Paper abstract:

Throughout the 1980s, a steadily-growing scandal played out in the newspapers of the Soviet Union—the Uzbek Cotton Scandal. Investigations revealed that the leaders of the Soviet Union’s Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic had falsified cotton production reports for decades and defrauded Moscow out of billions of rubles. Though historians have discussed the Cotton Scandal as it relates to Soviet political history and economics, little attention has been given to the discourse that constituted the Scandal and made it truly “Uzbek”. This paper examines how the Soviet press, influenced by historically-rooted Orientalist tropes, decades of Soviet nationality policies, and the reform programs of the 1980s, transformed its coverage of the cotton industry’s corruption into a public explication and condemnation of Uzbek national identity. Analyzing the subject matter of and language used in Soviet newspaper narratives of the Uzbek Cotton Scandal ultimately reveals a discourse of qoralash—an Uzbek word that can be translated to mean “accusation”—against the Uzbek nation as a whole. The qoralash discourse that developed in the Soviet press returned Uzbeks to the status of culturally backward outsiders and created a justification for renewed political interventions and centralized cultural control.