Uzbek cotton: the turn of uzbekistan into the cotton raw materials base of the soviet state

Journal of History Culture and Art Research 
5 
The growth of the population of the Uzbek SSR is inextricably linked with the 
increase in the production of raw cotton and the expansion of cultivated areas. 
Since the 1960s, cotton growing has developed rapidly in the republic, and the 
peak of this process occurred in the 1980s. During this time, the population of 
Uzbekistan SSR more than doubled - from 8 million people in 1960 to 19 million 
people in 1987. Thus, during the period of the Soviets, a mechanism was put into 
operation that allowed the growth of the republic's population to grow much 
faster than the ability to meet the growing material needs of the state. By 1991, 
when Uzbekistan gained independence, the population of the republic already 
exceeded 20 million people. 
Another important factor should be noted here. The majority of the 
population of the republic lived in rural areas, while in 1989, 74% of the 
population in the RSFSR lived in cities. The standard of living in cities in the Soviet 
Union was much higher than in the countryside. The highest material supply and 
education of the population was among the population of those republics of the 
USSR, where the urban population exceeded or was approximately equal to the 
rural population. In the Uzbek SSR, the level of urbanization was low, the level of 
modernization was low, and the level of material well-being was low. 
The increase in socio-demographic problems has also caused other 
problems. Thus, in the late 1980s, religiosity and nationalism flourished in Central 
Asian republics, in particular, in a number of densely populated regions of 
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and southern Kyrgyzstan. Intolerance, the emergence of 
the idea of building a state with Islamic rules is the result of the conscious 
concentration of a part of the population in remote areas and their forced 
occupation by using only the land as a salvation from the current situation. Even 
in the Soviet era, this situation created conditions for the emergence of low-
income strata of the population loyal to tradition in Uzbekistan. This worsened 
the chances of the republic to have the potential of highly qualified personnel 
specialized in several fields. Consequently, the development of cotton growing 
was inextricably linked not only with the development of all sectors of the 
national economy of the Uzbek SSR, but also with the growth of the culture and 
well-being of the Uzbek people. Central Asian researcher S. Abashin describes the 
ethnic stereotypes that arose as a result of the "cotton farming" policy of the 
USSR and cotton prosperity as follows: 
"In order to ensure the economic independence of the USSR, the Soviet 
leadership deliberately began to form a cotton monopoly in Central Asia. At the 
same time, in contrast to, say, the cultivation of grain, cotton requires a lot of 
labor, so the population of Central Asia was kept in the countryside by various 
coercions. And the entire Central Asian industry and urban culture was created by 
the same forced migration of people who had just been liberated from the 
European part of the USSR, by the way, from agriculture. In other words, the state 
contributed to the preservation of one group in the "agrarian" sector and the 

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