A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

Central Asia becomes independent 257
honest than his predecessors, he realized that his country and political
faith might lose the contest with the Western world and capitalism unless
they reformed themselves.The ideological hostility and closure of the
Soviet Union to the West was one of the chief causes of its growing stagnation.This
stagnation included those aspects that must have mattered
most especially to the military – the rapidly evolving electronic technology.President
Reagan’s “Star Wars” gave Gorbachev the necessary tool
with which to persuade his peers that a “restructuring,” perestroika, was
necessary if they wanted their system to survive.This restructuring
included an unprecedented openness and dismantling of at least a part
of the ideological wall erected along the Soviet frontier.It might be interesting
to compare the Ottoman and Soviet empires with respect to their
stagnation and its causes, the remedies sought by their reformers, and
the ultimate dissolution of these empires and of their ideologies.
The challenge was enormous, and Gorbachev’s answer included a
major contradiction: this statesman, a sincere Communist, wanted to
save Communism by grafting a strong dose of humanism and openness
onto it, something no one had tried before.The combination proved to
be a utopian idea, and brought about the collapse of the whole system
years, perhaps decades, before this process might otherwise have come
to fruition.
The contradiction took on a special form in Central Asia, however.
By the time Mikhail Gorbachev succeeded Konstantin Chernenko, it
was no secret that something was wrong especially in the republic of
Uzbekistan.People had discovered that the figures showing the quantity
of cotton shipped to Russia did not quite tally with the actual quantity,
and that this falsification had reached a vast scale and had
especially mushroomed in the Brezhnev era.Moreover, those masterminding
this deception had included some of the highest officials –
Rashidov himself, and they had coopted people at the center like
Brezhnev’s son-in-law, Yuriy Churbanov.The scandal had generated
investigations and firings and prison terms already under Andropov, but
Gorbachev widened the clean-up by launching a massive campaign
against “corruption.” Corruption in this context is perhaps an inaccurate
term, for it was spawned by a system and relationship which in
themselves were corrupt.What was rashidovshchina, a term devised for
the wily bureaucrats’ gimmicks to line their pockets or promote their
nephews, in comparison with the environmental blight spread by
Moscow’s policies in Central Asia? What was their petty pilfery in comparison
with the grand larceny perpetrated by the center of the empire,