Uzbekistan, officially the Republic of Uzbekistan, is a doubly landlocked country located in Central Asia. It is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Kyrgyzstan to the northeast, Tajikistan to the southeast, Afghanistan to the south, and Turkmenistan to the south-west. It is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world, the other being Liechtenstein. The country has a population of more than 39 million, making it the most populous Republic in Central Asia. Uzbekistan is a member of the Organisation of Turkic States. Uzbek (written in both Cyrillic and Latin scripts), spoken by the Uzbek people who form more than 89% of the population, is the official language of the country. Russian and Tajik are significant minority languages, with Russian serving as a lingua franca. Tajik is primarily spoken by Tajiks living in the southern parts of the country, such as Samarkand and Bukhara.
The first recorded settlers in Uzbekistan were Eastern Iranian nomads, known as Scythians, who founded kingdoms in Khwarazm, Sogdiana, and Bactria in the 8th–6th centuries BC, as well as in Fergana and Margiana in the 3rd century BC – 6th century AD. The area was incorporated into the Achaemenid Empire and, after a period of Greco-Bactrian rule, was part of the Sasanian Empire until the Muslim conquest of Persia in the seventh century. The early Muslim conquests and the subsequent Samanid Empire resulted in the spread of Islam among the local people. During this period, cities began to grow rich from the Silk Road, and became a centre of the Islamic Golden Age. The local Khwarazmian Empire was destroyed in the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, leading to a dominance by Mongol peoples. Timur in the 14th century established the Timurid Empire. The Timurid capital of Samarkand became a centre of science under the rule of Ulugh Beg, giving birth to the Timurid Renaissance. The territories of the Timurid dynasty were conquered by Kipchak Shaybanids in the 16th century. Most of Central Asia was gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire during the 19th century, with Tashkent becoming the political centre of Russian Turkestan. In 1924, national delimitation created the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic as a republic of the Soviet Union. During the Soviet era, Uzbekistan became a leading producer of farm products such as cotton and melons, while also making significant advances in science and technology. It declared independence as the Republic of Uzbekistan in 1991 following the Soviet collapse.
Uzbekistan is a secular state, with a semi-presidential government. Uzbekistan comprises 12 regions (vilayats), Tashkent City, and the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan. While NGOs have defined Uzbekistan as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights", significant reforms under Uzbekistan's second president, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, have been made following the death of the first president, Islam Karimov. Owing to these reforms, relations with neighbours Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan have drastically improved. The country also holds strong ties with other Asian countries like China, Turkey, Russia and India. In recent years, Uzbekistan's ties with the European Union and the United States have grown rapidly as well.
The Uzbek economy is undergoing a gradual transition to a market economy, with foreign trade policy being based on import substitution. In September 2017, the country's currency became fully convertible at market rates. Uzbekistan is a major producer and exporter of cotton. With gigantic power-generation facilities from the Soviet era and an ample supply of natural gas, Uzbekistan has become the largest electricity producer in Central Asia. Uzbekistan is a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), United Nations (UN) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).
Etymology
The name Uzbegistán appears in the 16th century Tarikh-i Rashidi.
The origin of the word Uzbek remains disputed.
"free", "independent" or "own master/leader", requiring an amalgamation of uz (Turkic: "own"), beg ("master" or "leader")
eponymously named after Oghuz Khagan, also known as Oghuz Beg
A contraction of uğuz, earlier oğuz, that is, the oghuz, or "tribe", amalgamated with bek "oguz-leader".
Some scholars connect the name Uzbek to Özbeg Khan, the ruler of the Golden Horde, whence the Uzbeks migrated into what is now Uzbekistan in the 16th century.
All four have the middle syllable/phoneme being cognate with the Turkic title beg.
The name of the country was often spelled Ўзбекистон in Uzbek Cyrillic or Узбекистан in Russian during Soviet rule.
History
The region has been referred to by many names over the millennia. The name Uzbekistan first appears in 16th century literature. Other names for the region include: Transoxiana, Turkestan, and Bukhara. In the 14th century the region served as the birthplace, home, and capital of Tamerlane. Under Tamerlane, the region was a part of the Timurid Empire which extended from the Black Sea to the Arabian Sea, and to just outside of Delhi, India.
Prehistory and ancient history
Central Asia was shaped by multiple Indo-European migrations. During early antiquity, the region was inhabited by nomadic Scythian tribes who came from the Eurasian Steppe, which includes modern Uzbekistan, sometime during the first millennium BC. When these nomadic tribes settled in the region they built an extensive irrigation system along the rivers. At this time, cities such as Bukhoro (Bukhara) and Samarqand (Samarkand) emerged as centres of government and high culture. By the fifth century BC, the Bactrian, Sogdian, and Tokharian states dominated the region.
As East Asia began to develop its silk trade with the West, using an extensive network of cities and rural settlements in the province of Transoxiana, and further east in what is today Xinjiang, the Sogdian intermediaries became the wealthiest of these merchants. As a result of this trade on what became known as the Silk Road, Bukhara and Samarkand eventually became extremely wealthy cities, and at times Transoxiana (Mawarannahr) was one of the most influential and powerful provinces of antiquity.
The Achaemenid emperors Cyrus the Great, and later Darius the Great, exerted control over the Amu Darya, incorporating Bactria and Chorasmia as satrapies. Historical Iranian texts later record the region as Turan. In 327 BC, Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire provinces of Sogdiana and Bactria, which contained the territories of modern Uzbekistan. Popular resistance to the conquest was fierce, causing Alexander's army to be bogged down in the region that became the northern part of the Macedonian Greco-Bactrian Kingdom. The kingdom was replaced with the Yuezhi-dominated Kushan Empire in the first century BC. For many centuries thereafter the region of Uzbekistan was ruled by the Hephthalites and Sassanid Empires, as well as by other empires, for example, those formed by the Turkic Gokturk peoples.
Medieval history
In the eighth century, Transoxiana, the territory between the Amudarya and Syrdarya rivers, was conquered by the Arabs (Qutayba ibn Muslim), becoming a focal point soon after the Islamic Golden Age.
In the ninth and tenth centuries, Transoxiana was brought into the Samanid Empire. In the tenth century it was gradually dominated by the Turkic-ruled Karakhanids, as well as their Seljuk overseers.
The Mongol conquest under Genghis Khan during the 13th century brought change to the region. The invasions of Bukhara, Samarkand, Urgench and other cities resulted in mass murders and unprecedented destruction, which saw parts of Khwarezmia being completely razed.
Following the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, the empire was divided among his four sons and family members. Despite the potential for serious fragmentation, an orderly succession continued for several generations. Control of most of Transoxiana stayed in the hands of the direct descendants of Chagatai Khan, the second son of Genghis Khan. Orderly succession, prosperity, and internal peace prevailed in the Chagatai lands, and the Mongol Empire as a whole remained a strong and united kingdom, known as the Golden Horde.
Timurid period
One tribal chieftain, Timur (Tamerlane), emerged from struggles in the 1380s as the dominant force in Transoxiana. Although he was not a descendant of Genghis Khan, Timur became the de facto ruler of Transoxiana and proceeded to conquer all of western Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, and the southern steppe region north of the Aral Sea. He also invaded Russia before dying during an invasion of China in 1405. Timur was also known for his extreme brutality and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres in the cities he occupied.
Timur initiated the last flowering of Transoxiana by gathering together numerous artisans and scholars from the vast lands he had conquered into his capital, Samarkand, thus imbuing his empire with a rich Perso-Islamic culture. During his reign and the reigns of his immediate descendants, a wide range of religious and palatial construction masterpieces were undertaken in Samarkand and other population centres.
Tamerlane also established an exchange of medical discoveries and became the patron of physicians, scientists and artists from neighbouring countries such as India; his grandson Ulugh Beg was one of the world's first great astronomers. It was during the Timurid dynasty that Turkic, in the form of the Chaghatai dialect, became a literary language in its own right in Transoxiana, although the Timurids were Persianate in culture. The greatest Chaghataid writer, Ali-Shir Nava'i, was active in the city of Herat (now in northwestern Afghanistan) in the second half of the 15th century.
Uzbek period
The Timurid state quickly split in half after the death of Timur. The chronic internal fighting of the Timurids attracted the attention of the Uzbek nomadic tribes living to the north of the Aral Sea. In 1501, the Uzbek forces began a wholesale invasion of Transoxiana. The slave trade in the Emirate of Bukhara became prominent and was established at this time. The Khanate of Bukhara was eventually invaded by the foreign government of Persia in 1740, and then became a part of the Persian empire of the day.
Before the arrival of the Russians, present-day Uzbekistan was divided between the Emirate of Bukhara and the khanates of Khiva and Kokand.
Russian conquest
In the 19th century, the Russian Empire began to expand and spread into Central Asia. There were 210,306 Russians living in Uzbekistan in 1912. The "Great Game" period is generally regarded as running from approximately 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. A second, less intensive phase followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. At the start of the 19th century, there were some 3,200 kilometres (2,000 mi) separating British India and the outlying regions of Tsarist Russia. Much of the land between was unmapped.
Soviet period
By the beginning of 1920, Central Asia was firmly in the hands of Russia and, despite some early resistance to the Bolsheviks, Uzbekistan and the rest of Central Asia became a part of the Soviet Union. On 27 October 1924, the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic was created. From 1941 to 1945, during World War II, 1,433,230 people from Uzbekistan fought in the Red Army against Nazi Germany. As many as 263,005 Uzbek soldiers died in the battlefields of the Eastern Front, and 32,670 went missing in action.
During the Soviet–Afghan War, about 65,000 Uzbek troops fought in neighbouring Afghanistan. At least 1,500 lost their lives and thousands more were paralysed.
Independence
On 20 June 1990, Uzbekistan declared its state sovereignty. On 31 August 1991, Uzbekistan declared independence after the failed coup attempt in Moscow. 1 September was proclaimed National Independence Day. The Soviet Union was dissolved on 26 December of that year. Islam Karimov, previously first secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan since 1989, was elected president of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic in 1990. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, he was elected president of independent Uzbekistan. An authoritarian ruler, Karimov died in September 2016. He was replaced by his long-time Prime Minister, Shavkat Mirziyoyev, on 14 December of the same year. On 6 November 2021, Mirziyoyev was sworn into his second term in office, after gaining a landslide victory in the presidential election.
Geography and climate
Uzbekistan has an area of 448,978 square kilometres (173,351 sq mi). It is the 56th largest country in the world by area and the 40th by population. Among the CIS countries, it is the fourth largest by area and the second largest by population.
Uzbekistan lies between latitudes 37° and 46° N, and longitudes 56° and 74° E. It stretches 1,425 kilometres (885 mi) from west to east and 930 kilometres (580 mi) from north to south. Bordering Kazakhstan and the Aralkum Desert (former Aral Sea) to the north and northwest, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan to the southwest, Tajikistan to the southeast, and Kyrgyzstan to the northeast, Uzbekistan is one of the largest Central Asian states and the only Central Asian state to border all the other four. Uzbekistan also shares a short border (less than 150 km or 93 mi) with Afghanistan to the south. Uzbekistan is home to six terrestrial ecoregions: Alai-Western Tian Shan steppe, Gissaro-Alai open woodlands, Badghyz and Karabil semi-desert, Central Asian northern desert, Central Asian riparian woodlands, and Central Asian southern desert.
Uzbekistan is a hot, dry, doubly landlocked country. The only other doubly landlocked country is Liechtenstein. In addition, due to its location within a series of endorheic basins, none of its rivers lead to the sea. Less than 10% of its territory is intensively cultivated irrigated land in river valleys and oases. The Aral Sea, which has been largely desiccated by cotton production established in the Soviet era, is considered one of the world's worst environmental disasters. The rest is the vast Kyzylkum Desert and mountains.
As published in its book of records in 2007, the generally accepted highest point in Uzbekistan is Khazret Sultan at 4,643 metres (15,233 ft) above sea level.
The climate in Uzbekistan is continental, with little precipitation expected annually (100–200 millimetres, or 3.9–7.9 inches). The average summer high temperature tends to be 40 °C (104 °F), while the average winter low temperature is around −23 °C (−9 °F).
Environment
Uzbekistan has a rich and diverse natural environment. However, decades of Soviet policies in pursuit of greater cotton production have resulted in a catastrophic scenario with the agricultural industry being the main contributor to the pollution and devastation of both air and water in the country.
The Aral Sea was once the fourth-largest inland sea on Earth, humidifying the surrounding air and irrigating the arid land. Since the 1960s, when the overuse of the Aral Sea water began, it has shrunk to about 10% of its former area and divided into parts, with only the southern part of the narrow western lobe of the South Aral Sea remaining permanently in Uzbekistan. Much of the water was and continues to be used for the irrigation of cotton fields, a crop requiring a large amount of water to grow.
Due to the Aral Sea loss, high salinity and contamination of the soil with heavy elements are especially widespread in Karakalpakstan, the region of Uzbekistan adjacent to the Aral Sea. The bulk of the nation's water resources is used for farming, which accounts for nearly 84% of the water use and contributes to high soil salinity. Heavy use of pesticides and fertilisers for cotton growing further aggravates soil contamination.
According to the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), climate risk management in Uzbekistan should consider its ecological safety.
Numerous oil and gas deposits have been discovered in the south of the country.
Uzbekistan has also been home to seismic activity, as evidenced by the 1902 Andijan earthquake, 2011 Fergana Valley earthquake, and 1966 Tashkent earthquake.
A dam collapse at Sardoba Reservoir in May 2020 flooded 35,000 hectares of land. Six people died and 111,000 evacuated with recovery estimates over 1.5 trillion som. The devastation extended into areas inside neighbouring Kazakhstan.
Air pollution
The air pollution situation in Uzbekistan throughout the 21st century has been characterised by steady deterioration, reflecting a long history of environmental problems. The increase in pollution began with local domestic emissions in the early 20th century, but Soviet industrialisation made a significant contribution, especially the evacuation of enterprises in the 1940s and the subsequent development of heavy industry, oil refining and chemical production in the 1950s–1980s. The decline in the level of the Aral Sea has created an additional source of salt and dust storms. In the post-Soviet period, the structure of pollution shifted: in the 2000s, the dominant factor was the growth of motor transport and the use of low-quality fuel, and in the 2010s, it was the increase in PM2.5 concentrations due to the construction boom and climatic conditions.
By 2020–2025, the combination of transport emissions, domestic heating, dust and meteorological inversions had led to a systemic environmental crisis, with Tashkent regularly ranking among the most polluted cities in the world. According to the World Bank, the average annual pollution level in the capital is more than six times higher than the WHO recommended level (5 μg/m³).
Responses to climate change
Uzbekistan's socioeconomic situation and geographic location make it highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change—particularly water stress—as much of the country consists of vast desert plains and arid regions. According to a risk assessment by The World Bank, more than a fifth of Uzbekistan's projected 2030 population (8 million people) will live in areas classified as very high climate‑risk (p. 11). The country has made progress in the agricultural sector, risk management, and adaptation and resilience strategies, but important gaps remain in the resilience of forest ecosystems, water‑resource management, business and financial continuity planning, and disaster communication. Uzbekistan also lacks an overarching national climate policy, limiting climate action to sector‑specific efforts.
Climate impacts on agriculture are already visible: crops have been affected differentially by temperature and water‑stress changes. Maize, potatoes, rice, watermelons, and wheat may experience positive yield changes, while cotton—the country's second most important crop—and high‑revenue fruit crops such as apples, cherries, and apricots are expected to face negative effects (p. 7).
At the same time, reforms are underway to support a transition toward a lower‑carbon economy, even as economic growth remains dependent on natural resources. Key solutions include expanding access to financing for lower‑income populations and improving access to safe sanitation, universal health care, information and communication technology, and social protections (p. 1).
Politics
After Uzbekistan declared independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, an election was held, and Islam Karimov was elected as the first President of Uzbekistan on 29 December 1991. The elections of the Oliy Majlis (Parliament or Supreme Assembly) were held under a resolution adopted by the 16th Supreme Soviet in 1994. In that year, the Supreme Soviet was replaced by the Oliy Majlis. The third elections for the bicameral 150-member Oliy Majlis, the Legislative Chamber, and the 100-member Senate for five-year terms, were held on 27 December 2009. The second elections were held from December 2004 to January 2005. The Oliy Majlis was unicameral up to 2004. Its size increased from 69 deputies (members) in 1994 to 120 in 2004–05 and currently stands at 150.