While in Moscow, Ikramov kept on campaigning within the Party for raising the cultural level of Turkestan by increasing literacy and building more schools.

[4] In January 1925 he became secretary of the Tashkent Oblast committee in the newly formed Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and was also for a time active as chief editor of the magazine Communist.

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.

"[7] In February 1937, near the start of the Great Purge, Ikramov took part in a plenum of the Central Committee which determined the fate of two leading Bolsheviks, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov, who had led the opposition to forced collectivisation.

"[9] Ikramov was publicly censured on 8 September 1937, after the Politburo member Andrey Andreyev had descended on Tashkent, for being sufficiently vigilant in rooting out 'enemies of the people'.

[11] In March 1938, Ikramov was a defendant in the last of the great Moscow show trials, alongside Bukharin and Rykov, whom he had denounced as renegades a year earlier, and his old rivals Zelensky and Khodzhayev.

He also 'confessed' that the waste that resulted from over ambitious targets for cotton production and uncompleted construction work had been sabotage,[12] and that he was a British spy.