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  • The Lost Paris of the Caucasus

    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 www.baku.ru 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 www.baku.ru. `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

    http://www.russiaprofile.org/page.php?page id=Themes&cont=c1225535432&articleid=a1225 537107
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