Usman Yusupov

Usman Yusupovich Yusupov was born on 1 March 1901 in the village of Kaftarkhana (now in the Fergana District of the Fergana Region), into a family of a farm labourer. In the late 1910s he began work at the cotton ginnery in Kovunchi, the name of present-day Yangiyol until 1934. He joined the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1926.

From 1926 to 1928 he chaired the Tashkent district committee of the builders’ trade union, then became a secretary of the Tashkent district committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Uzbekistan. From 1929 he was a secretary of the party’s Central Committee in Uzbekistan, and in 1931–1934 chairman of the Central Asian Bureau of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. In 1936 he became People’s Commissar of the Food Industry of the Uzbek SSR.

In 1937 Yusupov was elected First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Uzbekistan and held the post until 1950. These years saw the building of the Great Fergana Canal (begun in August 1939), the reception of enterprises evacuated to the republic in the war, and the mass repressions of 1937–1939; as First Secretary he sat on the republic’s “special troika” set up under NKVD Order No. 00447 of 30 July 1937.

In 1950–1953 Yusupov was USSR Minister of Cotton Growing, and in 1953–1955 Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Uzbek SSR. He then directed State Farm No. 4 in the Bayaut District of the Tashkent Region, retired in 1959, and in 1962–1966 headed the Khalkabad combine in the Yangiyol District. He was a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU in 1939–1956, a delegate to the 16th–19th party congresses and a deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet of the 1st–4th convocations.

He died on 7 May 1966 in Yangiyol and was buried in the Chigatay Cemetery in Tashkent. The same year the Great Fergana Canal was named after him; a house museum devoted to him operates in Yangiyol.