Kremlin Fires Party Boss in Uzbekistan : Action Viewed as Part of Gorbachev’s Drive Against Corruption

The Communist Party chief in Uzbekistan was dismissed Tuesday and replaced by an official apparently selected by Moscow in a continuing Kremlin crackdown on corruption and inefficiency in Central Asia.

Inamzhon B. Usmankhodzhayev, who had held the post in Uzbekistan for slightly more than three years, was “relieved of his duties due to retirement for health reasons,” the news agency Tass said.

Moscow’s hand in the changeover was disclosed by a second Tass dispatch from Tashkent, capital of the Uzbek republic, which said that Georgy P. Razumovsky, a secretary of the Central Committee and widely regarded as the Kremlin “enforcer” of personnel decisions, addressed the plenum at which the change was ordered.

The party chief’s removal came on the same day that Pravda, the national party newspaper, condemned the Uzbek Politburo for undermining Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign of perestroika, or restructuring.

Usmankhodzhayev, 57, was not publicly thanked for his work in the Tass article, and this was interpreted here as an indication that he had been forced out. It seemed certain that he will also be dropped from the Central Committee of the national party at the party conference in June.

He was replaced by Rafik N. Ni-shanov, 62, a former ambassador to Sri Lanka and Jordan whose principal qualification may have been his absence from the country from 1970 to 1985.

Tass said that Nishanov served in party and local organizations in Tashkent after graduating from the teachers’ training college there. He held the ceremonial post of foreign minister of Uzbekistan in 1985 and 1986 and was named president of the Presidium of the republic’s Supreme Soviet at the end of 1986.

The choice of Nishanov--bypassing the entire Politburo and Central Committee of the heavily Muslim republic--indicated that party officials in Moscow stagemanaged his election, Western observers said.

The Tass account carefully noted that Nishanov, like his predecessor, is an Uzbek. This contrasts with events in Kazakhstan in December, 1986. Riots erupted there when Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev was ousted from the party leadership and was replaced, at Moscow’s order, by Gennady I. Kolbin, an ethnic Russian.

The riots, the worst known outbreak of violence in the Soviet Union in recent times, were attributed to nationalism and resentment against the predominantly Russian authorities in Moscow. The violence continued for three days, and two deaths were reported.

Uzbekistan has been a problem for Soviet leaders for many years. Among other things, officials of the republic repeatedly inflated estimates of the cotton crop and led Moscow to pay for 900,000 tons of cotton that never existed.

Uzbek leaders traditionally used state wealth to build private fortunes. Sharaf Rashidov, who was the party boss there for 24 years, was accused after his death in 1983 of stashing away huge amounts of gold and jewels while allowing other officials to spend millions of rubles on private mansions.

In 1986, after the accession of Gorbachev to the national leadership, Rashidov was stripped of state honors, and his grave was moved from a place of honor in Tashkent to a family burial plot.

Tuesday’s account in Pravda was the latest in a long series of attacks on Uzbek’s party chiefs for alleged corruption, cronyism and inefficiency.

It said the republic Politburo announced last fall that it had ended the practice of taking children out of school to harvest cotton, the republic’s chief crop. The children spent so much time in the fields, Pravda said, that they were in school only seven to eight years instead of the standard 10. As a consequence, it said, they were “half-literate and utterly unprepared for military duty.”

When the republic Politburo recently decreed that children would be taken from school again to help bring in the cotton crop, Pravda accused it of deception and undermining popular faith in “the cardinal changes taking place,” a reference to the perestroika campaign.

Pravda also has printed strong charges against party leaders in Tadzhikistan, a neighboring Muslim republic, and in Armenia, suggesting that the leaders of these republics may also be in jeopardy.

The Politburo in Moscow also has criticized the party leadership in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. Party chief Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky is considered to be the target there.