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6 1988–1990 An Azerbaijani Tragedy ON THE AFTERNOON of 23 July 1988, five Azerbaijani academics stood disconsolately on the pavement in front of the main Communist Party headquarters in Baku. They had just come out of a two-and-ahalf -hour meeting with the new Party leader of Azerbaijan, Abdurahman Vezirov, and they were depressed. One of the group, Leila Yunusova , confessed that Vezirov had been even more conservative and blinkered than she had expected. Another, the physicist Tofik Qasimov, remarked that the best course of action he could think of was going home and finishing the repair work on his apartment. A third, the Arabist scholar Zardusht Alizade, says that he declared that the only way forward was to set up a rival political movement to the Communist Party, a Popular Front of Azerbaijan. Some of the others were skeptical, but Alizade recalls, “We went to Leila’s house, bought a cake on the way, had the cake and some tea. And from the next day I began to work on creating a Popular Front.”1 By September, the intellectuals had formulated the first draft program for “The Popular Front of Azerbaijan in Support of Perestroika.” As the name implies, it was a pro-Gorbachev reformist organization. Many of its policy ideas were adapted from a copy of the Estonian Popular Front program, which they had obtained by chance. More important than the program was the fact for the first time Azerbaijan had an alternative political banner around which activists could gather. From very tentative beginnings, the Azerbaijani nationalist opposition traveled a long road to power. It finally ousted the Communist Party and its successors only in 1992 and after a formidable struggle. In 1988, Azerbaijan was still one of the most conservative republics in the Soviet Union, and almost no political dissent was tolerated. In Armenia, large sections of the Party hierarchy proved willing to work with the new nationalist movement, and it took power relatively smoothly; in 82 Azerbaijan, there was no basis for the authorities and opposition to strike a deal and no consensus about what the future held. Another constant source of tension was the gulf between the cosmopolitan and generally Russian-speaking intellectuals of Baku and the rest of the republic . Several of the members of the “Club of Scholars” were Party members and were despised by the more radical activists, who spoke a language of undiluted nationalism and had no interest in Gorbachev’s perestroika. The two most prominent radicals, the historian Etibar Mamedov and the trade unionist Neimet Panakhov, both came from Yeraz families that had left Armenia in the 1940s. The failure to agree on the “rules of the game” both between the ruling authorities and a divided opposition made for a continuing power struggle. Eventually, it helped precipitate the bloody confrontation between Moscow and the Popular Front in Baku in January 1990, when for the first time the Soviet leadership sent the army into one of its own cities, killing more than a hundred people. This tragedy accelerated Azerbaijan’s journey toward independence and arguably began the death agony of the Soviet Union. In 1988, as in Armenia, so in Azerbaijan, only one issue, Nagorny Karabakh, was able to raise passions and bring large numbers of people out on to the streets. “I had hundreds of conversations,” said the Moscow official Vyacheslav Mikhailov, who traveled between the two republics . “I didn’t meet a single Armenian or a single Azerbaijani who held a compromise position on this question, from shepherds to academicians .”2 In Baku, the spark for mass protests was the exodus of tens of thousands of Azerbaijanis from Armenia in November 1988. Vast crowds filled Lenin Square—subsequently renamed Freedom Square— the great space near the waterfront between the city’s two biggest hotels . From 17 November, the rallies carried on without a break and demonstrators camped overnight in the square. At night, there were estimated to be roughly twenty thousand protestors; by day, as many as half a million.3 Panakhov and Mamedov were among the most popular and powerful speakers and stirred up anti-Armenian feelings. They stoked indignation with assertions that the Armenians were planning to build a guest house for workers from a Yerevan aluminum factory in a beautiful Karabakh “grove” named Topkhana.4 On the eighteenth day of the protest, 5 December, the Soviet police moved in and cleared the square by force. Panakhov was one of those arrested, and a curfew...

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