Azerbaijan

Socialist-bloc leader 1923–2003 ○ Natural causes

The KGB general who rose from Baku to the Kremlin and founded independent Azerbaijan

F. D. Bobkov, first deputy KGB chairman, asked him after three years: "What have you managed to achieve?" Aliyev replied: "I can guarantee only one thing — in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, no one takes bribes."

An Azerbaijani who served 28 years in Soviet state security, Aliyev rose from KGB chairman to First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party in 1969. Under Brezhnev, he drove rapid economic growth in the republic, expanding grape, oil, and cotton production, and became one of the few non-Slavs to reach the post of First Deputy Chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers and full Politburo member in 1982. Returning to Azerbaijan as it descended into civil war after the Soviet collapse, he became president in 1993, stabilized the country, and signed the 'Contract of the Century' for Caspian oil development, securing his legacy as the founder of independent Azerbaijan.

Socialist-bloc reform leader 1938–2000 ○ Natural causes

The pan-Turkist dissident who became Azerbaijan's first democratically elected president

During a 1992 visit to Ankara he declared: "I am a soldier of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk."

A leader of Azerbaijan's independence movement and its first democratically elected president after the Soviet collapse. Trained as an Arabic philologist, he served 18 months in prison in the 1970s for anti-Soviet activities, and in 1989 became the leader of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, the rallying point of nationalist forces. On 13 January 1990 he organized the National Defence Council, placing himself at the centre of the nationalities crisis that culminated in the anti-Armenian Baku pogrom and Black January. Elected president in 1992 as the first anti-communist leader of any former Soviet republic, he was overthrown in June 1993 by a Russia-backed military coup and Heydar Aliyev succeeded him.

Socialist-bloc leader 1938–2022

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.

Socialist-bloc leader 1955– ○ Natural causes (still living)

Deputy chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front who warned Primakov there would be resistance

Polyanichko told him that at midnight troops would enter the city "whatever the cost." Mammadov replied that the army would meet resistance.

As deputy chairman of the Azerbaijani Popular Front, Etibar Mammadov stood at the forefront of the national independence movement and met with Yevgeny Primakov and Viktor Polyanichko on January 19, 1990, where he was warned that troops would enter Baku. That evening Polyanichko told him the army would go in "whatever the cost"; Mammadov replied there would be resistance, and he later became a key witness to the Kremlin's bloody crackdown on the city. He went on to found the Azerbaijan National Independence Party, finished second in the 1998 presidential election, and remained a durable opposition leader in independent Azerbaijan.