Few theories of politics in Soviet Uzbekistan have received greater attention, affirmation, and debate than the importance of regionalism, often depicted as manifested in elite ;;clans” or solidarity groups. Concentrated primarily in Tashkent, Samarkand, Ferghana, and to a lesser degree Khorezm, these groups are asserted to have been vying and scheming for power throughout the Soviet era. Three path-breaking works have been authored on the topic: Kathleen Collins’ Clan Politics and Regime Transition in Central Asia, Pauline Jones Luong’s Institutional Change and Political Continuity in Post-Soviet Central Asia, and Olivier Roy’s The New Central Asia. Two circumstances compel a reappraisal of this hypothesis. First and foremost, neither these contributions nor any of the dozens of scholarly articles published on the topic build on primary archival sources. This dissertation fills this lacunae. Second, conflicting claims regarding this proposition give room for doubt. Luong, for example, averred in the early 2000s that cadre recruitment on the basis of region of origin in Soviet Uzbekistan was ;;overt” and well-known. What is puzzling is that Irwin Selnick’s 500-page doctoral dissertation on elite recruitment in Uzbekistan, defended in 1984, did not even mention the possibility of such local favoritism, let alone using the concepts of ;;clan”, solidarity groups, or regionalism. If it was as overt as has been claimed and if the Politburo was filled with figures from Rashidov’s Samarkand why did Selnick not recognize it? The reason, this dissertation contends, is because the notion of ;;clans” and strong regionalism in Uzbekistan is largely a myth. The origins of this myth trace to the dubious, populistic, and demonstrably false information on Uzbekistan presented by Soviet authorities in the mid-1980s. Older readers may remember the ;;cotton scandal” during these years, in which hundreds of Uzbek officials were purged following revelations of widespread corruption, embezzlement of cotton, and ;;mafia-rule”. This was also the catalyst of the clan/region hypothesis, pioneered by Donald Carlisle in 1985. This theory of extensive nepotism and subnational loyalties corresponded seamlessly with the picture portrayed by the Prosecutor General’s anti-corruption investigators, Telman Gdlyan and Nikolai Ivanov, as well as that of Rashidov’s successor Inamzhon Usmankhodzhaev, all of whom had a political agenda and, as will be detailed below, used biased or falsified information to support it.To back up these claims, this dissertation builds primarily on a close examination of primary sources in Moscow’s RGASPI and RGANI archives, biographical information gleaned from official Soviet Central Asian encyclopedias, Soviet newspapers, and party plenum reports. The main archival material used has been drawn from the Party Control Commission, which monitored party violations in the Soviet Union, including the presence of nepotism, localism (zemlyachestvo or mestnichestvo), and corruption. The focus is Soviet Uzbekistan, from its formation in 1924 to independence in 1991, although plenty of material has been drawn also from other Soviet republics. Needless to say, whether locally based loyalties were more or less present in Uzbekistan than elsewhere in the Soviet Union can only be assessed comparatively. The main findings are: First, the archival record contains scant evidence that subnational loyalties were a major problem in Soviet Uzbekistan. While there were rifts to be sure, these were mostly limited to antagonisms between Uzbeks and Russian/Slavs in the Central Committee, ;;groupism” in the agricultural sector on the specific technologies to be used, and oligarchic decision-making in obkom and republican bodies. Locally based loyalties were noted elsewhere in the Soviet Union, especially in Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, and several Russian oblasts but only rarely in Uzbekistan. Second, it is true that figures hailing from Tashkent, Ferghana, and Samarkand dominated politics throughout the Soviet period. This could in part be explained by demographic factors: in 1976 Tashkent, Samarkand, and Ferghana oblast made up 29.7%, 27.5%, and 26.5% of the population respectively, i.e., more than 80% of Uzbekistan’s total population. The supremacy of any one or two of these regions at any point in time could also be explained by Moscow’s intricate ;;hierarchy of regions” in which cadre were drawn from the most important oblasts, the ranking of which varied over the Soviet period; Minsk and Vitebsk filled analogous roles in Belarus, just as Vilnius and Kaunas did in Lithuania. Notably, however, when power over cadre appointment was extensively decentralized, principally during the Brezhnev era, this hegemony dissolved. At no point in Soviet Uzbekistan’s history did members of the Politburo hail from more varied regions than during the zenith of Rashidov’s powers, who served as First Secretary throughout the Brezhnev era. That Selnick did not detect any regionalism with this set up is not surprising since no such clear-cut pattern existed but is an erroneous construction of the post-Soviet era. Third, at the very moment when the clan/region hypothesis gained traction among Western scholars, in 1989, the Politburo and Supreme Soviet in Moscow, paradoxically, discussed a set of important classified and hitherto unexamined documents which questioned the revelations of the ;;cotton scandal”. One established that the corruption investigations in Uzbekistan had not only implicated a great number of innocent Uzbek officials but also fed the media with false information. Another made similar claims, calling on the Prosecutor General’s office to reassess the cotton scandal due to the slender or inexistent evidence on which many had been convicted. However, Uzbekistan was never ;;rehabilitated” from this morass since the Soviet Union collapsed two years thereafter. If it ever would have been revealed is doubtful since these findings were hushed while the USSR still existed. Why, then, does all of this matter? Beyond the obvious reasons that scholars may have been wrong, that the claims of tightly organized regional clans or ;;solidarity groups” in Uzbekistan rest on a shaky foundation, and that several hundred Uzbek officials may have been wrongly convicted -- several of whom committed suicide -- the findings of this dissertation matter because they offer alternative hypotheses about Soviet Uzbekistan’s politics. Here, as elsewhere in the USSR, coalitions of protégés formed at the oblast and republican-levels primarily among former co-workers and associates. Region of origin played a marginal role at most in this calculus, as a careful tracing of the origins of members in protection pacts attests to. That the Uzbek elite typically served on average in three or more oblasts during their careers, as established in this dissertation, and were generally less ;;rooted” than the Soviet average diversified loyalties beyond home regions. Coalitions formed among figures of diverse origin, resulting in essentially non-territorialized factions.In stark contrast stood neighboring Tajikistan whose Leninabad oblast supplied all of Tajikistan’s First Secretaries from 1946 to 1991 and all Chairmen of the Council of Ministers but one -- none of whom ever served outside of Leninabad or the capital oblast Stalinabad. Whereas heads of party and state came from heterogenous origins in Uzbekistan and a majority, as a rule, had traversed several oblasts during their careers, in Tajikistan political power was concentrated to a single region. This lopsided arrangement contributed to unleashing and sustaining a devastating civil war in Tajikistan after independence when power was transferred to officials hailing from Kulyab. Stability in Uzbekistan was helped, though not ensured, by the non-territorialization of its elite factions.
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