Honorary Title "Meritorious Cotton Grower Of The Uzbek SSR".

[Kirchgoens]

I might as well highjack this thread title since it hasn't been used in a while.:)

I can't make out enough of the text on this one to tell anything about it other than the word "honored" and a shared root with the word for "servant" (but I strongly doubt that is the actual case). With all the Cyrillic "X"s I am guessing this is a local variant Uzbek use of the Russian alphabet much like with Mongolian awards.

Any thoughts?

It's in both languages. The bottom two words are straight Russian, and translate as Paul notes. You'll find the "cotton worker" word in multitran.ru, but I bet some online translators won't pick it up.

In Soviet times, other than a few years prior to the Purges when the UzSSR used Turkic and later Latin script, they pretty much stuck to Cyrillic (with a couple added letters like the one that looks like the Latin "f") until after independence. At that point, they attempted to go back to Latin. This effort has had mixed results, and the alphabets are pretty mixed up throughout the country, sometimes even on the same billboard.