Qoralash: Cotton, Corruption, and the Assault on Uzbek National Identity in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, 1983-1991

Abstract

Throughout the 1980s, a steadily-growing scandal played out in the newspapers of the Soviet Union—the Uzbek Cotton Scandal. Investigations revealed that the leaders of the Soviet Union’s Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic had falsified cotton production reports for decades and defrauded Moscow out of billions of rubles. Though historians have discussed the Cotton Scandal as it relates to Soviet political history and economics, little attention has been given to the discourse that constituted the Scandal and made it truly “Uzbek.” This thesis examines how the Soviet press, influenced by historically-rooted Orientalist tropes, decades of Soviet nationality policies, and the reform programs of the 1980s, transformed its coverage of the cotton industry’s corruption into a public explication and condemnation of Uzbek national identity. Using primary sources that include propaganda posters, film, literature, and public art, this thesis tracks the development of cotton as a symbol of Uzbek social and cultural progress and the promotion of cotton agriculture as a means by which Uzbeks could overcome the feudal past that defined them. This cultural approach to Uzbek cotton is then applied to Soviet newspaper narratives of the Uzbek Cotton Scandal to ultimately reveal a discourse of qoralash—an Uzbek word that can be translated to mean “accusation”—against the Uzbek nation as a whole. The qoralash discourse that developed in the Soviet press returned Uzbeks to the status of culturally backward outsiders and created a justification for renewed political interventions and centralized cultural control. Ultimately, this thesis alters existing understandings of the Uzbek Cotton Scandal, national identity in the late-Soviet Union, and the outcomes of glasnost’ in Soviet Central Asia.