The last Soviet leader caught between a renewed union and independence
He supported a new union treaty from the view that the federation should exist for the republics.
Ayaz Mutalibov was a politician who rose from the Soviet Azerbaijani bureaucracy to become the republic’s last Communist leader and its first president. At the 1991 Novo-Ogaryovo 9+1 talks, he supported a renewed union that would guarantee republican sovereignty, arguing that the federation should exist for the republics, and he took an active position on the status of autonomous republics. His government confronted the Nagorno-Karabakh war and mounting domestic struggles, which ultimately destroyed its political base. Ousted in 1992, he lived in exile in Moscow, returned to Azerbaijan in 2012, and died in Baku in 2022.
Career Timeline
- 1964–1977Director of the Baku Refrigerator Factory, then general director of a state industrial combine
- 1977–1979Second secretary of the Narimanov District Party Committee in Baku
- 1979–1982Minister of Local Industry of the Azerbaijan SSR
- 1982–1989Chairman of the State Planning Committee and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan SSR
- 1989–1990Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan SSR
- 1990–1991First secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party and president of Soviet Azerbaijan
- 1991–1992First president of Azerbaijan
- 1992–2012Exile in Moscow after his ouster, followed by a return in 2012