Sharof Rashidov

Who was Sharof Rashidov?

Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov was a Communist Party leader in the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and a CPSU Central Committee Politbureau candidate member between 1961 and 1983.

Born the day before the Russian Revolution to a poor peasant family in Jizzakh, Uzbekistan, Sharof Rashidov worked as a teacher, journalist and editor for a Samarkand newspaper. He returned home in 1942 with wounds suffered on the German front in World War 2. He became head of the Uzbekistan Writers Union in 1949, and was elected to the post of Chairman of the Praesidium of the Uzbek Supreme Soviet in 1950. In 1959, he became First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, a post he held to his death in 1983.

In the Soviet Union his name became synonymous with corruption, nepotism and the Great Cotton Scandal of the late Brezhnev period. As orders from Moscow to grow increasing quantities of, the Uzbek government responded by reporting miraculous growth in land irrigated and harvested, and record improvements in production and efficiency. Today it would seem that most of these records were falsified. The Uzbek leadership used these exaggerated figures to transfer substantial amounts of wealth from central Soviet funds into Uzbekistan. When this was discovered by Andropov, Rashidov committed suicide.