The Last Purge explores the political ramifications of what is now known as the Cotton Affair, the largest and final purge in the post-Stalin Soviet Union. A significant yet underexamined episode of Uzbekistan's contemporary history, the Cotton Affair was a drawn-out judicial and political imbroglio that grew out of falsified cotton production data and corruption. Under cotton king Sharaf Rashidov, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Uzbekistan, the country more than doubled its production of cotton, the nation's principal cash crop. When the USSR's tenth five-year plan demanded an annual production of six million tons of raw cotton, however, production became a matter of political survival for the Uzbek ruling elite. To cope, they began hiding inefficiencies through bribes and falsifying cotton production data. Moscow's eventual crackdown in the 1980s implicated 58,000 officials – 20,000 of whom faced criminal prosecution – and overwhelmed Uzbekistan's institutions.

Cucciolla sets the Cotton Affair at the center of Uzbekistan's transition from Soviet republic to independent state. Through the use of untapped Russian and Uzbek sources, he traces how the Cotton Affair became a sensitive identity issue of revenge and resistance against former rulers that served to legitimize the new Uzbek president's regime and define his relations with local power networks. In recovering the often sordid details of this critical event in the USSR's political history, Cucciolla offers fresh insights into the contradictions as well as consequences of perestroika and the disintegration of the Soviet Union from the perspective of its periphery.