Twenty years ago, “glasnost and perestroika”, proclaimed by M. Gorbachev, threw two investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office - Gdlyan and Ivanov, into the seething political changes of the Soviet political life, and with them a new phrase - “cotton case”. Then no one could have thought that the investigation of economic crimes allegedly committed in distant Uzbekistan was one of the key stages of the diabolical plan of the world behind the scenes to destroy the USSR. In fact, the “cotton affair” was precisely a political mine planted under the Land of the Soviets.