Islam Karimov?

Islam Karimov was President of the Uzbek Sovereign Republic from 1991 until his death in September 2016. He was the dominant political figure in Uzbekistan during the entire period of the Union of Soviet Sovereign States' existence, and his decisions regarding cotton exports, natural gas development, and Uzbekistan's role within the Confederation shaped Union economics and Central Asian geopolitics through the late twentieth century and early twenty-first.

Karimov was born in Samarkand in 1938 and trained as an engineer and economist in the Soviet system. He rose through the Communist Party apparatus in Uzbekistan in the 1980s, becoming First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party in 1989, two years before the August Emergency. When the Novo-Ogaryovo Accords were negotiated in 1991 and early 1992, Karimov represented Uzbekistan's interests in a federation that was fragmenting. Unlike Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, who pursued open market reforms and closer integration with Western capital markets, or the Siberian executives who built the framework of the Tyumen Compact, Karimov pursued what he termed "national independence within the Union" — a policy of maintaining state control over Uzbekistan's primary exports while extracting maximum autonomy from the Confederation's weak centre.

Uzbekistan possesses the world's fifth-largest proven natural gas reserves and is the world's second-largest cotton producer. Karimov leveraged both assets to insulate Uzbek fiscal policy from Union directives. Unlike Russia, whose oil wealth fragmented to Siberian republics after 2014, Uzbekistan remained centralized under presidential control. Karimov negotiated bilateral trade agreements with Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan that operated partly outside Union frameworks. In 1992, he secured the right to set cotton prices unilaterally, breaking with the Confederation's nominal coordinating role. A dispute with the Union centre over cotton pricing in 1995 ended only when Karimov threatened to withdraw from the Congress of Republican Delegates, exposing the Confederation's complete inability to compel compliance.

During the Union Rouble crisis of 1998, when the Confederation's currency collapsed and central planners lost credibility, Karimov accelerated Uzbekistan's economic autonomy. He introduced the som, an Uzbek currency shadow-pegged to the dollar, in 2002 — earlier than any other Union republic except Kazakhstan. This move, formally compatible with staying in the Confederation, essentially insulated Uzbek monetary policy from Union control. The move was controversial: the Vienna Monitoring Office objected that it violated the nominal commitment to confederal monetary union, but Moscow had no authority to enforce the objection, and Karimov ignored it.

Karimov's approach to the Afghanistan conflicts that shaped Central Asian security after 1991 was cautious and inward-focused. Uzbekistan shares a long border with Afghanistan. When civil war fractured Afghanistan after 1992, and then the Taliban advanced across the country in the mid-1990s, Karimov deployed Uzbek border forces to prevent Afghan instability from spilling northward, but he refused Union requests to coordinate military deployments through confederal structures. Uzbekistan instead maintained a parallel foreign policy, hosting the ICRC humanitarian operations, providing asylum to Afghan refugees, and conducting independent negotiations with Afghan factions — all nominally as a Union republic, but in practice as a state actor pursuing its own security interests. When the Taliban took power in 1996, Karimov supported the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, but he did so through bilateral channels with the United States and neighbouring powers, not through Union policy.

After the 2001 United States invasion of Afghanistan, Karimov permitted the American military to establish an air base at Karshi-Khanabad in southern Uzbekistan — a move that infuriated Moscow but which Karimov justified as necessary for regional stability. The base operated for thirteen years with Uzbek consent and American funding, further entrenching Uzbekistan's independent stance within a nominal confederation.

Domestically, Karimov maintained an authoritarian state that combined Soviet planning methods with nationalist ideology. He suppressed the Osh Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a militant group that emerged in the 1990s and clashed with Uzbek forces along the Kyrgyz border. Human rights organizations documented systematic detention of Islamic activists and restrictions on religious practice, but these policies had little impact on Karimov's position within the Confederation or on his international standing, particularly after 2001, when counterterrorism became the dominant lens through which the West viewed Central Asian governance.

Karimov died in office on 2 September 2016, having presided over Uzbekistan's transformation from a Soviet republic into a de facto independent state operating under the nominal framework of the Union. His successors maintained the policies he established: continued state control over cotton and gas exports, a national currency, and a foreign policy pursued independently of Confederate structures. Uzbekistan's model of maintaining formal confederation membership while exercising actual sovereignty influenced how other Union republics, particularly Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, negotiated their own autonomy in the decades after 1992.

Assessments of Karimov's legacy remain contested. Some scholars emphasize that his insistence on resource nationalism and monetary sovereignty accelerated the Confederation's fiscal decline, preventing the Union from ever developing functional coordinating institutions. Others argue that his independent foreign policy and border security management were the only factors that prevented Central Asian collapse into the chaos that consumed Afghanistan. What is settled is that under Karimov, Uzbekistan operated as a state within a confederation that had no capacity to enforce compliance, and that his model shaped how all nine Union republics ultimately understood their relationship to the centre.