- Faizullah Khojaev
Faizullah Ubaidullaevich Khojaev ( _uz. Fayzulla Ubaydulloyevich Xo‘jayev; _ru. Файзулла Убайдуллаевич Ходжаев; _fa. فائض الله خؤاجه). b.1896
Bukhara —March 1938,Moscow was an Uzbek politician.Khojaev was born in to a family of wealthy traders. He was sent to Moscow by his father in 1907. There he realized the tremendous gap between contemporary European society and technology, and the ancient, tradition-bound ways of his homeland.
He joined the Pan-Turkist "
Jadid " movement of like-minded reformers in 1916, and, with his father’s fortune, established the Young Bukharan Party. Seeing the Russian Revolution as an opportunity, the Young Bukharan Party invited theBolsheviks of theTashkent Soviet to seize Bukhara by force in 1917. When this attempted invasion failed, Khojaev was forced to flee toTashkent , and was only able to return after theEmir of Bukhara fled in September 1920.Appointed head of the
Bukharan People's Soviet Republic , he barely escaped assassination by "Basmachi" leader Enver Pasha. With the reorganization ofCentral Asia and subsequent purge of suspected Uzbek nationalists in 1923-1924, Khojaev rose to become President of the Council of People’s Commissars of theUzbek Soviet Socialist Republic . However, he opposedJoseph Stalin ’s heavy-handed control, particularly in the matter ofcotton monoculture .Khojaev was arrested on trumped up charges in 1937, tried in Moscow as a "Trotskyite and a Rightist" and executed on
March 13 1938 . Officially rehabilitated in 1966, he remains a controversial figure in modernUzbekistan . On the one hand, he is seen as a traitor who sold his country and people into Soviet servitude. On the other hand, he is seen as an idealist, who sought modernization and independence forTurkestan , but was caught up in forces beyond his control.There are few monuments to him in modern Uzbekistan, and although his father’s house in Bukhara is preserved as a monument, it is styled as "House of a Wealthy Local Merchant", with very little emphasis on Khojaev himself.
References
[http://www.worldstatesmen.org/Uzbekistan.html World Statesmen - Uzbekistan]
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