Ubaydulla Abdurazzakov

Ubaydulla Abbasovich Abdurazzakov was born in Tashkent in 1932. He began working in 1952 in the republic’s education system and from 1954 held posts in Komsomol organisations. He graduated from the Tashkent Pedagogical Institute in 1957 and later earned the degree of Candidate of Historical Sciences (1966), with a dissertation on how the Communist Party of Uzbekistan spread advanced labour methods in agriculture and supplied it with trained staff in 1961–1965.

From 1965 he served in the party and state apparatus of the republic: in the Tashkent regional committee and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, and then in the Council of Ministers of the Uzbek SSR, where he was head of the administration of affairs in 1971–1974. In 1974–1978 he chaired the executive committee of the Namangan Regional Council of People’s Deputies. He received the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and was a delegate to the 25th Congress of the CPSU in 1976.

He then moved to education and publishing: in 1978–1987 he was first deputy chairman of the board of the republican Znanie (“Knowledge”) society, in 1987–1990 editor-in-chief of the Mehnat publishing house, and in 1990–1992 chairman of the Uzbek SSR State Committee for the Press. He wrote several books and pamphlets, among them a work on the economy of socialism and market relations (1990).

After the collapse of the USSR, Abdurazzakov became one of the first people to lead the foreign policy of independent Uzbekistan. In September 1991 he joined the organising committee for the founding congress of the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, formed on the basis of the former Communist Party. In 1992, according to Wikipedia, he became the republic’s Minister of Foreign Affairs; he was succeeded by Sodiq Safoyev.

From early 1993 he was Uzbekistan’s ambassador extraordinary and plenipotentiary to Turkey. He was twice elected a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of Uzbekistan. Sources disagree on the date of his death: the Russian Wikipedia gives 2005, the Uzbek Wikipedia and Wikidata give 2014, and neither is backed by a document, so no year is given here.