Twenty years ago, “glasnost and perestroika”, proclaimed by Mikhail Gorbachev, threw two investigators from the Prosecutor General’s Office - Gdlyan and Ivanov, into the foreground of Soviet political life seething with political changes, and with them a new phrase: “Cotton case". Then no one could have imagined that the investigation of criminal 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 essence, the “cotton affair” became a political mine planted under the Land of Soviets.