Sumgait pogroms. After 25 years

The Sumgait pogrom (also known as the Sumgait Massacre or February Events) was a pogrom that targeted the Armenian population of the seaside town of Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan during February 1988.

On February 27, 1988, mobs made up largely of ethnic Azeris formed into groups that went on to attack and kill Armenians both on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the situation to worsen. The violence in Sumgait was unprecedented in scope in the Soviet Union and received heavy coverage in the Western media. A number of international and Soviet sources described the events as genocide of the Armenian population.

The pogrom took place during the early stages of the Nagorno-Karabakh movement. The official death toll released by the Procurator General of the USSR (tallies were compiled based on lists of named victims) was 32 people (26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis), although some have revised this figure up into the tens and hundreds.

On February 28, a small contingent of MVD troops entered the city and unsuccessfully attempted to quell the rioting. The situation was finally defused when more professional military units entered with tanks and other armored vehicles one day later. The forces sent by the government imposed a state of martial law in Sumgait, established a curfew, and brought the crisis to an end.

The event was greeted with astonishment in both Armenia and the rest of the Soviet Union since ethnic feuds in the country were largely suppressed and officially did not exist. In the seven decades of Soviet rule, policies such as internationalism and Soviet patriotism were promoted in the republics to avert such conflicts. The massacre, together with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, would present a major challenge to the reforms being implemented by then General Secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. Gorbachev was criticized for what was perceived as his slow reaction to the crisis and numerous conspiracy theories rose after the event.

Warnings by Azerbaijanis sympathetic to their Armenian neighbors instructed them to leave their lights on the night of the 27th; those who shut it off were assumed to be Armenian. According to several Armenian witnesses and, later on, Soviet military personnel, alcohol and anasha, an Azeri term referring to narcotics, were also reported to have been brought in trucks and distributed to the Azeri crowds,although such accounts went unreported in the media.

The anti-Armenian pogrom and violence started on the evening of February 27, one week after the appeal of the Council of People's Deputies to unify Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia and according to many sources was a direct response to the Council's decision. The perpetrators were targeting the victims based solely on the ethnicity factor-being Armenian was the only criterion.