Career

Ikramov was born in 1898 in an Uzbek family in Tashkent, then part of the Russian Empire. In 1918 he joined the Communist Party.^[2] From 1921 to 1922 he was secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan. In 1922 he moved to Moscow where he studied at the Sverdlov Communist University. While in Moscow, Ikramov kept on campaigning within the Party for raising the cultural level of Turkestan by increasing literacy and building more schools.^[3] Meanwhile, Ikramov became involved in a power struggle among the Communists between those favoring a Pan-Turkist government like Turar Ryskulov, and those in favor of dividing the Turkestan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic into smaller ethnic or regional units, such as Fayzulla Khodzhayev and Ikramov. The latter group won, as national delimitation in Central Asia began in 1924.^[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 1929, he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan and thus de facto head of government in Soviet Uzbekistan. He was the first ethnic Uzbek in this office, which he held until 1937. In 1930 his predecessor Isaak Zelensky tried to depose him, but since the Central Committee supported Ikramov, this attempt failed.^[5] Ikramov led the forced introduction of collectivised agriculture in Uzbekistan, in line with the policy set in Moscow by Joseph Stalin, and implemented a decision to make Uzbekistan the main source of cotton in the USSR. 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.

Anti-religious policies

Ikramov bore the most responsibility for designing the specifics of the design of anti-Islamic actions during the first five-year plan.^[2] Sometimes he personally ordered the arrest of clergymen.^[6] Further measures to struggle against the clergy were taken, as Ikramov put it, "not by prohibitive measures, but by measures developed from broad party-organizational and cultural enlightenment work."^[7]

Great Purge

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. He denounced them as "renegades", accused them of leading an "uprising against the party, against soviet power" and called for them to be put on trial.^[8] In June, after he had returned to Uzbekistan's capital, Tashkent, his rival, Khodzhayev, was denounced, sacked, and later arrested.

Despite these displays of severity and loyalty, Stalin complained in a telegram to the Uzbek party leadership on 2 August 1937 that "there is no struggle againstanti-soviet elements in Uzbekistan, and Ikramov is surrounded by such elements but does not see them."^[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'. On 10 September, he was violently denounced in Pravda for defending a 'Trotskyite' Secretary of the Uzbekistan Central Committee. On 12 September, it was announced that he had been expelled from the party and was under investigation.^[10] In October, news broke that he was arrested, together with Khodzhayev.^[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 'confessed' to having been a Trotskyite since 1923, a leader since 1928 of a secret nationalist movement plotting independence for Uzbekistan, and to having been recruited by Bukharin to the 'right opposition' in 1933. 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. Ikramov was quoted saying: "We had to rely on a strong European Power to help us. We thought England most reliable because she is so strong."^[13] He was sentenced to death on 13 March and shot on 13 March (other sources indicate 15 March) 1938.

Rehabilitation

During the Khrushchev Thaw, Ikramov's son Kamal requested that the first secretary of Uzbekistan rehabilitate his father. The secretary brought the case to Nikita Khrushchev personally, who then asked Vyacheslav Molotov to look at it. After a year, in 1957, Akmal Ikramov was reinstated in the Party,^[5] although the document reinstating him was classified as "Confidential".^[14] He was the first defendant from any of the Stalinist show trials to be rehabilitated.^[15]