Oil city, imperial borderland, vanished community

Modern Baku was made by oil, imperial migration and the Caspian. By the 1897 imperial census it was not yet a simple Azerbaijani national capital: Azerbaijani, Russian, Armenian, Persian and Jewish communities all formed visible parts of the city 1897 census. Armenians were especially prominent in commerce, printing, philanthropy and the oil economy, while Azerbaijani Muslim political life increasingly organised around newspapers, schools and parties that would culminate in Musavat and the first Azerbaijani republic.

That mixed city was also a repeated violence site. During the March Days of 1918, Bolshevik and Dashnak forces killed thousands of Azerbaijani civilians. In September, after the Ottoman Army of Islam entered the city, the September Days massacre killed thousands of Armenians in retaliation and conquest. The two events are linked by chronology and by reciprocal memory, but not by moral cancellation. Each produced civilian dead, political myth and a claim of victimhood that later national histories would harden. editorial

In the late Soviet period Baku still contained the largest Armenian urban community in Azerbaijan. The 1979 Soviet census recorded Armenians at about 14% of the city 1979 census, and atlas event notes use de Waal's figure of roughly 215,000 Armenians in the wider Baku urban setting de Waal. After Sumgait, Kirovabad and the Baku pogrom, that community effectively disappeared. De Waal records only a residual population in 1999, mostly elderly people and mixed families de Waal. Baku therefore shows the atlas's core pattern in urban form: a shared imperial city narrowed by war into a national capital with a missing population. editorial