Akmal Ikramov

Akmal Ikramovich Ikramov was born in September 1898 in Tashkent into an Uzbek peasant family. He joined the Communist Party in 1918; in 1918–1920 he worked as a teacher and school inspector in Namangan, then held party and Soviet posts in the Namangan and Fergana districts. In 1921–1922 he was a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Turkestan; from 1922 he studied at the Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow.

In 1924–1925 he sat on the organising bureau for the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, and in 1925–1929 was its second secretary and editor of the journal «Communist». From December 1929 to September 1937 he was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, the first ethnic Uzbek to hold the post; these years saw forced collectivisation, the republic's conversion into the USSR's main cotton base, and anti-religious measures. He became a full member of the Party Central Committee in 1934, after being a candidate from 1925.

In 1937, at the height of the purges, Stalin criticised him for failing to fight anti-Soviet elements; in September 1937 he was removed from office, expelled from the Party and, on 20 September, arrested. At the third Moscow show trial in March 1938 (the «Bloc of Rights and Trotskyites» case), together with Bukharin, Rykov, Fayzulla Khodzhayev and others, he was sentenced to death and shot at the Kommunarka range near Moscow (sources give 13 or 15 March).

He was the first defendant of the Stalin-era show trials to be rehabilitated: in 1957 he was reinstated in the Party. He had been awarded the Order of Lenin (1935). He is commemorated in place names: Gijduvan was called Akmalabad until 1972, Tashkent had an Akmal Ikramov district in 1977–2005 (now Uchtepa), and a museum in Samarkand bore his name; a Soviet stamp with his portrait was issued in 1968. His son was the writer Kamil Ikramov.