Usmon Nosir was born in Namangan on 13 November 1912 to a poor craftsman's family and lost his father at four. In 1921 he moved with his uncle and guardian to Kokand, where he grew up in a boarding school and discovered Russian and world literature. From 1931 he studied philology at the Uzbek State University in Samarkand. Contemporaries said he “entered literature like thunder and lived a creative life as brief as lightning”.
A short, brilliant career
His first collection, “Conversation with the Sun”, appeared in 1932, followed by “Mobilised Lines”, “Tractor Land” (1933), “Heart” (1935) and “My Love” (1936), whose sincere lyricism and fresh imagery made him hugely popular with young readers. He wrote the plays “Nazirjon Khalilov”, “Zafar” and “Atlas” and translated Pushkin's “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” and Lermontov's “The Demon” into Uzbek. Arrested as an “enemy of the people” in July 1937 and sentenced to ten years, he passed through Zlatoust prison and camps near Vladivostok and Magadan before being moved in 1943 to a camp in the Mariinsk district of Kemerovo Region, where he died on 9 March 1944. He was later rehabilitated.
Remembrance
Uzbekistan marked his 90th anniversary in 2003 and his 110th in 2022. Kemerovo has a Usmon Nosir museum and holds literary readings in his memory each year, and in 2023 a statue of him was placed at the memorial to the victims of the Siblag camps in Mariinsk. His lyrics remain among the most widely read poems in Uzbekistan.
On 25 June (8 July) 1916, at the height of the First World War, Nicholas II decreed the conscription of Turkestani men aged 19 to 43 for labour behind the front. Issued at harvest time and enforced through unfair lists, the decree provoked mass unrest. In July there were protests in Khujand, Tashkent and towns of the Fergana Valley; in Jizzakh the rising turned into armed fighting and was crushed with great brutality by punitive detachments, which left the old town badly damaged. The revolt also spread across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Tens of thousands of labourers were eventually sent to the front zone regardless.
After the October Revolution of 1917, power in Tashkent passed to a Bolshevik-led soviet that excluded the local Muslim majority. In response, the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Turkestan Muslims, meeting in Kokand on 27 November 1917, proclaimed a Turkestan Autonomy within a Russian federation. Its government was led by Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev and then Mustafa Chokay, with Jadids among its members. In February 1918 Red Guard units sent from Tashkent stormed Kokand; much of the city was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed. Short-lived as it was, the autonomy is seen as a milestone in the region's pursuit of national statehood.
After the Turkestan Autonomy was crushed, an armed movement against Soviet rule spread through the Fergana Valley from 1918. Soviet sources called it the Basmachi movement; Uzbek historians today more often describe it as a struggle for independence. It was led by local commanders, or kurbashi, such as Ergash, Madamin Bek and Shermuhammad Bek (Kurshermat). After 1920 the fighting shifted to Eastern Bukhara and the mountains of Kashkadarya and Surkhandarya, where Ibrahim Bek was a leading figure; the Ottoman general Enver Pasha joined in 1921–1922 and was killed in 1922. Large Red Army forces had largely suppressed the movement by the mid-1920s, though isolated bands held out into the early 1930s.
In February 1920 the Red Army and Young Khivan forces ended the Khanate of Khiva: the last khan, Said Abdullah, abdicated, and in April the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic was proclaimed. On 2 September 1920 the Red Army under Mikhail Frunze, together with the Young Bukharans, took Bukhara after a bombardment that set the Ark and parts of the city ablaze; Emir Alim Khan fled to Eastern Bukhara and in 1921 to Afghanistan. In October the Bukharan People's Soviet Republic was created, headed by Fayzulla Khodjaev, with Fitrat among its ministers. Both republics were dissolved in the national delimitation of 1924.
In 1924 Central Asia underwent national-territorial delimitation: the Turkestan ASSR and the Bukharan and Khorezm republics were replaced by new republics drawn largely along ethnic lines. On 27 October 1924 the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was formed, with the Tajik ASSR inside it until 1929. Its First Congress of Soviets met in Bukhara in February 1925. Samarkand was the first capital; in 1930 the capital moved to Tashkent. The borders drawn then largely define today's Uzbekistan, but in mixed areas such as the Fergana Valley they left complicated frontiers and enclaves.
On 8 March 1927, International Women's Day, the Soviet authorities launched the Hujum (“assault”) campaign in Central Asia. It aimed to persuade women to give up the paranja robe and horsehair veil and to change their status through literacy classes and work outside the home, with mass veil-burnings staged in city squares. The campaign met fierce resistance: many unveiled women were harassed, and by some estimates around 2,500 were murdered. Historians judge the Hujum in different ways — as a reform that opened education and careers to women, and as a coercive policy that cost many lives.
