Industrialisation and the women’s question

In December 1925 the Fourteenth Congress of the VKP(b) proclaimed the move to socialist industrialisation, and from October 1928 the economy was run by five-year plans. In 1927 agriculture made up 62.6 percent and industry 37.4 percent of the Uzbek economy, and 90 percent of industry relied on processing agricultural raw materials, i.e. the economy was oriented to raw materials. In the first five-year plan (October 1928 – December 1932) 289 new enterprises were built and 79 reorganised; the Tashkent agricultural machinery plant, the Tashkent textile combine, the Chirchiq electrochemical combine and the Chirchiq–Bozsu hydropower cascade date from these years. Industrialisation was financed largely at the countryside’s expense by keeping purchase prices low; skilled specialists were mostly brought from cities of the RSFSR, while training local staff proceeded slowly. A special commission for localising the state apparatus was set up on 3 March 1925 (chaired by Bobon Mavlonbekov) and on 8 January 1927 it was renamed the Central Commission for “Uzbekisation”; in districts with many Uzbeks office work was to be in Uzbek, while minorities were to be served in their mother tongue. On 11 December 1931 a USSR CEC decision halted the commission’s work and the process was labelled “bourgeois nationalism”.