He joined the pan-Turkist Jadid movement of like-minded reformers in 1916, and, with his father's fortune, established the Young Bukharan Party.

In March 1918, after the Bolsheviks had successfully established Soviet rule in Kokand, Xoʻjayev led an attempt to form a Young Bukharan government, with the Emir of Bukhara as a figurehead.

For a few days, it appeared that they had succeeded, and had the Emir as a virtual prisoner, but in his account, written later, Xoʻjayev admitted that he and his fellow revolutionaries had been "gullible" and had underestimated the influence of the clergy and the strength of forces loyal to the old regime.

I would see a Nazir, or minister, squatting on a carpet and dictating decrees to a scribe, who would write them in old Persian characters on a board balanced on his knees.

Fayzulla Xoʻjayev, called the "Lenin of the Uzbeks" was small, wiry, and full of consuming energy, in spite of the malaria which often gave his face a greenish tinge, He enjoyed life, and could laugh gaily beneath a crushing load of work.

Although he retained his post as head of government, from 1929 his influence and access to Moscow was eclipsed by Akmal Ikramov, the First Secretary of the Uzbek communist party.

Xoʻjayev "confessed" that in the early 1920s he had been a member of a secret pan-Turkic society, Milli Ittikhad (National Unification) that wanted to preserve the Bukharan Republic as an independent buffer state, between Russia and the British Empire, that he had opposed the breakdown of Turkestan into four separate Soviet republics, of which Uzbekistan was one, and opposed the decision made in Moscow as part of the First five-year plan to create a cotton monoculture in Uzbekistan's Ferghana Valley, and to being linked to the Right Opposition.