More often than not, things fall apart to make way for better things. Landmark revolutions in history reach heights of social upheaval that render a return to the old order impossible. But what happens when a revolution becomes entangled with other major crises? When that entanglement disrupts the straightforward sequence of cause, uprising, and change? When a revolution falls short of its original ambitions, it is often forgotten. Yet, in the capital city of Baku, Azerbaijan, where I was born and raised, the memory of one such movement lingers—sometimes vivid, sometimes faint, but never fully gone.
Amid the serial collapse of communist regimes and democratic transitions in the Eastern Bloc during the late 1980s—a period often celebrated in the West as an extraordinary era of progress—Azerbaijan’s independence movement stands out. Marked by overlapping internal and external crises, it resists fitting neatly into the common Western framework of a revolution. This sentiment is reflected in Azerbaijan itself. From what I have witnessed, Azerbaijanis regard the period, at most, as a ‘national liberation’—the word revolution seldom enters the conversation.
As Mikhail Gorbachev’s democratization efforts failed to preserve unity in the Soviet Union, central authority weakened. As a result, tensions in Azerbaijan’s Karabakh region, driven by a long-standing territorial dispute with Armenia, spiraled out of Soviet control. At the core of the dispute was the desire of the ethnic Armenian population in Karabakh to unify with Armenia, which later grew into a separatist cause to establish an autonomous republic. The political dispute soon escalated into brutality, resulting in the deaths of at least 40 civilians in the Armenian districts of Baku in 1990. Similar outbreaks occurred in other large cities like Sumqayit and various Armenian-populated villages throughout Karabakh.
Alongside the encroaching separatist surge in Karabakh, which was opposed by ethnic Azerbaijanis, there was a growing push for the country’s independence from the Soviet Union. As a result, Azerbaijanis found themselves facing two fronts of resistance: one aimed at preserving Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity and another against Soviet imperialism. These causes fueled a unified Azerbaijani nationalist movement, erupting into mass protests in late 1988 and culminating on November 17, now commemorated in Azerbaijan as National Revival Day. Bakuvians painted slogans on government buildings condemning Gorbachev while holding signs with messages like, “Where are you, Democracy?” alluding to Gorbachev’s hypocritical championing of democratization on the world stage while tightening his grip on dissent at home, ultimately resorting to violence.
Under the pretext of suppressing inter-ethnic violence, on January 20, 1990—in a day now referred to as Black January—Soviet leadership carried out a violent military crackdown in Baku. Over 200 civilians died at Soviet hands. To prevent news from circulating within the country or reaching abroad, Soviet authorities severed telephone lines, censored local media, restricted access to foreign journalists, and destroyed Baku’s broadcast transmitters hours before the tanks rolled in. It is almost as if the revolution was both literally and figuratively silenced, its story deliberately contained, never intended to reach or resonate with the wider world. If the purpose of the Soviet troop action was to halt violence and restore order, why was a state of emergency not declared beforehand to protect civilians? Why was a supposedly rightful intervention shrouded in secrecy? Why was Baku attacked as though it were an enemy fortress?
Far from quelling the independence movement, the intervention failed to achieve its purported aims. Twenty months later, Azerbaijan declared independence as the Soviet Union dissolved; an independence that, though long sought by the Azerbaijani people, was not the immediate fruit of their collective mobilization but rather an almost inevitable consequence of the empire’s collapse. The newly independent Azerbaijan then plunged into a full-scale war with Armenia—one far more destructive than the unrest the Soviet intervention had allegedly sought to contain. This immediate subsequent war, coupled with the fact that Azerbaijan’s independence was more a byproduct of Soviet collapse than a result of a successful revolution, led the movement to go unrecognized as a revolution both domestically and internationally.
Just nine months after Black January, to the fury of Azerbaijanis, Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The global recognition of a figure who, at his core, mirrored the imperialist and authoritarian record of previous Soviet rulers remains a stark and painful contradiction. It is one thing for a revolution to go unnoticed. It stings even more for the injustices and the oppressors to be glorified by the international community.
Current geopolitical realities further obscure the revolutionary essence of Azerbaijan’s independence movement in the 1990s. Even today, many Azerbaijanis dismiss it as inconsequential and view it as little more than a series of repeated failures and losses of life. This view is underscored by the fact that, despite its political breakaway from Russia, Azerbaijan remains a prisoner of its own geography, bound by historical and geopolitical constraints, as well as Russia’s continued interest in access to the resource-rich country. Thus, 30 years later, Azerbaijan remains within Russia’s sphere of influence despite its efforts to adopt a balanced foreign policy and shift toward neutrality after gaining independence. This cautious approach is hardly surprising considering Russia’s history of hostility in attempts to keep the South Caucasus away from alignment with the West—most notably exemplified by Russia’s military intervention in Georgia in 2008. Despite Russia having been less involved in the region’s affairs in the last five years due to its ongoing war in Ukraine, the nearing conclusion of that conflict prompts speculation about Russia’s renewed focus on its neighbors in the South Caucasus. The impending threat of Russian interference rings particularly true in light of rising tensions: civil unrest in Georgia against its pro-Russian government, Armenia’s growing political and military ties with France as it turns away from Russia, and the recent surge in anti-Russian sentiment in Azerbaijan following an airplane disaster, for which Russia has been widely blamed. These ongoing political constraints make it difficult for Azerbaijanis to view the 1990s as a revolutionary struggle, instead associating it with a traumatic loss of life and hardship rather than the victories typically associated with revolutions.
The significance of a revolution should not be defined solely by the immediate attainment of its goals; often, its true impact lies in the socio-political shifts it sets in motion, even if they take time to manifest in clear ways. By that measure, Azerbaijan’s 1990s independence movement was undeniably a revolution—a fierce rebellion that shattered a century and a half of Russian imperial rule and sparked a renewed sense of national identity. Revolutions in postcolonial autocratic contexts rarely follow a clean arc of victory, but their force lies in the structures they weaken and the new realities they create. These overlooked movements remind us that transformative change can take many forms, some unnamed but no less revolutionary. Decades later, the silence of the annual commemoration of Black January, with Azerbaijanis laying red carnations at the Alley of Martyrs, remains the closest we have come to a label that speaks volumes.