The Deputy Prosecutor General whose TV broadcast lit the fuse of the Sumgait pogrom
On 27 February 1988, on Central Television, he named the two youths killed in the Askeran clash as Azerbaijanis; that night the Sumgait pogrom erupted.
A Soviet military jurist of Belorussian birth, Alexander Katusev was appointed Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR in 1987 and led high-profile corruption investigations in Uzbekistan. His name entered history on 27 February 1988, when he appeared on Central Television and named two Azerbaijani youths killed in a clash near Askeran, specifying their nationality; the broadcast became the immediate spark for the Sumgait pogrom that evening. As Chief Military Prosecutor (1989–1991), he investigated and debunked the Panfilov Twenty-Eight myth in his essay 'Another's Fame,' but was forced into retirement after the August coup.
Activities and affiliations
- 1966–1991 Law and justice · Soviet Union
Career Timeline
- 1950sGraduated Dneprodzerzhinsk Metallurgical School, worker at Dnieper Metallurgical Combine
- 1965Graduated Kharkov Law Institute
- 1966Investigator, garrison procuracy, Transbaikal Military District
- c. 1970s–1987Investigator, senior investigator, head of investigation departments, chief of Main Investigation Directorate, USSR Procuracy
- 1987–1989Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR
- 1989–1991Chief Military Prosecutor and Deputy Prosecutor General of the USSR
- 1991Forced into retirement after the August coup
The Sumgait pogrom and Katusev’s television announcement
On 27 February 1988, Soviet Deputy Procurator General Alexander Katusev announced on Baku Radio and Central Television that Azerbaijani youths Bakhtiyar Guliyev and Ali Hajiyev had been killed in a clash near Aghdam several days earlier. In Black Garden, Thomas de Waal writes that Katusev named the two young men killed at Askeran and did not disclose that one had been killed by an Azerbaijani police officer. De Waal treats the announcement as one factor that further inflamed tensions in Sumgait. It cannot, however, be reduced to a claim that one broadcast caused the pogrom. Anti-Armenian slogans had already been heard in the streets, and mobs began seeking out Armenian residents that evening. Attacks by Azerbaijani mobs continued through 1 March; the official death toll released by the USSR Prosecutor General was 32 Armenians. The course of the February 1988 crisis must be understood through both Katusev’s announcement and the response of the city authorities.