Lecture | Book Talk
The Last Purge: Soviet Uzbekistan During the Cotton Affair, 1975-1991
- Riccardo Mario Cucciolla
- Date
- Friday 25 September 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 1.48
Uzbekistan was the Soviet Union’s preeminent producer of a key raw material: cotton. As a source of both export revenue and a central input for innumerable finished goods, cotton was the axis around which Uzbekistan’s place in the Soviet Union revolved. Cotton determined its financial balance and its political future, and, given the ever-growing demands of the Soviet planned economy, its increasingly tenuous ability to meet centralized demands.
Riccardo Mario Cucciolla’s important and groundbreaking book, The Last Purge: Soviet Uzbekistan During the Cotton Affair, 1975-1991 (Cornell University Press, 2026), examines what happened when this tenuous economic structure reached its limits. By the early 1980s, Uzbekistan was hiding its inability to meet centralised targets through falsification of harvest results. The discovery of these obfuscations led to the last and final Soviet purge, in which tens of thousands of Uzbekistani officials lost their jobs, livelihoods, and freedoms, a move that has increasingly been understood in modern Uzbekistan as a late colonial revanche and attempt to control the republic from the imperial core in Moscow.
Dr. Cucciolla’s book is the first monograph to delve into the Cotton Affair in such detail and to interrogate its place in the larger narrative of late Soviet imperial history. Leiden University’s Institute for History, with support from Itinerario and the ‘Reevaluating Conceptions of Imperial Monetary Flow’ research team, is greatly pleased to host Dr. Cucciolla’s presentation of his recently published work.
Registration
This talk is open to the public; no registration is necessary.
Please direct any questions or inquiries to Dr. Isaac McKean Scarborough (i.m.scarborough@hum.leidenuniv.nl).