Suleymenov Came to Baku during Black January and then Told Moscow that Soviet Forces in Azerbaijan had Acted Like Fascists

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 15 – As the anniversary of Black January approaches, Olzhas Suleymenov, a prominent Kazakh poet and activist, has published a brief memoir of his visit to Baku at that time in which he recalls his subsequent statement to a closed meeting of the USSR Supreme Soviet that the forces Moscow had sent to crush the Azerbaijanis had acted like fascists.

            In Novaya Gazeta v Kazakhstane, Suleymenov says he was in Moscow for a meeting of the Supreme Soviet and had become very ill. Nonetheless when he received a call from an Azerbaijani friend describing what was happening in Baku and asking him to come, he could not . He camerefuse (novgaz.com/index.php/2-news/4106-январь-в-баку).

            Initially, he hoped to use the good offices of the Azerbaijani SSR Permanent Representation in Moscow to somehow get a flight – all regular ones had been cancelled – but crowds there blocked him. Then he turned to the military and using his Supreme Soviet membership got on a Soviet air force plane, arriving late on the second night of the attacks.

            After some difficulties in getting to his hotel, he was visited by among others, Abulfaz Aliyev, a philologist and Arabist who became better known under the pseudonym Elchibey when he became leader of the Azerbaijani Popular Front. He visited Suleymenov to tell him what was happening and to get protection against arrest given that the Soviets blamed him for the events.

            Because of his status as a Supreme Soviet deputy, he was able to meet both with the representatives of Soviet power there, including Yevgeny Primakov, then head of the upper house of the Soviet parliament, and defense minister Dmitry Yazov, on the one hand, and Azerbaijani activists and especially print workers, on the other.

            He expressed his horror about what was happening to the former and called on the latter to resume publishing their newspapers and journals so that Azerbaijanis and then the world would know what was happening. They did so and that helped calm the situation, Suleymenov suggests.

            Later in Moscow, he recalls, “speaking at a closed session of the Supreme Soviet, I openly spoke about what I had seen and called the actions of the tank group fascist,” thus becoming one of the first in the USSR to equate what the Soviet leadership was doing in the last decade of power with what the Nazis had done in the 1930s and 1940s.