Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

Party leadership.
18 
Two of these men, Panakhov and Rahim Gaziev, 
were shown on local television. Panakhov told the television audience 
that Baku was full of homeless refugees and that thousands of Armeni­
ans were still living in comfort—in effect, inciting the viewers to anti-
Armenian violence. 
The next day, 13 January, murderous anti-Armenian violence over-
whelmed Baku. A vast crowd filled Lenin Square for a rally, and by 
early evening men had broken away from it to attack Armenians. As 
in Sumgait, the savagery was appalling and the center of the city 
around the Armenian quarter became a killing ground. People were 
thrown to their deaths from the balconies of upper-story apartments. 
Crowds set upon and beat Armenians to death. Thousands of terrified 
Armenians took shelter in police stations or in the vast Shafag Cinema, 
under the protection of troops. From there they were taken to the cold 
and windy quayside, put on ferries, and transported across the Cas­
pian Sea. Over the next few days, the port of Krasnovodsk in Turk­
menistan received thousands of beaten and frightened refugees. Air-
planes were on hand to fly them to Yerevan. With this terrible flourish, 
Armenia and Azerbaijan completed their ethnic cleansing of each 
other’s populations. 
Around ninety Armenians died in the Baku pogroms. It is hard to 
verify the death toll because yet more chaos was to descend on Baku 
within days and no official investigation was ever launched. Also, the 
Baku Armenians were scattered to Armenia, Russia, and Turkmenistan, 
and some of the elderly victims died on the Caspian Sea ferries or in 
Yerevan hospitals.
19 
Certainly, the casualties would have been much 
higher if the authorities had not staged an operation to evacuate the 
Armenians. 
There are troubling questions as to why both sides in the power 
struggle did not manage to avert the bloodshed of the Baku pogroms. 
Moscow had sent thousands of Soviet Interior Ministry troops into 
Baku who did nothing to intervene. Arzu Abdullayeva, the human 

---

1 9 8 8 – 1 9 9 0 :   A N   A Z E R B A I J A N I  T R AG E DY 
91 
rights activist, remembers appealing to a policeman to go to the aid of a 
desperate Armenian being set upon by a mob and being told, “We have 
orders not to intervene.”
20 
One story has it that the writer Yusif Same­
doglu telephoned the Central Committee building and begged them to 
intervene. He got the reply “Let them slaughter.”
21 
The strange collaboration between Viktor Polyanichko and the na­
tionalist radicals in forming the National Defense Council is especially 
fertile territory for conspiracy theorists. One of the radicals, Etibar 
Mamedov, offers the explanation that they could not turn down the op­
portunity to take up arms legally; Panakhov says that “[w]e ourselves 
asked to be invited on television so as to end the tension amongst the 
population, to take measures”—although of course tension increased, 
rather than diminished, after his appearance. There are more cynical in­
terpretations: perhaps the Party leadership was desperately trying to 
shore up its authority by co-opting the Popular Front and channeling its 
energies in a “patriotic” direction; or perhaps Polyanichko was plan­
ning an out-and-out “provocation,” which would provoke the Front to 
violence, discredit it, and serve as the pretext for a crackdown. 
There are contradictory accounts about the role of the Popular Front 
in the violence. In their stories of Black January, Armenian refugees 
from Baku unanimously blame “Popular Front people,” young male ac­
tivists with beards, for the pogroms. Popular Front activists counter this 
by saying that they helped to save Armenian lives. In fact, both versions 
are probably true, for by then the Front had a vast and amorphous 
membership. The Popular Front breakaways, Alizade and Yunusova, 
make a more precise accusation against the radical leaders, blaming 
them for failing to do anything to halt the coming violence. Alizade says 
that several days before the pogroms began, lists of Armenian ad-
dresses were hung up outside the Popular Front headquarters on 
Rashid Beibutov Street. When they were taken down, someone put 
them up again. He continues: 
After the session of the ruling council finished, they went to a rally 
attended by the whole city. At the rally there were constant anti-Ar­
menian calls and the last call was “Long live Baku without Armeni­
ans!” It was at a Popular Front rally. During the rally anti-Armenian 
pogroms began in Baku. Do the leaders of the Popular Front bear re­
sponsibility for this? I think that they do. 

---

92 
1 9 8 8 – 1 9 9 0 :   A N   A Z E R B A I J A N I  T R AG E DY 
BLACK JANUARY PART II 
With the Armenians violently expelled from Baku, the stage was set for 
a showdown between Moscow and the Popular Front. Even as the 
pogroms were going on, on 14 January, a Politburo delegation led by 
Gorbachev’s close political ally Yevgeny Primakov arrived in Baku to 
try to take charge. Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov flew down to 
take charge of the thousands of troops, still in barracks on the edge of 
the city. The decision was made to impose a state of emergency in 
Nagorny Karabakh, the border areas between Azerbaijan and Armenia, 
and the city of Ganje—but, inexplicably, not Baku. 
Nationalist activists ruled the streets of Baku. They put up barri­
cades of trucks and concrete blocks on the roads leading to the bar-
racks on the edge of the city. On 17 January, they began a nonstop rally 
in front of the Central Committee building, blocking access to it. They 
erected a gallows in front of the building—whether as a threatening 
symbol or as an actual instrument of execution never became clear. 
The Moscow emissaries and the Popular Front leadership played a 
game of bluff. According to Andrei Girenko, one of the Politburo dele­
gation: 
We met Elchibey and other leaders of the Popular Front. Primakov and 
I received them, talked to them. Then it was already clear to me that 
Vezirov had completely lost control. I met one of the [Popular Front] 
activists literally on the eve of the events that happened that night. I 
knew that troops could not stay blockaded forever in that position. I 
begged him to take down the barricades that were blocking the roads, 
the airfields, to rescue people from a dangerous confrontation with the 
troops.
22 
The stakes were high. According to Etibar Mamedov, Primakov was 
warning them he would not tolerate Azerbaijan’s seceding from the So­
viet Union and implicitly threatening to use force. “Primakov told me, 
‘You are one step away from independence,’” Mamedov recalled.
23 
Yet 
the decision to bring in the army had still not been made, and Primakov 
also reportedly tried to persuade Gorbachev in a telephone conversa­
tion not to authorize a military intervention.
24 
Gorbachev and his security ministers finally decided to send the 
army into Baku on the night of 19–20 January. A State of Emergency was 

---

1 9 8 8 – 1 9 9 0 :   A N   A Z E R B A I J A N I  T R AG E DY 
93 
declared, to begin at midnight. Yet the residents of the city were un­
aware of what was happening because television broadcasts had gone 
off the air at 7:30 in the evening, after an explosion at the television sta­
tion, almost certainly carried out by the security forces. As a result, most 
Bakuvians learned about the State of Emergency at 5:30 the next morn­
ing from the radio and leaflets dropped from helicopters.
25 
By then it 
was too late. 
Shortly after midnight, troops had come out of their barracks and 
tanks had started rumbling toward the city. Most of the troops who ap­
proached from the south were from local garrisons and did not fight 
their way into the city, but the troops who approached form the north 
entered Baku as if it were a city under enemy occupation. Tanks rolled 
over barricades, crushing cars and even ambulances. Witnesses spoke 
of soldiers firing at people who fled and of soldiers stabbing and shoot­
ing the wounded. A bus full of civilians was hit by a volley of bullets 
and many of its passengers, including a fourteen-year-old girl, were 
killed. 
Some one hundred thirty citizens of Baku were killed and several 
hundred were wounded on the night of 19–20 January. An independent 
military investigation group known as “Shield” (“Shchit,” in Russian) 
later concluded that the Soviet army had waged war on one of its own 
cities and called for criminal proceedings against Defense Minister 
Dmitry Yazov, who had personally commanded the operation. At least 
twenty-one soldiers also died. How they did so is disputed; this death 
toll implies there was armed resistance from protestors, although some 
of the soldiers may also have been victims of bullets fired by their own 
side in the dark city’s general mêlée. 
AFTERMATH 
The intervention in Baku, with the Soviet army for the first time taking 
one of its own cities by force, was a tragedy for Azerbaijan and the So­
viet Union. The army took full control of Baku within a few hours and 
reestablished rule by Moscow. But on 20 January 1990 Moscow essen­
tially lost Azerbaijan. Almost the whole population of Baku turned out 
for mass funerals of the victims. The victims were the first “martyrs” to 
be buried in the Alley of Martyrs on the top of the hill in the city. Thou-
sands of Communist Party members publicly burned their Party cards 

---

94 
1 9 8 8 – 1 9 9 0 :   A N   A Z E R B A I J A N I  T R AG E DY 
and even the chairwoman of the Supreme Soviet, Elmira Kafarova, de­
nounced the actions of “army criminals.” 
The profound effects of “Black January” went far beyond Baku. The 
intervention had exposed the center’s increasing inability to cope with 
the problems beginning to overwhelm the Soviet Union. The failure to 
declare a State of Emergency to halt the Armenian pogroms, only to do 
so when all the Armenians had left, suggested deep cynicism or incom­
petence, or both. The confused and then brutal response to the Popular 
Front’s challenge revealed that the Soviet Union had several different 
centers of power, each with its own priorities, and that Gorbachev wa­
vered between them. 
In the short term, the Communist Party was back in control. Dozens 
of Popular Front activists—including many members of the National 
Defense Council, formed with official consent only days before—were 
detained. Etibar Mamedov was arrested when he traveled to Moscow 
to hold a press conference, and Neimet Panakhov fled—or was allowed 
to flee—across the border to Iran. Resistance flickered for a few days in 
Nakhichevan, which became the first part of the Soviet Union ever to 
declare unilateral independence, before Popular Front resistance was 
crushed there as well. First Party Secretary Vezirov had decamped and 
was in Moscow, suffering from nervous exhaustion, and Ayaz Mutali­
bov was made his successor in a free vote of Party officials. Polyanichko 
remained the second secretary and the power behind the throne. 
On 4 February, Mutalibov flew to Moscow to see Gorbachev. The 
same day a prominent article in Pravda vigorously denounced Heidar 
Aliev as a corrupt relic of the Brezhnev era; it had evidently been timed 
to coincide with Mutalibov’s visit. Yet Mutalibov says that he went on 
to see Aliev and they talked until three o’clock in the morning. 
That the new Party boss chose to visit the disgraced Aliev suggests 
that Aliev remained a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in Azerbaijani 
life. His connection, or lack of it, to the January events is an intriguing 
subplot to the main story, which has never been properly explained. 
Aliev himself has said that at the height of the demonstrations, Gor­
bachev telephoned him outside Moscow and asked him to “remove 
his people from the streets” of Baku and make a public statement—to 
which he responded by saying that he was in Moscow and had nothing 
to do with what was going on in Baku. Gorbachev’s call suggests that 
he, for one, believed that Aliev was still pulling strings in Baku. What-
ever his role before the bloodshed, Aliev used the aftermath of Black 

---

1 9 8 8 – 1 9 9 0 :   A N   A Z E R B A I J A N I  T R AG E DY 
95 
January to begin his long climb back to power. After 20 January, he 
called a press conference in Azerbaijan’s representative’s office in Mos­
cow and condemned the intervention in Baku.
26 
Azerbaijan entered a dull period of shock and reflection. As the op­
position took stock of the bloody defeat it had suffered, the standing of 
the middle-of-the-road group in the Popular Front—men like Isa Gam­
bar, Hikmet Hajizade, and Sabit Bagirov—climbed. Hajizade says: “The 
radicals, the schizophrenics, understood that it wasn’t so simple, that 
you couldn’t simply just take power through a revolution. It was a 
heavy blow for them. They were forced to make peace with the liberals, 
with the liberal leadership, who, in the end, came to power.”
27 

---

7 
Baku