Rashidov died in office in 1983 after ruling this Central Asian country for 25 years. He was posthumously accused of having falsified Uzbekistan's cotton yield statistics and of massive corruption when Yury Andropov singled him out as a key target for his anticorruption campaign.
But last Friday Uzbekistan's current president, Islam Karimov, decided to rehabilitate his former boss. The whole Uzbekistan government piled into buses to cross the dusty plains from Tashkent to Samarkand and celebrate "the end of our persecution".
Many of the dead leader's supporters were jailed during Andropov's crackdown, which continued until Uzbekistan reluctantly declared its independence from the former Soviet Union after the August coup.
As Rashidov's widow wept and thanked Karimov for restoring her husband's reputation, hundreds of darkly clad men reached for their hankies to wipe away tears of sympathy. Many had lost their jobs in the purge that followed Rashidov's death.
Uzbekistan now has a new set of problems to deal with other than helping Moscow to clean up the Communist Party.
The country was formed as recently as 1924 out of parts of three Moslem principalities. Suddenly it is independent and with no true history as a nation-state to draw on, the present government is trying to find the foundations for one.
Rashidov has apparently been chosen for the role of Uzbekistan's founding father. For the former Communists still firmly in control here, it does not seem to have been a difficult choice.
"Rashidov thought day and night about the future of the Uzbek people", Karimov said in a speech that alluded several times to numerous heroic figures from Central Asian history.
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