The Last Purge: Soviet Uzbekistan During the Cotton Affair, 1975-1991

The Last Purge explores the political ramifications of what is now known as the Cotton Affair, the largest and final purge in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.A significant yet underexamined episode of Uzbekistan's contemporary history, the Cotton Affair was a drawn-out judicial and political imbroglio that grew out of falsified cotton production data and corruption.Under cotton king Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, the country more than doubled its production of cotton, the nation's principal cash crop.When the USSR's tenth five-year plan demanded an annual production of six million tons of raw cotton, however, production became a matter of political survival for the Uzbek ruling elite.To cope, they began hiding inefficiencies through bribes and falsifying cotton production data.Moscow's eventual crackdown in the 1980s implicated 58,000 officials - 20,000 of whom faced criminal prosecution - and overwhelmed Uzbekistan's institutions. Cucciolla set