The Last Purge explores the political ramifications of what is now known as the Cotton Affair, the largest and last purge in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.
The cotton issue, an important but understudied episode in Uzbekistan's contemporary history, is a protracted judicial and political dilemma that has arisen from the falsification of cotton production and corruption data. Under Sharaf Rashidov, the first secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, the country more than doubled its production of cotton, the country's main cash crop.When the Tenth Five-Year Plan of the Soviet Union called for the production of six million tons of raw cotton per year, production became a matter of political survival for Uzbekistan's ruling elite. To adapt to the situation, this elite resorted to hiding shortcomings through bribes and falsifying cotton production data. Moscow's crackdown in the 1980s implicated 58,000 officials, 20,000 of whom faced criminal prosecution, and burdened Uzbekistan's institutions.
