Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

parts of it are almost flashy. Nowadays you can live in the Marriot 
Hotel, drink in Irish bars, eat sushi, and buy Gucci. Fountain Square is 
overlooked by the tinted glass of an instantly built skyscraper, the ISR 
Tower, which looks like a large American paperweight flung down 
from the sky. The Scots and Texans who work there are more sophisti-

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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. 

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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