A Most Painful Day  [By Elin Suleymanov, Consul General of Azerbaijan to Los Angeles, California]     January 20 was a very tragic and painful day.  Despite that, it served as the basis for the construction of post-Soviet Azerbaijani identity and even the recovery of Azerbaijani identity.  On that day, most Azerbaijanis lived through a personal transformation, changing from being Soviet citizens, however unhappy, into confident citizens of their own country.  I was one of those Azerbaijanis.  On that date, as a student in Russia, I witne...

Twenty years after the fact, the events of January 1990 remain a source of controversy especially since some groups are seeking to distort the record in order to promote their own narrow political agendas.  This year, for example, the Armenian media have insisted with one voice that the killing of more than 130 Azerbaijani civilians in Baku by the Soviet Army was justified because only by taking that step could Moscow hope “to finally stop the massacres of Christian Armenians in [the] mostly Muslim capital.” But if the Soviet forces truly had such a noble-sounding mission, how d...

On the night that I agreed to write my analysis about the events of January 19/20 1990 in Baku, then capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan (AzSSR), I left my new Senior Political Science project class at Montana State University, walked to my car and reflected on the real and true level of international-awareness among my fourth-year “Capstone” graduating students, and sighed. January 19, 2010 was the first meeting of our first class, and although several of the students had previously subjected themselves to “Goltz’s Gulag”—meaning a crash course in the poli...