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.
Activities and affiliations
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
The Soviet Politburo
- Full member 1990.07–1991.08
served until the party ban of 1991.11
Related historical events
From factory manager to republican planning chief
Mutallibov came up not through party ranks but through the technical management of production. Born in Baku in 1938, he graduated from the Azerbaijan Institute of Petroleum and Chemistry in 1962 and worked as a senior design engineer, then as head of the design bureau and chief engineer at the Baku refrigerator and household-appliance factory; in 1966 he became the plant's director and in 1974 general director of the refrigerator and appliance production association. He joined the Communist Party in 1963, and in this period he was a figure who handled both engineering and management at the front line of republican industry.
He entered party work in 1977 as second secretary of the Narimanov district committee in Baku, then served as republican minister of local industry from 1979 and, from 1982, as chairman of the State Planning Committee (Gosplan) and deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers. As head of Gosplan he stood at the center of republican economic planning, and in January 1989 he became chairman of the Council of Ministers, that is, head of government. From 1989 to 1991 he was also a USSR People's Deputy from the Kubatly constituency.
His rise to the party's top post was bound up with the events in Baku in January 1990. On the night of 19-20 January 1990 Soviet troops entered Baku and crushed the protests ("Black January"), and a few days later, on 24-25 January, a plenum of the republican party's Central Committee elected the incumbent head of government, Mutallibov, as First Secretary. On 18 May of that year the Supreme Soviet elected him president of the Azerbaijan SSR, still part of the Soviet Union. He thus moved from a working official of the republic's industrial and planning system to its top leader only months before independence. This path formed the background to the position he later took between a reorganized union and independence.