Gorbachev's man for the Karabakh crisis who fled Baku as Black January consumed Soviet Azerbaijan
On the night of the 25th, Vezirov called to say 'catastrophe is brewing and we must ask Moscow for help': from Ayaz Mutallibov's recollections
First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party (1988–1990), appointed by Gorbachev as the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict spiraled. Of Karabakh descent and a career diplomat who had spent over a decade outside the republic, he was untainted by local corruption but could command neither the entrenched party clans nor the street. Having lost all control as mass protests and anti-Armenian pogroms convulsed Baku in January 1990, he fled to Moscow before Soviet troops opened fire on civilians, and was afterward blamed by the central government and Heydar Aliyev alike.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1954–1956Secretary, then Second Secretary, CC Azerbaijan Komsomol
- 1956–1959First Secretary, CC Azerbaijan Komsomol
- 1959–1970Secretary, CC All-Union Komsomol
- 1970–1976First Secretary, Kirovabad City Committee, then Head of Industry Dept, CC Azerbaijan CP
- 1976–1979USSR Consul-General, Calcutta
- 1979–1985USSR Ambassador to Nepal
- 1985–1988USSR Ambassador to Pakistan; involved in Afghan withdrawal talks
- 1988–1990First Secretary, CC Azerbaijan Communist Party
Related historical events
Diplomatic service in South Asia, 1976-1988
On 9 December 1975, after a session of the Bureau of the Central Committee of the Azerbaijan Communist Party, Vezirov was summoned by telephone by First Secretary Heydar Aliyev, who read him the CPSU secretariat's resolution appointing him Consul-General in Calcutta. Aliyev refused to let him go, insisting that the republic was short of cadres and ordering second secretary Kozlov to telephone Moscow to have the decision reversed; the centre answered that it decided where to use party cadres.
Vezirov then spent twelve years outside Azerbaijan in the diplomatic service: Consul-General in Calcutta from 1976 to 1979, ambassador to Nepal from 1979 to 1985, and ambassador to Pakistan from May 1985 to July 1988. He later wrote that he was the first and, as it turned out, the only Azerbaijani in Soviet history to have headed a diplomatic mission of the USSR.
The Afghan problem defined that assignment. He arrived in Pakistan in 1985, when the war in Afghanistan was at its height and the Soviet embassy in Islamabad had become a principal instrument of the diplomatic effort to settle the Afghan question. Foreign Minister Gromyko had told him he was being moved from peaceful Nepal to a hostile Pakistan. During his posting he met Pakistan's president, foreign ministers and prime minister, held talks with Afghan leaders including Najibullah, and took part in Soviet-Pakistani negotiations.
That record brought him back to Baku. In May 1988, while serving in Islamabad, he was recalled and elected First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan.