B A K U : A N E V E N T F U L H I S TO RY
107
cated than the British soldiers in 1918, who apparently moaned about
the caviar given them in their daily rations “until the reiterated com
plaint that ‘this ’ere jam do taste of fish’ got it removed.”
9
The newcom
ers have made Baku into an international city once again.
But Azerbaijan’s oil wealth has probably created more social prob
lems than it has solved. Some people have become fabulously wealthy.
The center of Baku is a bubble of prosperity. A few streets out from the
center a grimier and more typical reality begins that stretches back into
Azerbaijan. Because the
non-oil economy has collapsed, most Azerbai
janis get by on a few dollars a month or the remittances of male family
members who are guest workers in Turkey or Russia.
Down the street from Asadov’s war veterans organization, I found
a ten-story tower block that had formerly been a hostel for students at
Baku’s Pedagogical Institute but was now
home to a group of refugees
from the city of Aghdam. On the porch, a mosaic in gaudy colors harked
back to more optimistic times: spacemen and rockets crowded around
two earnest Soviet youths, who were staring
at a test tube labeled H
2
0.
Rovshan Abasov, a student, took me through the hostel. Alone in
his family, he seemed to have found a purpose in life since they were
washed up here in 1993. We went to visit his aunt, Zumrit Kulieva, and
saw the miserable face of the new Baku. The
room Zumrit lived in was
stuffy and heated by an oil stove. Four people slept in the beds; the chil
dren slept on the floor. She said each refugee received fifty thousand
manats a month, or about ten dollars, which was not enough for food.
“We think that everyone has forgotten us,” Zumrit said plainly. “We
don’t know what will happen to us.”
Rovshan said that the water pump in the hostel had broken. The
upper stories were no longer
getting water through the taps, and the
basement was filling up with water. Despite the refugees’ complaints,
no one had come to repair the water system and they were worried that
one day the building might just collapse in on them. It was a disturbing
metaphor for Baku. Everything was fine
on the surface, but one day the
roof might cave in—this time not under the weight of intercommunal
tensions but because of the gap between rich and poor.
8
1990 –1991
A Soviet Civil War
POLYANICHKO’S HOUR
In January 1990, as order broke down in Baku,
the area around Nagorny
Karabakh slid out of control. On 15 January, Moscow imposed a State of
Emergency on the province and the border regions with Armenia. A
delegation sent by the Politburo flew into Karabakh but was turned
back at the airfield by Armenian villagers. There was fighting in the vil
lages of the Khanlar region. Then, after the bloodshed of 20 January,
Arkady Volsky and his team pulled out of the region, leaving it without
any working administration.
This was Viktor Polyanichko’s hour. After
Black January, Azerbai
jan’s Russian second secretary had stayed in place as deputy to the new
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: