Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party boss Kamran Bagirov, a protégé of the former Azerbaijani Party 
leader Heidar Aliev, was out of favor and sick.
1 
Gorbachev showed his 
distrust of the local Azerbaijani leadership by taking direct handling of 
the Karabakh crisis out of its hands. 
Azerbaijan’s first political protest took place on 19 February 1988, 
the seventh day of the Armenian rallies. A group of students, workers, 
and intellectuals marched from the Academy of Sciences on the top of 
the hill in Baku down to the building of the republican parliament, the 
Supreme Soviet, carrying placards that proclaimed that Nagorny Kara­
bakh belonged to Azerbaijan. They had almost no organizational back-
up, however. Many intellectuals in Baku say that they had never taken 
an interest in the Karabakh issue before 1988; unaware that it was a po­
tent theme for Armenians, they had simply taken for granted that Kara­
bakh would always be theirs. So the eruption of protests in Karabakh 
represented something both vaguer and more universal. Azerbaijanis 
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felt that Armenians were trying to break up their republic and threaten 
Azerbaijan’s national identity. 
The first to react was a group of Azerbaijani historians who had 
been engaged in an aggressive politicized debate with their Armenian 
counterparts since the 1960s. The poet Bakhtiar Vahabzade and the his­
torian Suleiman Aliarov published an “Open Letter” in the newspaper 
Azerbaijan in which they declared that Karabakh was historical Azer­
baijani territory, that the Karabakh Armenian campaign came out of a 
dangerous irredentist tradition, and that “the Azerbaijani people, in the 
new era of international competition, have been among the first vic­
tims.”
2 
The “Open Letter” also mentioned the hitherto taboo subject of 
“southern Azerbaijan” across the border in Iran. But this rare counter-
blast to the Armenians was published only in Baku, not Moscow, where 
the Armenian argument was receiving a much more favorable hearing. 
BAKU IN FERMENT 
Baku had always stood apart from the rest of Azerbaijan. It was the 
largest city in the Caucasus and home to dozens of nationalities. Russ­
ian was the preferred lingua franca and intermarriage was common. At 
the same time, the city’s rich ethnic mix also made it vulnerable; inter-
communal tensions simmered below the surface. 
The vote by the Nagorny Karabakh Soviet on 20 February to leave 
Azerbaijan immediately raised the temperature in the city. The situation 
worsened with the influx of Azerbaijanis fleeing the Kafan district of 
southern Armenia, many of whom descended on relatives in Baku. Al­
though there were no reports of deaths, many of the refugees were 
bandaged from beatings and fights. In the fevered atmosphere, many 
Azerbaijanis perceived that they had a fifth column in their midst in the 
Armenian quarter known as Armenikend. A Soviet official sent to Baku 
at that time was given one example of the growing hatred: a leaf of 
checked paper from a school exercise book that had been pushed into 
an Armenian’s mailbox. Written on it in red capital letters were the 
Russian words “pogosianshchiki von iz baku poka zhivy” (meaning: 
“Pogosian supporters [i.e., supporters of the new Armenian leader of 
Nagorny Karabakh Genrikh Pogosian] get out of Baku while you are 
still alive!”)
3 

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Baku’s local Party boss was a bluff and energetic former soccer 
player and construction engineer named Fuad Musayev. His abrasive 
approach to problem solving was controversial but possibly what was 
needed in this situation. On 20 Feburary, Musayev was called back to 
Baku from a vacation in the Russian spa town of Kislovodsk and found 
the city tense: “Someone was provoking them, propaganda work was 
going on.”
4 
That night Musayev and his Party Committee decided to re-
strict outsiders’ access into Baku. People’s volunteer groups were 
formed and patrolled the streets with wooden staves, keeping a careful 
watch on the Armenian quarter. 
The trouble died down in Baku, and timely action by the city au­
thorities may have averted at least two other attempts at pogroms there 
later that year.
5 
Yet, arguably, Musayev had only moved the trouble on 
to the town of Sumgait, twenty miles away. As one of his precautionary 
measures, he restricted the access of the thousands of workers who 
traveled from Sumgait to work in Baku every day, and he sent the Azer­
baijani refugees from Armenia on to two villages, Fatmai and Sarai, on 
the edge of Sumgait. So, as Baku became calmer, Sumgait seethed. 
A MODEL SOVIET TOWN 
There was something darkly appropriate about the way Sumgait pro­
duced the first-ever mass violence of the late Soviet era. It was a purely 
Soviet town, built to fulfill the dream of creating a modern internation­
alist workers’ community. Instead, it created a large class of poorly 
housed and disaffected lumpenproletariat. 
The patch of Caspian Sea shoreline north of Baku, where Sumgait 
now stands, was empty until World War II. It is a pleasant sandy spot, 
sprouting palm trees and other tropical greenery, where in the late 
1940s, a town began to grow. Its population was filled by the lowest 
ranks of Soviet society: zeks  (political prisoners) let out of Stalin’s 
camps; Azerbaijanis who had left Armenia to make way for Diaspora 
Armenian immigrants; and poor Armenian migrant workers from the 
hills of Karabakh. In 1960, the new city already had a population of 
sixty-five thousand. 
By the 1980s, this internationalist dream had turned into a night-
mare. The population had rocketed to a quarter of a million and there 

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were acute housing shortages. Factory workers lived in crowded hos­
tels. The city’s chemical factories gave it one of the worst pollution 
records in the Soviet Union. The infant mortality rate was so high that 
Sumgait had a cemetery set aside especially for children. The average 
age of its residents was twenty-five, and one inhabitant in five had a 
criminal record. Between 1981 and 1988, more than two thousand re-
leased prisoners called it home.
6 
In 1963, serious trouble had broken out in Sumgait when Nikita 
Khrushchev was leader of the Soviet Union and dismantling the cult of 
Stalin. On 7 November, the day of celebrations of the October Revolu­
tion, an unruly crowd from the Pipe-Rolling Factory broke away from 
the festive march through the central square of the city. The workers 
stormed the podium, where the local Party leaders were standing, and 
ripped down a vast portrait of Khrushchev that covered the façade of 
the Palace of Culture. The police battered the rioters with truncheons, 
but disturbances continued for several hours. According to one version 
of these events, the protestors had economic grievances and were pro-
testing against bread queues and rising prices. Another version has it 
that the riots had a distinct anti-Armenian streak and were in reprisal 
for an incident in which an Azerbaijani had been killed in Stepanakert. 
According to another story, the organizers planned a repeat perform­
ance of the trouble on the tenth anniversary of the riots in 1973 but were 
foiled by the KGB.
7 
A POGROM BEGINS 
In February 1988, while Fuad Musayev was forcibly suppressing any 
signs of trouble in Baku, Sumgait was ignored. In the crucial days of the 
Armenian protests in Nagorny Karabakh, many local leaders, including 
the Party boss, Jehangir Muslimzade, were away. On 26 February, ac­
cording to eyewitnesses, a small demonstration of perhaps forty or fifty 
people formed on Lenin Square in front of the Town Committee build­
ing and protested about the situation in Karabakh.
8 
The raw material 
for the demonstrations was the same group of Azerbaijanis who had re­
cently fled Armenia. A man with a long face, beard, and narrow mous­
tache, whom some of the Armenians later dubbed the “Leader,” an 
Azerbaijani from Kafan, told the crowd how he had been expelled by 
the Armenians, who had killed several of his relatives.
9 

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On Saturday, 27 February, the number of demonstrators had swelled 
to several hundred. The speakers used a megaphone, which could be 
heard several streets away. Armenians remember hearing the word 
“Karabakh” repeated endlessly into the night. The second secretary— 
or number-two official—in the local Party committee, a woman with 
the surname Bairamova, also reportedly addressed the crowd and de­
manded that Armenians leave Azerbaijan. The Leader’s tales had be-
come yet more blood curdling. He said members of his wife’s family 
had been killed and women had had their breasts cut off.
10 
That evening, the first incidents of violence, in a cinema and the 
market, were reported. Another factor, which seems to have been a nec­
essary condition for ethnic violence to begin, came into play: the local 
police did nothing. It later transpired that the local police force was 
overwhelmingly composed of Azerbaijanis and had only one profes­
sional Armenian officer.
11 
That same evening, the military prosecutor of the USSR, Alexander 
Katusev, who was in Azerbaijan, spoke on national television and on 
Baku Radio. Questioned about the events in Karabakh, he confirmed 
that two young men had been killed in Askeran five days before and 
gave their obviously Azerbaijani names.
12 
Katusev was putting a match 
to a tinderbox. According to one Sumgait Armenian, “[W]hen he said 
that . . . you know how bees sound, have you heard how they buzz? It 
was like the buzzing of millions of bees . . . and with this buzzing, they 
flew into our courtyard, howling and shouting.”
13 
The next day, Sunday, 28 February, an angry crowd filled the entire 
central square of Sumgait. The local Party boss, Jehangir Muslimzade, 
had finally returned from Moscow. According to one Georgian witness, 
he reassured the crowd that Karabakh would never be given to the Ar­
menians—but this was no longer enough to satisfy them. Then he said: 
“Brothers, we need to let the Armenians leave the city freely; once this 
kind of feud has started, once national issues have been opened up, 
force awakened, we need to let the Armenians leave.”
14 
Muslimzade 
was unable to quell the crowd. 
The details of what happened next are not entirely clear, but at 
around 6:30 p.m. Muslimzade descended into the crowd. An Azerbaijani 
flag was planted in his hand, and he marched at the head of the demon­
strators. The Party boss led them two blocks west, then south along 
Ulitsa Druzhby (Friendship Street), then east again toward the sea. 
Muslimzade later said that his intention had been to lead the crowd out 

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of the city center, down toward the sea, and out of trouble. Instead, he 
helped unleash a mob in the center of the city. The tail of the crowd 
broke up into small groups that began to swarm about the center of 
town seeking out Armenians. 
The peacetime Soviet Union had never before experienced what 
happened next. Gangs, ranging in size from about a dozen to more than 
fifty, roamed around, smashing windows, burning cars, but above all 
looking for Armenians to attack. Several blocks of Sumgait turned into 
a war zone. Its epicenter was the area around the city’s bus station, 
which, in a piece of unintended Soviet black irony, was situated on the 
corner of Friendship and Peace Streets. Ordinary inhabitants were ter­
rified. Natevan Tagieva, a doctor’s wife, related how she had come back 
to the city from her dacha  to find the mob in complete control of the 
streets: “When I saw the crowd I realized that the syndrome of the 
crowd really does exist. You look at their eyes and you see that they are 
absolutely switched off from everything, like zombies.”
15 
The horrors of what the Armenian residents of these streets suffered 
have been meticulously documented. A book of the accounts of forty-
four survivors was compiled later in Armenia and provides an ex­
tremely powerful and detailed anatomy of the pogrom. The roving 
gangs committed acts of horrific savagery. Several victims were so badly 
mutilated by axes that their bodies could not be identified. Women were 
stripped naked and set on fire. Several were raped repeatedly.
16 
Almost thirteen years after the events, a group of Sumgait Arme­
nians could be found in the village of Kasakh, north of the Armenian 
capital Yerevan. They had been given neat cottages to live in, but few 
of them had permanent jobs and they were still obviously metropoli­
tan folk, conversing with one another in Russian and not entirely at 
home with the wood-burning stoves in their front rooms. They all 
had perfect recall of the three days of terror that had destroyed their 
lives in Sumgait. And, although they had experienced it as an eruption 
of elemental evil, they also identified a certain pattern in what had 
happened. 
The attackers came in separate waves, said Rafik Khacharian, an 
elderly man with an elegant plume of gray hair. “One group shouted, 
made a noise, smashed things and left,” he said. “A second group came 
to take good things and then left again. The third did the torturing 
and killing. They had three groups. The first were just boys of fifteen, 
sixteen, seventeen, they were vandals; the second were looters.” The 

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