Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

part in the violence, of whom eighty-two were Azerbaijani and one 
other was Russian.
31 
Grigorian was a very lowly figure. A native of 
Sumgait, he was brought up by his Russian mother after his Armenian 
father died. He had three criminal convictions. According to one ver­
sion, he egged others on during the riots; according to another, he was 
persuaded to join the violence by his Azerbaijani workmates. In sum, 
Grigorian bears the profile of a pogromshchik, a thuggish young man, of 
indeterminate nationality with a criminal past, seeking violence for its 
own sake. It is very hard to make a political conspirator out of him, let 
alone a key player in a sinister Armenian plot. 
If the violence was planned, it may have been done so inside the 
city itself. After the pogroms were over, several local officials were 
sacked and the local Party boss, Muslimzade, was expelled from the 
Party.
32 
Several of the Armenian survivors said they saw Party officials 
taking part in the rallies on Lenin Square and calling on Armenians to 
leave the town; some of the Armenian survivors said that there were 
even town officials among the pogromshchiki. Many of the killers and ri­
oters had been made promises, given names and addresses of Armeni­
ans, and armed with homemade weapons.
33 
Perhaps some of the local 
officials deliberately manipulated the crowd, hoping they could force 
Armenians to leave Sumgait and thus solve the town’s most pressing 
social problem—the housing shortage. Whoever were targeting the Ar­
menians, what they planned almost certainly got out of control. 
In one sense, the conspiracy theorists are posing the wrong ques­
tion. The violence did not happen in a vacuum and even if provocateurs 
were at work in Sumgait, they still needed willing material to provoke. 
The writer and journalist Anatol Lieven has described watching Soviet 
military cadets masquerading as Russian civilians trying to start a riot 
with the Latvian police—unsuccessfully, because the phlegmatic Baltic 
policemen did not overreact. Unfortunately, a crowd in the Caucasus 
contains more flammable material.
34 
It might be more useful to ask how violence could have been avoided 
in Sumgait, a deprived city, filling up with refugees in a volatile situa­
tion. Anti-Armenian pogroms were barely averted during these days in 
Azerbaijan’s other big cities, Baku and Kirovabad, but in Sumgait the 

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44 
F E B RUA RY   1 9 8 8 :  A Z E R B A I J A N :  P U Z Z L E M E N T  A N D   P O G RO M S  
combination of elements was too combustible. The violence erupted so 
quickly that it is surprising that more Armenians were not killed. That 
they were not, when the police did nothing and the military arrived a 
day late, suggests that some Soviet civic values were acting as a brake 
on intercommunal bloodletting. Horrible as the pogroms were, the 
death toll in Sumgait was far smaller than that of the massacres in Baku 
in 1905 and 1918. 
Azerbaijanis, who have a rather easygoing image of themselves, 
might find it easier to come to terms with the pogroms, if they realized 
that this kind of violence is not so uncommon. “One important reason 
for the rapid growth of the baiting crowd is that there is no risk in­
volved,” writes Elias Canetti in his seminal study of crowd psychology, 
Crowds and Power. “A murder shared with many others, which is not 
only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the 
great majority of men.”
35 
Savage pogroms took place not long afterward 
in Soviet Central Asia, in Osh and Dushanbe. Another country that has 
a peaceful self-image, Great Britain, was the scene of little-remembered 
ethnic pogroms in the East End of London in 1915. After the sinking of 
the British ship Lusitania  by a German submarine, gangs took to the 
streets, smashing German shops and beating German shopkeepers.
36 
More than two hundred people were hurt. The depiction of Sumgait 
would also have been less black-and-white, if it had been more widely 
known that Azerbaijanis were expelled violently from Armenia. The vi­
olence, which happened in rural areas, was less dramatic than the Sum-
gait pogroms, but in the course of 1988, hundreds of Azerbaijanis suf­
fered at the hands of Armenians. 
As it was, in the Soviet Union and the wider world, Sumgait came 
to stand as a symbol of ethnically motivated violence, with the Armeni­
ans portrayed as its sole victims. In Armenia, the killings caused a great 
upsurge of grief and anger. The comparison was immediately felt and 
expressed with the massacres of 1915, the “Genocide.” Memorials were 
set up to the Sumgait victims. In Yerevan, demonstrators carried plac­
ards bearing the twin dates, 1915 and 1988. Many Armenians now be­
lieved that they had to fight against a coming wave of aggression. 
Arkady Gukasian, now elected leader of Nagorny Karabakh, says that 
Sumgait made eventual conflict with Azerbaijan “inevitable.” “After 
Sumgait we began to think about where all this was leading, but the 
wheel had already started turning. Sumgait was an attempt to frighten 
us, to say, ‘Look the same thing will happen to you.’”
37 

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3 
Shusha 
The Neighbors’ Tale 
D R I N K I N G   T E A   I N  
their garden, surrounded by nodding flowers and 
looking out at their old ruined school, Albert and Larisa Khachaturian 
seemed like the survivors of an earthquake.
1 
The Khachaturians’ house in the upper part of Shusha is one of the 
few in the town that is still intact. As I walked up through the flagged 
streets of this formerly prosperous city, in the shade of oak and apple 
trees, I passed the black empty shells of old balconied mansion houses. 
Shusha (called Shushi by the Armenians), situated high above a gorge 
in the central hills of Nagorny Karabakh, was once one of the great cities 
of the Caucasus, famous for its theaters, mosques, and churches. Now 
its ruins support only a tiny populace, the streets are empty and lined 
with devastated buildings. Yet this comprehensive ruination was the re­
sult of a man-made disaster, not an earthquake. 
The Khachaturians are some of only a few original natives who still 
live in Shusha. They come from what was a small Armenian minority in 
a majority-Azerbaijani town. In February 1988, when the Karabakh Ar­
menians began their protests, the Azerbaijanis of Shusha were afraid. 
“No one slept,” said Zahid Abasov, a local town official. The Shusha Ar­
menians, people like Larisa and Albert Khachaturian, were doubly 
afraid. They were teachers who had done well under the Soviet system, 
and they had dozens of Azerbaijani friends and colleagues. But in 1988, 
they were suddenly members of an especially vulnerable social group: 
they, to be precise, were Armenians living in an Azerbaijani town inside 
an Armenian province inside Azerbaijan. Who would protect them 
now? Their story—the story of Shusha as a whole—is one of how Soviet 
neighbors came to fear and then fight one another. 
Shusha did not have the socioeconomic problems of Sumgait, 
and at first the two communities in the town did not fight. But the Sum-
gait pogroms in February 1988 immediately created tensions, which 
45 

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46 
S H U S H A :  T H E   N E I G H B O R S ’  TA L E  
increased, when refugees—first Armenians from Sumgait, then Azer­
baijanis from Armenia—began to arrive in Nagorny Karabakh. The fuse 
took longer to burn down in Shusha—a tribute perhaps to relationships 
of trust forged over many years. But it did ignite in September 1988, 
when, within a few days, all the Armenians were expelled from Shusha 
and all the Azerbaijanis were driven from Stepanakert. Albert recalled 
for me the day he came home to find a crowd trampling his garden and 
breaking his possessions: 
We thought it would be solved peacefully. It was very hard because 
Shusha is not a big town. We all knew each other, we were friends, we 
went to each other’s weddings and funerals. I came in and saw Hus­
sein the tailor smashing up my veranda. I said “Hussein, what are you 
doing?” I had managed to get his son-in-law into the Communist