ABSTRACT
One of the most effective issues exploited by the Uzbek elites in their campaign against Moscow was general resentment of the official Russian presence and the alien authority wielded by representatives of the center from Moscow. In Uzbekistan, as in other non-Russian republics, the national language emerged as an effective vehicle for opposition to russification. It also became a potent force in consolidating nationalism. By 1989, Uzbek activists, encouraged by perestroika, were joining other non-Russian nationalists in pressing for legal mechanisms that would reverse the trend against their languages. Settlers from European Russia have been an irritant in Central Asia ever since the nineteenth century, when large numbers of land-hungry immigrants began to drive the nomadic Kazakhs and Kirghiz from their grazing lands. Following the tsarist conquest with its influx of military and civilian officials, Russian entrepreneurs flocked to the cities eager to make money from cotton and other Central Asian raw materials.
