Azerbaijan and Armenia associate February of modern history with the tragic events of Sumgait and Khojaly. As time goes, there are fewer and fewer witnesses of the events left, but the question why the tragedy happened remains. Vestnik Kavkaza experts will describe details of the horrifying events of February 1988 this week.
In the 1980s, the USSR made its most flagrant civilizational mistake: it was tempted with promises of heaven on earth. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was charmed with the idea of heavenly communism, only to be later replaced with another one after decades of bloodshed and hard work.
Perestroika, collapse of the USSR and the bloody events depicted in the article could have been avoided if it were not for the idea of a capitalist heaven in the hearts of people. The state ideology of the early 1980s was failing to satisfy needs of its citizens. The Cold War started after WWII could only end with either socialism or capitalism winning.
Mikhail Gorbachev started his reign on March 11, 1985, believing in the American Dream. Unlike his predecessors, he was a gullible and naïve leader who thought that scrapping totalitarian ideology for the sake of European democratic values would end hostilities and make the USSR part of the world society.
The West had no intentions to make friends, it was only worried about own security which could only be strengthened by weakening or better destroying the Soviet Union. The divide and rule principle was taken as the basis and served under the cover of “heavenly” ideals of Western democracy. The ethnic problem was the perfect tool for a coup in the multiethnic Soviet Union where all nationalities were equal.
Nationalism as a mass movement cannot be born by its own, it is a political instrument, sort of a scalpel, that cuts the body of the country into any number of pieces. Organized and idea-firm nationalists convinced in their superiority are few in numbers, but they are always under surveillance of special services and cannot do harm under a strong government. However, they become the blade of the scalpel in the hands of players of local and global politics.
The scalpel hit Sumgait on February 27-29, 1998.
