A terrible sight represented Baku at dawn on January 20: bloodstained streets and squares of the city, the remains of mutilated corpses, crushed cars, riddled bullet-riddled houses, and asphalt. This night, the whole population of Azerbaijan, especially Baku, experienced a real tragic shock.
I was then 15 years old, we lived in Baku, and I remember with my parents and sister sitting all night and could not fall asleep. They thought they were thinking that this could be and what awaits us. Then, like many other people in my city, for the first time in my life I heard shots from tanks and machine guns.
This terrible night was disgustingly long, but I remember that there were a lot of stars, but these stars could not tell us anything either, as if the stars lost their warmth and affection and it seems to me that they were forced to remain silent, frightened by these terrible shots.
The bloody massacre that occurred in Baku in January 1990 showed the anti-people and bloody essence of the totalitarian Soviet regime when the armed forces of the USSR were once again used not against foreign aggression, but against their own people...
The USSR leadership including Michail Gorbachev knew that the country was falling apart, and urgent measures were needed to stop the disintegration process. On the advice of his closest associates, Gorbachev authorized the implementation of a criminal fascist intervention in Baku, which was to be indicative lesson for all the other republics…
January 21, 1990 – Baku and Azerbaijan people buried their sons and daughters, who, according to Gorbachev, were "Islamic fundamentalists." Is Farida - a girl who married three months ago killed herself by hearing about the death of a loved one, is not Rashad, who was 15 years old, was Vera Besantina, Jan Meerovich, ambulance doctor Sasha Marchevka - they were all " Islamic fundamentalists.
The roots of the January tragedy were in the continuing aggression of Armenia against Azerbaijan for over two years, an analysis of the events of 1988-1990 clearly shows that Armenia, with the full support of the central Soviet government, intended to annex part of the territory of the neighboring republic.
These were the final convulsions of the obsolete Soviet empire. Azerbaijani patriots, a Jewish girl and a Russian doctor, and an Azerbaijani child buried in a mass grave, a brotherhood graveyard.
Arye Gut - political analyst