Akmal Ikramovich Ikramov

In the early 1920s a factional struggle over the future of Central Asia divided the Communist Party of Turkestan. One camp, led by Turar Ryskulov, favored pan-Turkic integration within the existing Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic; the other, led by Fayzulla Khodzhayev and Ikramov, argued for dividing Central Asia into individual ethnic or regional units. While studying at Moscow's Sverdlov Communist University, Ikramov campaigned within the Party to raise literacy in Turkestan and build schools, stressing the importance of cultural work.

When the national delimitation of Central Asia began in 1924, the latter vision prevailed. As a member of the Orgburo for founding the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, Ikramov played a key role in building the new republic's party structures; in January 1925 he became secretary of the Tashkent oblast committee in the newly formed Uzbek SSR and for a time was also chief editor of the magazine Kommunist. After serving as second secretary of the Central Committee, he became First Secretary in 1929, the first ethnic Uzbek in that office, and held it until 1937.

The republic-building he led involved not only territorial consolidation centered on Tashkent but also the indigenization of party and state institutions, laying the institutional foundation for Uzbekistan's later transformation into the Soviet Union's main cotton producer. The 1924 national delimitation remains a historical watershed that defines Central Asia's borders to this day. Yet the Uzbek Communist Party he built would later serve as the local instrument for forced collectivization and the anti-Islamic campaign.

Collectivization and Cotton Monoculture

As First Secretary from 1929 to 1937, Ikramov was the de facto head of government in Soviet Uzbekistan. He led the forced introduction of collectivized agriculture in line with the policy set in Moscow by Stalin, and implemented the decision making Uzbekistan the USSR's main source of cotton. In 1934 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the only representative of any of the ethnic Asian minorities.

In this period Ikramov was not only a target of Stalinist repression but also its agent. He entered the NKVD special troika created by USSR NKVD order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937 and is recorded as having actively participated in the repressions. In the anti-religious and anti-Islamic campaign he is assessed as bearing the most responsibility: he led the designing of the specifics of anti-Islamic actions during the first five-year plan, sometimes personally ordered the arrest of clergymen, and defined the struggle against the clergy as proceeding not by prohibitive measures but through broad party-organizational and cultural enlightenment work. In 1930 his predecessor Isaak Zelensky, sent to Central Asia, tried to depose him, but the Central Committee backed Ikramov and the attempt failed.

The Great Purge and the Third Moscow Trial

In February 1937, near the start of the Great Purge, Ikramov took part in the Central Committee plenum that determined the fate of Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, denouncing them as renegades, accusing them of uprising against the party and against soviet power, and calling for their trial. In June his rival Khodzhayev was denounced and sacked. Even so, Stalin's telegram of 2 August 1937 complained that Ikramov did not see the anti-Soviet elements around him. He was publicly censured on 8 September, denounced in Pravda on 10 September, expelled from the party and put under investigation on 12 September, and arrested on 20 September.

In March 1938 he was brought before the Third Moscow Trial, the Case of the Anti-Soviet Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites, known as the Trial of the Twenty-One. It was the last of the three public Moscow trials, and the accused were tortured to extract confessions. The trial ran from 2 to 13 March, and Ikramov was one of the 21 defendants. He 'confessed' to having been a Trotskyite since 1923, to leading from 1928 a secret nationalist movement for Uzbek independence, to the cotton-production shortfalls being sabotage, and to being a British spy; central to this was his statement that he had been one of the leaders of the nationalist organization Milli Istiqlal (national independence), said to have been founded in 1928. He was sentenced to death and shot at the Kommunarka firing range in Moscow oblast, on 13 March according to one source and on 15 March according to others. The trial's charges are considered fabricated, and the plenum of the USSR Supreme Court later found that the verdict in the case was unsupported by concrete evidence and that self-incrimination had been obtained through deception, blackmail, and psychological and physical violence.

The date of rehabilitation differs by source. Ikramov's biographical article records that he was fully rehabilitated and restored to the party in June 1957, while another article on the Third Moscow Trial states that Krestinsky, Ikramov, Khodzhayev and Zelensky were rehabilitated in 1963, after the 22nd Party Congress.