As to power development, here attention was mainly concentrated on the Byelorussian Regional Power Station, which feeds the industries of Vitebsk, Orsha and Moghilev. Fuel was supplied irregularly. Construction work was interfered with. Specifically, I can mention the Krichevsk Cement Works, the Orsha Flax Mills, the Moghilev Pipe Foundry….61
ASIAN NATIONALISTS
The Uzbek leader Khodzhayev followed Sharangovich. It will be convenient to take his case together with that of his colleague Ikramov, though the latter gave evidence the following day.
Hitherto “bourgeois nationalism” had been represented by Sharangovich and, to a lesser extent, Grinko. In the persons of the two Uzbeks, it was put forward in a more forthright form. They were not mobile apparatchiks like the two just named. Their entire careers had been spent in Central Asia, where they had successfully fronted for the imposition of Moscow rule on long recalcitrant populations.
They represented, as others represented in their different spheres, a much larger set of Party and State officials—implicating the First Secretary and Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars in neighboring Tadzhikistan, for example, as well as their own Republic’s deviationists.
Khodzhayev seems to have really resented in some degree the centralizing and denationalizing tendencies of Stalinism, but Ikramov had not. In fact, they had led two opposed factions in the Uzbek Party, and they now attributed their alleged unity in struggling against the regime to pressure from the Rightist central group. Ikramov testified, “Under the pressure of Bukharin and the direct guidance of Antipov, the two nationalist organizations co-ordinated their work.”62
Khodzhayev was by far the most prominent and effective Uzbek to have taken the Communist side right from the time of the Revolution, in the struggle against the old Emir of Bokhara. He had been a member of the Uzbek Central Committee Bureau since the first Congress of the Uzbek Party in 1925, and had long served as Chairman of the local Council of People’s Commissars.
But he had not even been elected a delegate to the VIIth Congress of the Uzbek Communist Party, ending on 17 June 1937. On 27 June, his removal from the Chairmanship of the Uzbek Council of People’s Commissars and expulsion from the Uzbek Central Executive Committee were announced, together with an attack on his counter-revolutionary nationalist positions.63 He was clearly under arrest by this time. His brother, also prominent in the local Party, committed suicide.64
On 8 September, Khodzhayev and seven others, including four members of the Bureau of the local Central Committee, were denounced as enemies of the people, and Ikramov, the First Secretary of the Republic, and the current local Bureau, censured for insufficient vigilance.65 Two days later, Pravda violently attacked Ikramov for defending a “Trotskyite” Secretary of the Uzbekistan Central Committee.66 Ikramov was at this time in Moscow and, still not under arrest, had been “confronted” with Bukharin, Khodzhayev, Antipov, and others. He denied their testimony against him, in spite of four “conversations” with Yezhov.
A letter to the Uzbek Central Committee signed by Stalin and Molotov now drew its attention to the evidence against “Comrade Ikramov,” as apparently proving “not merely political blunders, but also connections with the Trotskyite—Rightist group.” The letter also “proposes that the Uzbek Central Committee consider the question of Comrade Ikramov and inform the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of its opinion.”67 On 12 September, it was announced that Ikramov had been “unmasked” and expelled from the Party, and his case handed over to the investigating authorities.68 He had been arrested “on Stalin’s personal instructions.”69
The Uzbek press now attacked him for weakness towards bourgeois nationalism, and specifically for supporting Khodzhayev.70 It was presumably in support of Khodzhayev that Ikramov had protested in 1937 against the Purge, and thus incurred Stalin’s displeasure.71 (As an otherwise loyal Stalinist, Ikramov was the first defendant in the public trials to be rehabilitated.)
When his arrest was announced to the Party membership in Tashkent, the news was greeted “with warm applause.”72 He was confronted in jail with Bukharin,73 who again implicated him, but he only confessed on the “sixth or seventh day” of the interrogation .74
Similar events, with similar timing, were sweeping Soviet Asia, as we saw in Chapter 8. In Kirghizia, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars was purged on 12 September,75 and a call put out for ruthless measures against the local Central Committee.76 In Tadzhikistan, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Rakhimbayev (arrested on 9 September 1937 at a Youth Day meeting at the Park of Rest and Culture); the President, Shotemor; Ashurov and Frolov, Secretaries of the Central Committee; and a number of others were denounced as nationalists or spies on 10 to 12 September. Rakhimbayev was accused in addition of keeping a harem of three wives.77 (After the trial, Pravda again denounced these local leaders and “other swine.”)78
Under the cold lights of the October Hall, Khodzhayev now confessed that he had been anti-Soviet since 1920. He and Ikramov had been in contact with the Rights, through Antipov, and had been instructed to work with the British for the secession of Uzbekistan as “a British protectorate.” They had done a good deal of industrial sabotage on much the same lines as Sharangovich’s. “Errors” of planning had been intentionaclass="underline"
The ramp for the delivery of coal was planned for a capacity of 75,000 kW., whereas the power house was built for 48,000 kW., and the planned capacity of the station is 70,000 kW. You see, therefore, that the elements of wrecking were present in the very planning of the station.79
Their agricultural policy had been disastrous, and this was also intentional, as it caused hostility to Moscow:
Khodzhayev:
… This would have meant causing enormous discontent among the people, because we put it to them in this way: ‘this is the Moscow plan, we are merely the servants of Moscow, we are carrying out Moscow’s instructions. Don’t you like it? Then complain to Moscow.’ This is the task we set ourselves.
Vyshinsky:
A provocative task?
Khodzhayev:
A provocative task, set deliberately, and pursued for a number of years.
What did it lead to? It actually led to the destruction of the rotation of crops system, it led to diminution in the number of cattle, it led to a diminution in silk cultivation, because even here we pursued our wrecking activities, and in the long run it led to a diminution even of the cotton yield. And that is why for years Uzbekistan failed to fulfill its cotton plans…. If a peasant had ten hectares of land he had to sow eight or nine hectares with cotton. You will understand that if only one hectare is left for all the rest, the farm goes to ruin.
80
But there was a more important economic aim—to develop an independent economy in Uzbekistan. This (in contradiction to the admissions made above) led to their planning the economy
in such a way as to have less cotton, because it was an industrial crop which most of all bound Uzbekistan with the Union; secondly, we planned to develop agriculture in Uzbekistan so as to have more grain farming not only on the non-irrigated lands, but also on the irrigated lands, in order to be independent of Russian grain, and lastly, we planned the development of industry, road building, etc., in such a way as to be more economically independent than ever of Soviet Russia, of the Soviet Union, at the end of the First Five-Year Plan.