Baku pogrom §

Background

The Armenian community of Baku had been the demographic centrepiece of Russian Azerbaijan since the 1870s oil boom: 215,000 in 1979, comprising about 12% of the city and dominating its mercantile and intellectual life. By January 1990 it had been reduced to roughly 35,000 by emigration in the wake of Sumgait and continuous low-level harassment. The remainder was disproportionately elderly and pensioned.

The political setting was the unravelling of Soviet authority in the republic. The Azerbaijani Popular Front under Abulfaz Elchibey had taken effective control of much of the country outside Baku through the autumn of 1989; the Soviet–Azerbaijani Communist Vezirov administration had collapsed; and on the Armenian frontier, Front activists had begun dismantling border installations between Azerbaijan and Iran. In Baku itself, mass demonstrations in support of the Karabakh struggle had been continuous since November 1989, and the city's housing stock was filling with Azerbaijani refugees displaced from the Gugark and Armenian SSR depopulations of late 1988 and 1989.

The event

The pogrom, 13–19 January 1990

The pogrom began on the evening of 13 January at a Front-organised mass meeting on Lenin Square. Mobs broke off from the rally and moved into the adjacent Armenian-inhabited districts of the central city. Through 14, 15, 16 and 17 January, Armenian apartments were forcibly entered, residents beaten, women raped, men killed by defenestration, and contents looted. The pattern paralleled Sumgait two years earlier in its use of housing-authority address lists, in the absence of police intervention, and in the participation of the Front's organised volunteer detachments. Soviet Internal Troops were present but did not engage.

The Armenian population evacuated the city through these days under unofficial protection of the Caspian Sea Flotilla, which ferried thousands across to Krasnovodsk in Soviet Turkmenistan. The CSCE rapporteur and Soviet Memorial later compiled accounts; estimates of Armenian dead converge on a range of 90 to 300, with de Waal's account leaning toward the lower end contested. The remaining Armenian community of Baku, perhaps 18,000 elderly residents who could not be evacuated, was extinguished as a community over the following months.

Black January, 19–20 January 1990

Late on 19 January, Mikhail Gorbachev declared a state of emergency and ordered the 4th Army into Baku. Tank columns entered the city around 23:00 and through the night of the 19/20th moved against barricades thrown up by Popular Front demonstrators on the principal arteries. The army used live fire indiscriminately. By the morning of 20 January, between 130 and 170 Azerbaijani civilians were dead, the great majority Front demonstrators or unrelated bystanders, killed at the barricades or in their apartment buildings by stray fire.

The intervention's stated aim was to end the pogrom; in fact, the bulk of the pogrom violence had ended by 18 January, and the Soviet operation principally targeted not the perpetrators but the Front political infrastructure. Most credible accounts read Black January as Gorbachev's last attempt to restore Soviet authority in the South Caucasus through force; it failed, and accelerated rather than retarded the Azerbaijani independence movement editorial.

Aftermath

The Armenian community of Baku ceased to exist. By summer 1990 fewer than 5,000 Armenians remained in the city, almost all elderly, almost all in mixed marriages, and almost all underground. A handful survives today.

Politically, Black January is the founding moment of independent Azerbaijan: 20 January is a national day of mourning and the legal cornerstone of the post-1991 Azerbaijani Republic. The Communist Party leadership of the republic was discredited; the Front under Elchibey emerged as the principal political force, though it was Heydar Aliyev who would consolidate power three years later. The Russian language formal investigation into the pogrom was never completed.

The asymmetry in international response was striking. Black January produced extensive international press; the pogrom that preceded it produced almost none. de Waal reads this asymmetry as the founding misframing of the conflict in Western opinion, the moment at which Azerbaijan was cast as victim and Armenia as antagonist in a story that had begun the other way editorial.

Memory and politics

The Baku pogrom is the third in the sequence Sumgait–Kirovabad–Baku that ended the Armenian community of Soviet Azerbaijan. It is commemorated less institutionally than Sumgait but figures in the ICERD case and in the Armenian diaspora's working political memory. Black January is the founding atrocity in Azerbaijani national memory, but it is, decisively, an atrocity attributed to Soviet rather than Armenian agency, and its place in the Armenian–Azerbaijani conflict's bilateral memory is therefore complicated editorial.