Ethnic Azerbaijanis carried out a pogrom against the Armenian population of the town of Sumgait, in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, in February 1988. The pogrom took place during the early stages of the Karabakh movement. On February 27, 1988, mobs of Azerbaijanis formed into groups and attacked and killed Armenians on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting occurred, and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the violence to continue for three days.
On February 28, a small contingent of Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) troops entered the city and unsuccessfully attempted to quell the rioting. More professional military units entered with tanks and armored personnel vehicles one day later. Government forces imposed a state of martial law and curfew and brought the crisis to an end. The official death toll released by the Prosecutor General of the USSR was 32 Armenians, although other estimates reach up into the hundreds of victims.
The violence in Sumgait was unexpected and was widely covered in the Western media. It was greeted with general surprise in Armenia and the rest of the Soviet Union because the Soviet government had largely suppressed ethnic conflicts in the country and had promoted policies such as fraternity of peoples, socialist patriotism, and proletarian internationalism to avert such conflicts. The policies of glasnost and perestroika, introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, had decreased suppression of the population, which had the unintended consequences of allowing ethnic conflicts and ethnic nationalism to increase in the Soviet Union. The massacre, together with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, presented a major challenge to Gorbachev, and he was later criticized for his slow response to the crisis.
Because of the scale of atrocities against the Armenians as an ethnic group, the pogrom was immediately linked to the Armenian genocide of 1915 in the Armenian national consciousness. Russian political writer Roy Medvedev and USSR Journalists' Union described the events as genocide of the Armenian population. The Sumgait pogrom is commemorated every year on February 28 in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh (before the flight of its Armenian population), and among the Armenian diaspora.
The city of Sumgait is located near the coast of the Caspian Sea, 30 kilometres (19 mi) north of the capital Baku. It had been renovated in the 1960s and had become a leading industrial city, second after Baku by its industrial importance, with oil refineries and petrochemical plants built during that era. Its population in the 1960s stood at 60,000, but by the late 1980s it had grown to over 223,000 (with an Armenian population of about 17,000), and overcrowding among other social problems plagued the city. While there was a high rate of unemployment and poverty among the Azerbaijani residents, the Armenians comprised mainly the working and educated sector of the town's population.
The political and economic reforms that General Secretary Gorbachev had initiated in 1985 saw a marked decentralization of Soviet authority. Armenians, in both Armenia proper and Nagorno-Karabakh, viewed Gorbachev's reform program as an opportunity to unite the two entities together. On February 20, 1988, tens of thousands of Armenians gathered to demonstrate in Stepanakert's Lenin (now Renaissance) Square to demand that the region be joined to Armenia. On the same day, the Supreme Soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join the Armenian SSR, a move staunchly opposed by the Soviet Azerbaijani authorities. Gorbachev rejected these claims, invoking Article 78 of the Soviet Constitution, which stated that republics' borders could not be altered without their prior consent. The vote by the council and the subsequent protests were condemned also by the state-run Soviet media; however, they resonated more loudly among Azerbaijanis. As journalist Thomas de Waal wrote in his 2003 book on the conflict, after the appeal of the council "the slow descent into armed conflict began on the first day."
Rallies and fuelling of anti-Armenian sentiments
The rallies in Armenia were countered by demonstrations in Baku, during which time strong anti-Armenian sentiments were voiced by citizens and officials alike. One such statement came on February 14, 1988, when the head of the department of Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Asadov, declared "a hundred thousand Azerbaijanis are ready to storm Karabakh at any time and organize a slaughter there."
On February 26, several minor rallies were held at Lenin Square in Sumgait. Explicit calls for violence against Armenians and for their expulsion from Azerbaijan were heard and the crowds were agitated by news of Azerbaijani refugees who had fled Armenia (from the towns of Kapan and Masis). Certain individuals told stories of murders and violence purportedly carried out by Armenians against the Azerbaijanis. Soviet authorities would later cast these individuals as agents provocateur. One individual, according to the Soviet press, was later revealed not to be a resident of Kapan, as he had claimed, but a criminal with a prior arrest record. Zardusht Alizadeh, who was active in the social and political life of Azerbaijan from 1988 to 1989 and was one of the founders of Azerbaijani Popular Front, visited Sumgait ten days after the pogrom and met with the workers from the aluminum factory, and reported that locals said that people from out of town had been inciting the violence. Baku's local party leader Fuad Musayev, who was called back to Baku because of the unrest, stated in the interview given to Thomas de Waal, "Someone was provoking them, propaganda work was going on." William E. Odom cites several pieces of evidence in his book The Collapse of the Soviet Military to indicate that the Soviet KGB may have orchestrated the events to allow the Soviet central government to respond, suppressing the Azeri Popular Front.
The demonstrations in the Lenin Square were concluded with strong anti-Armenian sentiments. During the demonstrations there were apparent threats and accusations against the Armenians for distorting the territorial integrity of Azerbaijan. The Armenians were also blamed for being much better-off than most of the Azerbaijanis in Sumgait. Slogans such as "Death to Armenians" and "Armenians get out of our city" were being voiced. There were also many public figures attending the rallies, among them the head of public school No. 25, an actress of the Arablinski theatre, Azerbaijani poet Khydyr Alovlu (a strong supporter of Heydar Aliyev) and others, who called for Armenians to be expelled from Azerbaijan or killed. Almost each speech was concluded with the slogan "Death to Armenians." Since the speakers used microphones these calls were heard not only in the square but also in the nearby streets.
Efforts to calm the crowd were made by Azerbaijani figures such as secretary of the city party committee Bayramova and poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh, who addressed the crowd atop a platform. V. Huseinov, the director of the Institute of Political Education in Azerbaijan, also attempted to calm them by assuring them that Karabakh would remain within the republic and that the refugees' stories were false. He in turn was heckled with insults and forced to step down. Jahangir Muslimzade, Sumgait's first secretary, spoke to the crowd, and told them to allow Armenians to leave of their own accord. But according to witnesses, this message served to agitate the crowd. Shortly after his speech, at around 6:30 pm, Muslimzade was handed a flag of the Azerbaijan SSR and soon found himself leading the crowd. According to Muslimzade, he was attempting to lead the crowd away from the Armenian district and toward the sea, but many Armenians saw this act as implicating him as a leader of the riot. The crowd, in any case, dispersed and several groups made for the Armenian district.
Another factor that may have ignited the violence was an announcement of the murder of two Azerbaijanis. On February 27, Soviet Deputy Federal Procurator, Aleksandr Katusev, announced on Baku Radio and Central Television that two Azerbaijani youths, Bakhtiyar Guliyev and Ali Hajiyev, were killed in a clash between Armenians and Azerbaijanis near Aghdam several days earlier. One of the youths was killed by an Azerbaijani police officer, but Katusev neglected to mention that and would later receive a stinging rebuke for revealing the nationalities of the young men. The secretive nature the Soviet Union was still attempting to shake off led many Azerbaijanis to believe that there was something more nefarious to Katusev's report than he let on.