Yadgar Sadykovna Nasriddinova

Nasriddinova was born on 26 December 1920 in Kokand, Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Her father, a loader, died three months before her birth; her thirteen-year-old mother named the baby 'Yadgar', a name commonly given in Muslim cultures to orphaned children. At age six, she was abandoned by her stepfather on a roadside, taken in by passersby, and passed between families until age eleven, when she entered Uzbekistan's first orphanage. After vocational school and a workers' faculty at the Tashkent Institute of Railway Transport, she graduated as an engineer in 1941. She worked on the Tashkent Railway, joined the Party in 1942, and was immediately appointed Secretary for Schools of the Uzbek Komsomol Central Committee. She rose through First Secretary of the Tashkent Regional Komsomol (1946), Second Secretary of the Uzbek Komsomol Central Committee (1948), to Minister of the Construction Materials Industry of the Uzbek SSR (1952) and Deputy Chair of the Uzbek SSR Council of Ministers (1955). The trajectory of a Central Asian woman from an orphanage to the deputy premiership of a republic by age 35 was a dramatic instance of the social mobility, in both national and gender terms, that the Stalin-era Soviet system could generate.

In 1944, Stalin forcibly deported the entire Crimean Tatar population to Central Asia on charges of Nazi collaboration; hundreds of thousands settled in the Uzbek SSR. During the Khrushchev Thaw, Tatar activists began petitioning and demonstrating in Moscow and Tashkent, demanding the right to return to their homeland. In September 1967, the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet issued a decree withdrawing the blanket accusation of treason, but it described them as 'citizens of Tatar nationality formerly resident in the Crimea.' This denied their national identity and, crucially, the right of return. Nasriddinova, as Chair of the Uzbek SSR Supreme Soviet Presidium and Deputy Chair of the USSR Supreme Soviet Presidium, was one of the most vocal opponents of return. In a meeting with Crimean Tatar civil rights activists, she bluntly stated that Uzbekistan needed their labor. Her position, blocking return on grounds of economic pragmatism, exemplified how Central Asian republic elites exercised a structural veto over all-union nationalities policy. Mass return of Crimean Tatars would only begin in 1989, once perestroika had opened the political space.

In the mid-1970s, the Central Control organs of the CPSU began investigating Nasriddinova for corruption. She was suspected of taking bribes for pardons during her tenure as Chair of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Uzbek SSR (1959–1970). According to Soviet human rights activist Konstantin Simis, a pardon for a person convicted of a serious crime cost 100,000 rubles. The case expanded as part of the broader 'Cotton Affair' (хлопковое дело) that swept through the Uzbek republic leadership under Brezhnev. Nasriddinova was removed as Chair of the Soviet of Nationalities in 1974, demoted to Deputy Minister of the Construction Materials Industry of the USSR, and retired as a union-level personal pensioner in 1979. On 18 November 1988, she was expelled from the CPSU on bribery charges. However, on 3 April 1991, the USSR Prosecutor General's Office closed the case for 'absence of corpus delicti' and her party membership was restored. The episode illustrates both the political character of central purges against national-republic elites in the late Soviet period and the weakness of the evidence underlying them.

After leaving the chair of the Soviet of Nationalities in 1974, Nasriddinova was demoted to Deputy Minister of the USSR Construction Materials Industry and formally retired as a union-level personal pensioner in 1979. Her husband Siroj Nurutdinov had died in 1966, and with both children living in Moscow, she never returned to Uzbekistan. In 1987, the newspaper Izvestia published an article accusing her of taking a 100,000-ruble bribe and routing state gold to Swiss banks during her tenure as chair of the Uzbek Presidium. Investigative journalist Arkady Sakhnin further alleged that she had paid for her son's lavish wedding with state funds. In 1988, she was formally charged with bribery, expelled from the party, and stripped of her pension. Nasriddinova denied all charges and demanded Izvestia print a reply. In December 1990, prosecutors dropped the criminal case for insufficient evidence. In April 1991, her party membership was restored and she received back-payment of her suspended pension for two and a half years. She died in Moscow on 7 April 2006, aged 85, and was buried in Kuntsevo Cemetery. The last years of a Central Asian woman who had reached the highest levels of Soviet power were quiet, and with the dissolution of the USSR her name rapidly faded from public memory.