Today marks the 96th birthday anniversary of the national leader of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev, who served as the President of the Republic in 1993-2003.
Heydar Aliyev was born on 10 May 1923 in Nakhichevan. He graduated from the Nakhchivan Pedagogical College and started to study at the architectural department of the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute (now the State Oil Academy of Azerbaijan), but the incipient war impeded the completion of his education.
Since 1941, Heydar Aliyev headed a department at the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Nakhchivan, and in 1944, was sent to work at state security bodies. He received special education in the cities of Leningrad and Moscow.
In 1957 he graduated from the History Department of the Azerbaijan State University. Having worked for twenty five years at state security bodies, Heydar Aliyev worked as a deputy chairman of the State Security Committee under the Council of Ministers of the Azerbaijan SSR since 1964, and from 1967, held the office of chairman of the committee, and rose to the rank of a major general.
Elected as first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan at the Plenary Session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan in July 1969, Heydar Aliyev became the head of the republic.
Elected as a candidate to the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Soviet Union's Communist Party in 1976, and a member of the Political Bureau in 1982, Heydar Aliyev was appointed the first deputy chairman of the USSR's Council of Ministers. While on this position, Heydar Aliyev headed the most significant areas of the USSR's economic, social and cultural lives.
For 20 years, Heydar Aliyev was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Azerbaijan SSR, and for five years, worked as a first deputy chairman of the USSR's Council of Ministers.
In October 1987, Heydar Aliyev resigned from his post, as a sign of protest against the policy pursued by Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and personally the Secretary General Michael Gorbachev.
In connection with the tragedy committed on January 20, 1990 in Baku by the Soviet troops, Heydar Aliyev, appearing the next day at the Representative Office of Azerbaijan in Moscow with a statement, demanded that the organizers and executors of the crime committed against the people of Azerbaijan be punished. As a sign of protest against the hypocritical policy of the USSR leadership towards the critical conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, in July 1991, he left the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Since July 1990, Heydar Aliyev lived in Baku, then in Nakhchivan. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet of Azerbaijan, he also held the post of the Chairman of the Supreme Assembly of the Autonomous Republic of Nakhchivan, the Deputy Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Azerbaijan and the chairman of the Yeni Azerbaijan Party.
On 24 July 1993 Heydar Aliyev became the acting President of the Republic of Azerbaijan and on October 3, 1993, he was elected the President of the Republic.
On October 11, 1998, Heydar Aliyev was re-elected president for the second term. In 2003, he refused to participate in the next presidential elections due to health problems. He died on December 12, 2003 at the Cleveland Clinic in the US. On December 15 Aliyev was buried at the Alley of Honor in Baku.
The book titled 'Dialogue of cultures and challenges of the modern era', published with the support of the Heydar Aliyev Foundation in Russia, was presented at Biblio-Blobus in Moscow on May 6. The book was prepared on the basis of joint conferences at the Baku Forum dedicated to the memory of Heydar Aliyev.
