People of the Revolution and the USSR

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1870–1925 ○ Heart attack

From Azerbaijani Enlightener to a Head of the Soviet State

When oil magnate Taghiyev tried to silence him at the 1906 Teachers' Congress, Narimanov renounced his scholarship and declared: "I will not be silenced for despicable metal while comrades shed blood against the tsarist yoke."

A teacher, physician, and writer, Narimanov opened a public reading room in Baku and produced some of the earliest works of Azerbaijani realist literature. After joining Hummet in 1905, he entered revolutionary politics, led the government of Soviet Azerbaijan from 1920, and later became a co-chairman of the USSR Central Executive Committee. His attempt to join national emancipation to socialism brought him into tension with centralizing nationalities policy; after his death in 1925, he was interred in the Kremlin Wall.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1895–1956 ✕ Executed

Stalin-era party boss who ruled Azerbaijan for two decades

His statements at trial were said to have been only a few sentences, one of them: "What ruined me was my faith in Stalin."

First Secretary of the Azerbaijan Communist Party from 1933 to 1953, governing the republic for two decades. A former Cheka/GPU/OGPU chairman and People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, he led the mass repression of the republic's party, state and cultural cadres during the Great Terror, and was executed by shooting in May 1956 after Beria's fall.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1897–1962 ○ Natural causes

Ammunition and atomic administrator under Beria

"Comrade Stalin, you were imprisoned by enemies, but I was imprisoned by our own."

Born to a Jewish oil worker's family in Baku, he rose from engineer to People's Commissar of Armaments in 1939. Arrested and tortured just before the war, he was summoned by Stalin after the German invasion and appointed Commissar of Ammunition, quadrupling shell production by war's end. After the war, he led the First Main Directorate alongside Kurchatov, building the administrative and industrial foundation of the Soviet atomic bomb project, and later oversaw hydrogen bomb development. He was one of the very few awarded the Hero of Socialist Labor three times.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1902–1958 ○ Natural causes

Metallurgy administrator of Stalinist industrialization

In 1930, appointed head of ferrous metallurgy at 28, he asked Ordzhonikidze to send him to the factory floor instead. He chose the furnace over the desk — and became the Soviet Union's master of steel.

An Armenian from Shusha, he trained at the Moscow Mining Academy and on the shop floor of the Elektrostal plant. Rising through the Special Steel Trust, he moved through defense industry and shipbuilding before becoming commissar for ferrous metallurgy in 1940. During the war he evacuated southern and central metal plants beyond the Urals and directed specialty steel production for tanks, aircraft and ammunition, earning the Hero of Socialist Labor title in 1943. After the war he led reconstruction as Deputy Premier and Minister of Ferrous Metallurgy, while also overseeing uranium supply for the Soviet atomic project. In 1938 his German internship nearly cost his life on suspicion of being a 'German spy,' but Stalin personally intervened.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1908–1968 ○ Natural causes

Soviet theoretical physics titan who founded the 'Landau school' and pioneered quantum fluid dynamics

He rated physicists on a logarithmic scale by achievement: class 1 was Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac. Einstein alone was class 0.5. He once placed himself at 2.5, later promoting himself to 1.5.

Soviet theoretical physicist. He founded the 'Landau school' in Kharkov, selecting disciples through his rigorous Theoretical Minimum exam, and pioneered condensed matter physics with his theories of superfluidity and Fermi liquids. His Course of Theoretical Physics with Lifshitz set the global textbook standard.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1911–2008 ○ Natural causes

Long-serving Gosplan chairman of the stagnation era

Some colleagues turned out to be scoundrels — they tried to brand me an enemy of the people. To dodge that filthy investigation, I joined the Red Army.

A Baku-born oil engineer who led the Soviet oil industry in his thirties, devising the 'Baibakov method' of high-pressure cement injection to revive waterlogged wells. During the war he carried out the dramatic Caucasus oilfield denial mission; afterward he drove the Romashkino field development that helped make the USSR a petroleum superpower. As Gosplan chairman for twenty years from 1965, he personified post-Kosygin-reform central planning and remained a mainstay of the Brezhnev-era administrative system until Gorbachev replaced him.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1912–1981 ○ Natural causes

The Azeri engineer who built the Soviet gas industry into the world's largest

Landing on the bare tundra at the future Urengoy site in 1973, Orudzhev declared: "I am not Peter the Great, but I will borrow his words: here a city shall be built." From that moment, Novy Urengoy — Russia's 'gas capital' — was born.

An Azeri engineer from a Baku working-class family who built the Soviet gas industry into the world's largest. As Minister of the Gas Industry from 1972, he developed the West Siberian supergiant fields of Urengoy and Medvezhye and created the Unified Gas Supply System (ЕСГ), which remains the backbone of Russian gas power today.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1917–2003 ○ Natural causes

The long-hidden manager of crewed spaceflight

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin slept soundly before humanity's first spaceflight. Kerimov, monitoring the cosmonaut's sleep via bed sensors, spent a far more anxious night than the man about to ride the rocket.

His career began in World War II inspecting Katyusha rockets and gathering intelligence on the German V-2. He served on the State Commissions for Sputnik 1 and the Vostok programme, then chaired the State Commission for crewed flights from 1966 to 1991, twenty-five years in which he gave the final launch approval for every Soviet crewed mission. He was the administrative gatekeeper of Soviet crewed spaceflight's golden age, from Salyut and Soyuz-Apollo to Mir, yet his identity was kept strictly secret until perestroika.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1934–1993 ○ Natural causes

A Soviet republican leader who asserted institutional authority in crisis

“A state of emergency was declared and troops were sent in without the republic’s consent.”

Elmira Kafarova was an Azerbaijani Soviet politician and diplomat who moved through education and foreign-affairs administration before leading the republic’s Supreme Soviet. In January 1990, she publicly protested the declaration of emergency in Baku and the entry of Soviet troops, stating that the decision had been taken while she was in Moscow and without her knowledge. Her institutional dissent, unusual within the Soviet republican leadership, illuminates how the nationalities crisis became a collision among republican institutions, a mass movement, and Union power.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1938–2017 ○ Renal failure

First Secretary of the Baku Party Committee who blocked buses from entering Baku, shifting the violence to Sumgait

“I realized that it was a pogrom. I ordered all roads to the city blocked from these settlements. The order was executed. The buses went to Sumgait.”

A Soviet and Azerbaijani party and state official who rose through the construction sector to become First Secretary of the Baku City Party Committee in 1983. In February 1988, as buses carrying Azerbaijani refugees expelled from Armenia converged on Baku, he ordered the city's access roads blocked; the measure kept violence out of Baku but diverted the bus convoys to Sumgait, where the pogrom erupted days later. After the dissolution of the USSR, he served as the first president of independent Azerbaijan's football association (1992–2003), steering the country into UEFA and FIFA membership.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 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.

Soviet Union Soviet communism 1945–

The Sumgait party boss handed a flag and photographed at the head of the mob

Left isolated by the crowd, the republic flag thrust into his hands, Muslimzade walked where the mob led him; the scene was filmed and sent to the Party Central Committee.

A Komsomol careerist who rose to first secretary of the Sumgait city party committee, he was the party official who faced the crowd at the outset of the February 1988 Sumgait pogrom and, in attempting to calm it, found himself handed an Azerbaijan SSR flag and photographed leading the march. Muslimzade later maintained that he was steering the column away from the Armenian district toward the sea, but the tail of the procession splintered into groups that fanned out into Armenian neighbourhoods. Dismissed from all posts and expelled from the party days after the pogrom, he became both a scapegoat for the violence and an enduring symbol of the party's loss of control.