Islam, and the investigation of corruption led to the arrest of
a number of religious figures. In 1988–1990, there was ethnic vio-
lence in Uzbekistan, as the Uzbeks sought to maintain control of eth-
nically divided areas of their republic, resulting from the fear that
Moscow was again seeking to minimize Uzbek interests.274 •UZBEK COTTON SCANDAL06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 274