Meanwhile, the political stability of the country, that had been in decline since 1988, became even more complicated after the economic crisis and the expulsion of Azeris from Armenia due to the Karabakh crisis. Mutallibov was also unhappy with the chaotic steps that Moscow was making to move from a planned to a market economy.
As a result, he came into disagreement with the policy conducted by the central authorities in Moscow. In his report "On the current tasks of the party organizations to restructure its activity and the transition to the market economy" at the party plenum on Janury 28th 1991, Mutallibov argued that during perestroika the Soviet leadership made several strategic and tactical mistakes, saying that "we started to destroy a system of government that was functioning for decades without calculating the possible consequences." In his opinion, the declaration of independence led to the syndrome of total independence. He also accused the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of over-compromising: "The Communist party, without having analyzed the committed mistakes, made extreme concessions on all the questions."
It can be claimed that this over-compromising started long before. The constant repressions in the party deprived all its members on every level of strong opinions. The role of the leader was unquestionable. Every his word was taken as a plan of action. The rivals of the USSR in the cold war understood this very well. When talking Gorbachev over, they destroyed not only the party, but also the state. The rotten leadership that departed in the 1960s-1980s from humane socialist doctrine and welfare policy was mostly concerned with strengthening its power and accumulating wealth. The inability of the leadership to act and the dependence of the country's economy on oil and gas put the county on the verge of economic collapse. One of the extreme opinions explains the decline of world oil prices as being due to a secret agreement between Ronald Reagan and the king of Saudi Arabia.
At the turn of the 1990s the growing crisis forced the party to use new instruments. At the plenum in October 1990, the Central Committee of the Communist party decided that the transition to the market economy could ease the economic crisis. The events at the turn of the 1990s had serious consequences for the economy of Azerbaijan. As a result of the constant riots and strikes, the republic was suffering from a severe budget deficit. In the early 1990s it reached 5 billion roubles, or more than 35% of the budget. In February 1990 salaries and wages were paid with severe problems. Only emergency measures allowed the deficit to be reduced. It was necessary to create an economic strategy for Azerbaijan that would allow a structural change from a planned administrative to a market economy. The analysis of the decisions taken in the years of Mutallibov makes us conclude that the attempts to devise a new economic strategy were, unfortunately, unsuccessful. Similar problems occurred everywhere in post-Soviet space.
