Russia Profile, Russia
Nov 1 2008
The Lost Paris of the Caucasus
By Dmitry Babich
Russia Profile
The Natives of Azerbaijan’s Capital Thrive on all Continents
A Bakunian can be forced to leave Baku, but Baku can never be forced
out of a Bakunian.
Every day, Anna Tagiyeva, a 60-year-old Bakunian living and working in
Moscow, visits the Internet site, looking for old friends,
Baku news, or even relatives scattered all over the former Soviet
Union, the United States and Australia. This website is a meeting
place for people who live, were born in, or are somehow else
associated with Baku, the biggest and most ancient port on the Caspian
Sea and the capital of what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan. In the
earlier, happier years of Tagiyeva’s life, Baku was known as the
`Paris of the Caucuses,’ `the oil heart’ of the Soviet Union and the
capital of the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic’one of 15
constituent quasi-states which made up the Soviet Union and
which’unexpectedly even to CIA operatives’became independent in 1991.
For Tagiyeva, the collapse of the Soviet Union was not so
unexpected. An ethnic Armenian married to an Azerbaijani, she belonged
to the most unfortunate group of Baku residents, who became targets of
anti-Armenian pogroms in 1989 to 1990. The pogroms were the result of
an influx of Azerbaijani refugees from Nagorny Karabakh and other
territories that Armenians and Azerbaijanis started to dispute in
1987. Having lost the war in Karabakh, some desperate Azerbaijanis
turned their wrath against Armenians and other minorities in Baku.
`People were killed right on the street or inside their homes, in the
middle of the city’s ancient quarters, so that neighbors could see,’
Tagiyeva recalled. `When Soviet troops were moved in to stop the
pogroms in January 1990, most were already over. Families with at
least one Armenian member were evacuated to Moscow, because Armenia
was poor at the time and was not particularly keen to shelter us. Baku
Armenians spoke Russian much better than Armenian.’
Oleg Kriger, an expert in forensics from Moscow’s Institute of
Medico-Legal Research, who was sent to Baku in 1990 to study the
corpses of the pogroms’ victims, compared the pogroms in Baku to the
infamous night on the eve of St. Bartholomew’s day in Paris: `I had
been working with corpses of murdered people for 20 years before
coming to Baku, and I can tell you that I had never seen such badly
mutilated corpses. People were beaten to death by blocks of wood,
stones, knives, anything that the pogroms’ organizers could get their
hands on,’ he said.
Tagiyeva was one of the first Armenians evacuated to Moscow. She and
other escapees were secretly taken to the airport under heavy guard
and flown to Moscow, where even now, almost 20 years later, dozens of
refugee families continue to live in hotels, under the threat of
expulsion. Only recently did she venture to make a brief visit to her
native city, keeping as low a profile as possible.
`In 1989 and 1990 I made a lot of noise. I made phone calls to the
Soviet parliament, wrote to newspapers, warned about the danger of
pogroms,’ Tagiyeva said. `Some people may still remember that, so I
did not make much publicity about my visit. But I still have a lot of
friends among Azerbaijanis living in Baku and I don’t believe it was
the Bakunians who did this to us in 1990. It must have been the
Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia, the embittered and desperate
Yerazy.’
Yerazy, an abbreviation for `Yerevan Azerbaijanis,’ is a common name
Bakunians gave to Azerbaijanis who had lived in Armenia until the late
1980s, when the animosity between the two nations, suppressed under
Soviet rule, started to show its face again. Expelled from Armenia and
Karabakh by the Armenian nationalists, Yerazy became the shock troops
of anti-Armenian pogroms and Baku’s new inhabitants, not always
familiar with the city’s traditional cosmopolitan spirit. After the
expulsion of Armenians and other minorities, who did not feel secure
under the rule of the nationalist Popular Front, the ethnic
composition of Baku changed drastically. Azerbaijanis, who since the
19th century have been just one of the city’s three or four big
communities, now officially make up 88 percent of the city’s
population.
This is indeed a deviation from Baku’s old tradition of
multilingualism. Despite the fact that many Bakunians did remarkably
well after leaving the city, probably thanks to the city’s high
education standards, a lot of them refuse to recognize their old home
in an almost mono-ethnic modern metropolis. `I was born in Baku, but I
have no desire to visit,’ said Alexei Ganelin, the managing editor of
the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily, Russia’s most successful tabloid. `I
am an Armenian and when I grew up there, this was not important. I
don’t want to live in or even visit a city where this is important.’
But Some Bakunians are a bit more nostalgic. `The reflection of the
moon in the water is the most vivid of my impressions from my native
city,’ a Bakunian who identified herself as `Amerikanka’ wrote in her
posting on `Nowhere else did I see such a fusion of
silver and sea. I liked the new buildings that were being built. New
construction is so rapid that I almost lost myself. Thank God, there
was no problem with street names, which formally had been all changed
long ago. `We still call them Gorky Street and May Day Street,’ said
the Bakunians who followed me on my journey to childhood. In five or
six years of such restoration our Baku will be no worse than some
Madrid or Lisbon.’
Baku may indeed be turning into a more comfortable place to live in,
but whether it will retain the flavor of a meeting place for the East
and the West remains to be seen. The capital of a Turkic-speaking
former province of Iran, which had been under Russian rule since the
early 19th century and got a strong expat community involved in the
development of Caspian oilfields, Baku is a unique city whose history
does not belong to Azerbaijan alone.
`I lived in a house with an Italian patio in Myasnikov Street,’
Tagiyeva remembered. `Now that street is named after some general Ali
Abak, who is famous for I don’t know what. Myasnikov had a Russian
name, but he was one of the famous 26 Baku commissars, whom every
Bakunian learned about at school. Isn’t he also a part of Azerbaijan’s
history?’
`I still remember how we fled from our apartment on Chapayev Street in
January of 1990,’ said Evelina Zakamskaya, 32, a Bakunian now living
in Moscow and working as a television anchor on the Vesti 24
channel. `We lived in a building built in 1907, with a traditional
patio. There, it was indecent to eat `shashlik’ (grilled meat)
alone. You had to share with everyone or, having smelled the smoke,
the neighbors would think you were not a real Bakunian. And then, in
the morning after the day when Russian troops moved in to stop the
pogroms, I went to the street with my father. And we heard people
grunting behind our backs. The hint was that we were Russian pigs.’
The family packed and left the next day, leaving behind an apartment
which would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars now, and all
belongings that could not fit in two suitcases. In Moscow, Zakamskaya
and her family received official refugee IDs’one of the first in the
Soviet Union. Like hundreds of thousands of Russian returnees from the
former Soviet republics, the Zakamsky family had to go to some
provincial place’Moscow and other big cities did not have enough space
for the new exiles with a university education. The Zakamskys moved to
the village of Chelnovka in the Tver region. For five years, this
family of six lived in one small room.
`It was shocking, because in Baku I got used to living in a big
city. I went to a ballet school there, and although in 1989, the
Popular Front’s activists staged protests near our school chanting
that Azeri girls need not dance with naked legs, I still missed Baku
terribly, especially in my first years in Russia,’ Zakamskaya said.
Despite low standards at a village school, Zakamskaya managed to
graduate from the Tver State University and build a career as a
journalist. In 2005, she felt rich enough to afford a trip to
Baku. `When I came to our apartment, I found a woman who spoke no
Russian there,’ she said. `I explained to her in Azerbaijani who I was
and she allowed me to have a look. Only one neighbor recognized
me’ironically, a woman whom we talked to less than anyone else. She
happened to be a good friend. She was very happy to talk about the old
times, because all the others left’Armenians, Russians, Jews. Recently
I learnt that our house will be razed in order to clear space for new
construction.’
Zakamskaya hired an Azerbaijani nanny for her daughter, and feels a
pang of pleasure every time she meets a Bakunian, even though she has
no plans or even dreams of returning. `My granny spent all her life in
Azerbaijan and even had a job in the government staff, but she started
saving money for our move to Leningrad years before the pogroms
began,’ Zakamskaya recalled. `Sooner or later, the old multiethnic
Baku had to become history. Russians who stayed in Baku now appear to
be sidelined and generally keep a low profile. There were a few guys
from our ballet school who returned after the anti-Russian sentiment
subsided in the mid-1990s, but they were not particularly
successful. We were lucky to catch a glimpse of the magnificent old
Baku before leaving.’
Alexander Pogosov, a 45-year-old Bakunian turned Muscovite 19 years
ago, has similar feelings. `Baku was indeed unique, it was almost too
good to survive,’ Pogosov said. `It combined all the things that were
good about the old Soviet Union’education, social protection, close
human ties’with Asian hospitality and informality. A Moslem republic
with no anti-Semitism’where can you find this now? An Oriental bazaar
and classical ballet and opera theaters on two sides of one
street’where else could you find it?’
In Pogosov’s opinion, Bakunians all over the world form a closer
community than any ethnic or religious group. Russian Bakunians
recognize Azeri Bakunians by a special way of pronouncing Russian
words, and Jewish Bakunians formed entire communities in such areas as
cinema and television’probably due to their strong positions at Baku
film studios’one of the best in the former Soviet Union.
So, what is the main trait that keeps Bakunians all together,
irrespective of ethnic origin or social class? `I think it is the
tradition to help each other,’ said Tagiyeva. `Helping each other and
speaking good Russian’not the one that is spoken in Moscow. This is
what Bakunians are primarily about.’
Photo: courtesy of the Zakamsky family
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