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Uzbekistan
The Stalinist Period
In 1929 the Tajik and Uzbek Soviet socialist republics were separated.
As Uzbek communist party chief, Khojayev enforced the policies
of the Soviet government during the collectivization of agriculture
in the late 1920s and early 1930s and, at the same time, tried
to increase the participation of Uzbeks in the government and
the party. Soviet leader Joseph V. Stalin suspected the motives
of all reformist national leaders in the non-Russian republics
of the Soviet Union. By the late 1930s, Khojayev and the entire
group that came into high positions in the Uzbek Republic had
been arrested and executed during the Stalinist purges.
Following the purge of the nationalists, the government and party
ranks in Uzbekistan were filled with people loyal to the Moscow
government. Economic policy emphasized the supply of cotton to
the rest of the Soviet Union, to the exclusion of diversified
agriculture. During World War II, many industrial plants from
European Russia were evacuated to Uzbekistan and other parts of
Central Asia. With the factories came a new wave of Russian and
other European workers. Because native Uzbeks were mostly occupied
in the country's agricultural regions, the urban concentration
of immigrants increasingly Russified Tashkent and other large
cities. During the war years, in addition to the Russians who
moved to Uzbekistan, other nationalities such as Crimean Tatars,
Chechens, and Koreans were exiled to the republic because Moscow
saw them as subversive elements in European Russia.
Data as of March 1996
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