Riccardo Mario Cucciolla - Böcker

The Last Purge explores the political ramifications of what is now known as the Cotton Affair, the largest and final purge in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. A significant yet underexamined episode of Uzbekistan's contemporary history, the Cotton Affair was a drawn-out judicial and political imbroglio that grew out of falsified cotton production data and corruption. Under "Cotton King" Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, the country more than doubled its production of cotton, the nation's principal cash crop. However, when the USSR's tenth five-year plan demanded annual production of six million tons of raw cotton, production became a matter of political survival for the Uzbek ruling elite. To cope, they began hiding inefficiencies through bribes and falsifying cotton production data. Moscow's eventual crackdown in the 1980s implicated 58,000 officials—20,000 of whom faced criminal prosecution—and overwhelmed Uzbekistan's institutions.Cucciolla sets the Cotton Affair at the center of Uzbekistan's transition from Soviet republic to independent state. Through the use of untapped Russian and Uzbek sources, he traces how the Cotton Affair became a sensitive identity issue of revenge and resistance against former rulers that served to legitimize the new Uzbek president's regime and define his relations with local power networks. In recovering the often sordid details of this critical event in the USSR's political history, Cucciolla offers fresh insights into the contradictions as well as consequences of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union from the perspective of its periphery.

Liberalism in Russia is one of the most complex, multifaced and, indeed, controversial phenomena in the history of political thought. Values and practices traditionally associated with Western liberalism—such as individual freedom, property rights, or the rule of law—have often emerged ambiguously in the Russian historical experience through different dimensions and combinations. Economic and political liberalism have often appeared disjointed, and liberal projects have been shaped by local circumstances, evolved in response to secular challenges and developed within often rapidly-changing institutional and international settings. This third volume of the Reset DOC “Russia Workshop” collects a selection of the Dimensions and Challenges of Russian Liberalism conference proceedings, providing a broad set of insights into the Russian liberal experience through a dialogue between past and present, and intellectual and empirical contextualization, involving historians, jurists, political scientists and theorists. The first part focuses on the Imperial period, analyzing the political philosophy and peculiarities of pre-revolutionary Russian liberalism, its relations with the rule of law (Pravovoe Gosudarstvo), and its institutionalization within the Constitutional Democratic Party (Kadets). The second part focuses on Soviet times, when liberal undercurrents emerged under the surface of the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. After Stalin’s death, the “thaw intelligentsia” of Soviet dissidents and human rights defenders represented a new liberal dimension in late Soviet history, while the reforms of Gorbachev’s “New Thinking” became a substitute for liberalism in the final decade of the USSR. The third part focuses on the “time of troubles” under the Yeltsin presidency, and assesses the impact of liberal values and ethics, the bureaucratic difficulties in adapting to change, and the paradoxes of liberal reforms during the transition topost-Soviet Russia. Despite Russian liberals having begun to draw lessons from previous failures, their project was severely challenged by the rise of Vladimir Putin. Hence, the fourth part focuses on the 2000s, when the liberal alternative in Russian politics confronted the ascendance of Putin, surviving in parts of Russian culture and in the mindset of technocrats and “system liberals”. Today, however, the Russian liberal project faces the limits of reform cycles of public administration, suffers from a lack of federalist attitude in politics and is externally challenged from an illiberal world order. All this asks us to consider: what is the likelihood of a “reboot” of Russian liberalism?