During his tenure the Uzbek SSR saw considerable economic growth and had a very high degree of autonomy from the rest of the Soviet Union.
[1] Sharof Rashidov's father, Rashid Khalilov, was a farmer who joined the Qizil karvon kolkhoz,[2] and his mother Kuysinoy was a housewife.
He then graduated from the philological faculty of Samarkand State University in 1941, but later that year he was deployed to the Eastern Front as a junior lieutenant.
He saw combat in the Battle of Moscow and was awarded two Order of the Red Star[5] before being demobilized in 1943 after being severely wounded in the war.
After coming to power in 1959 he began a series of purges of Tashkent-aligned politicians from leadership positions in the Uzbek SSR.
However, Rashidov prevailed, and the leaders of the plot lost their power in Uzbek SSR politics, with Nasriddinova and Nishonov getting union-level positions but Qurbonov facing imprisonment.
[11] Rashidov had strong support from Brezhnev, who in turn allocated resources to projects industrializing the Uzbek SSR and protected him from investigation.
While other Soviet politicians of similar status feared the KGB and Community Party apparatuses giving such entities a great degree of control, those very same institutions based in Uzbek SSR feared Rashidov, whose close ties to Brezhnev enabled him to deviate from party norms far more than other politicians.
[12][13][14][15] During Rashidov's tenure the Uzbek SSR experienced rapid economic growth, not only in the agricultural sector but also urbanization and industrialization.
Most Crimean Tatars grew to see the project as just another Rashidov scam to fleece Moscow of money, and found the suggestions that anywhere in Central Asia was their "real" homeland to be chauvinist.
[20] In 1957 Rashidov accompanied Kliment Voroshilov on a diplomatic trip to visit Indonesia, Burma, China, and Vietnam, where he met with leaders of anti-colonial movements.
In 1973, the 1000th anniversary of the famous scholar Abu Rayhan Al-Biruni was widely celebrated and a feature film was made.
[31] Under the leadership of Sharof Rashidovich Rashidov, historians wrote and published in 1967-1970 in Uzbek and Russian languages a four-volume "History of Uzbekistan".
[32] After Rashidov's death, multi-volume general histories of Uzbekistan were no longer published, with the exception of separate volumes on individual periods.
Eventually Rashidov was summoned by Ligachev, who showed him the stacks of letters from citizens of the Uzbek SSR complaining about his corruption.
[33] With orders from Moscow to grow increasing quantities of cotton, the government of the Uzbek SSR under Rashidov responded by reporting artificially inflated statistics for growth in land irrigated and harvested, boasting of record improvements in production and efficiency.
After the death of Brezhnev, Andropov, who was aware of the scheme, began dismantling the “cotton mafia”, and eventually the scandal was made officially acknowledged.
[40][page needed] One of Rashidov's daughters was married to the nephew of Ibrohim Muminov of the Bukhara faction, who held the post of vice president of the Academy of Sciences of the Uzbek SSR and solidifying ties of the Samarkand-Bukhara grouping.
[40][page needed][42] While Uzbekistan is Muslim-majority, Rashidov lived a secular lifestyle as was expected of Soviet leaders and maintained that he was an atheist, and referred to religion as superstition.