“GEGHARD”
SCIENTIFIC ANALYTICAL
FOUNDATION
2025
2025
From February 27 to 29, 1988, in the city of Sumgait in Soviet Azerbaijan, organized massacres of the Armenian population took place with the tacit approval of the Azerbaijani authorities and the inaction of the police. According to official data, the perpetrators killed 26 Armenians, injured hundreds, and forced the entire Armenian population of the city to flee. The Soviet army entered Sumgait only on February 29, the third day of the massacres.
During and after the massacres, Soviet authorities and the media deliberately remained silent about the events, attempting to conceal the truth from the public. Meanwhile, at rallies, people shouted slogans such as “Glory to the heroes of Sumgait,” “Muslims, show the homes of Armenians,” and “Death to Armenians, Armenians will not live here.”
The Sumgait tragedy was neither fully reflected nor condemned in the Soviet press. Despite the information blockade, it was impossible to completely suppress the leakage of details about the massacres. Fragmented and contradictory reports about Sumgait appeared in the Western English-language press in the days following the violence. The first publications largely relied on Soviet media sources, particularly TASS reports, alongside eyewitness testimonies. Various allegations circulated regarding the causes of the events, and the exact number of victims and injured remained unclear.
On February 29, Los Angeles Times, citing Sergey Grigoryants, a resident of Moscow, said: “Thugs in Sumgait went up to people and asked them if they were Armenian or not. They started to beat people who said they were Armenians. Several people were knifed.”
On March 1, the Chicago Tribune reports that eyewitness accounts reaching Moscow describe how Armenian residents of Sumgait were raped, looted, and murdered before Soviet troops intervened.
On March 9, an Associated Press correspondent (AP's report was also published in the Daily News) published a material about Armenians who gathered at a cemetery in Moscow, sharing stories of the horrific events that took place days earlier.
More details about the massacres began to appear in the press in March. The Washington Post published eyewitness accounts in the March 11 edition. “The officer said that reports of Azerbaijanis storming the houses of Armenians were true and that about 300 people had been injured and 37 killed.” According to another testimony, “the violence in Sumgait was one-sided. This was no ethnic conflict, it was a genuine pogrom.” The article notes that Western journalists are not allowed to travel to Soviet Armenia or Azerbaijan. Andrei Shilkov, a Moscow resident who provided information to the newspaper, managed to stay in Sumgait for only six hours.
On March 9, The New York Times published an article summarizing the fragmented information gathered by its correspondent about the events in Sumgait. “The march in Yerevan today was to honor victims of violence in the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait, where official reports say 31 people died February 28 to 29.” “A few hours before the riots in Sumgait and Kirovabad, the official Azerbaijani radio in Baku had announced that two Azerbaijanis had died in ethnic clashes near Nagorno-Karabakh. It is considered highly likely that the disclosure of the two Azerbaijani deaths led to the violence in Sumgait and Kirovabad.”
In the following months, articles were published featuring testimonies from survivors and eyewitnesses of the horrific events.
“Six months after a bloody ethnic massacre the causes of the dispute have not been fully explored, let alone resolved,” The Washington Post wrote. “Traces of the havoc that a mob of Azerbaijanis wreaked here last February are still detectable,” told the author, who visited Sumgait.
In October of the same year, The Washington Post published another article by Juliete Stepanian, who managed to reach Yerevan in the summer of 1988, at a time when access for foreign journalists to Soviet Armenia was severely restricted.
“Four months had passed by then since the anti-Armenian riots of Feb. 27-29 in Sumgait, a city in neighboring Azerbaijan. Everyone in Yerevan was still talking about those events; the details remained vividly alive because of the presence of more than 3,000 refugees from Azerbaijan,” the author told about the life in Yerevan in those days.
“Six months since Iskui Isanyan lay giving birth to her son and listening to the sound of rioters and troops in the streets. Six months since Tale Ismailov, drunk from a birthday party, picked up an iron rod and waded into the murderous crowd to finish off an Armenian carpenter who had been dragged from his car on Peace Street,” the correspondent of The New York Times wrote.
In an article published in 1988 regarding the situation in Artsakh, The Guardian also recalls the massacre in Sumgait. “There has already been a massacre of Armenians in Azerbaijan. In the town of Sumgait in February, after the first demands for Nagorno-Karabakh’s secession were made, 25 Armenians were murdered by rampaging Azerbaijani crowds in a tribal orgy which shocked the country. Azerbaijani police did nothing to prevent it.”
In the days following the massacres, Soviet authorities sought to cover up and downplay the horrific events, distorting their nature by portraying them as mere hooliganism. In Azerbaijan, fabricated narratives quickly emerged. In 1989, Ziya Bunyatov, President of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR, published an article blaming Armenians, claiming that “the Sumgait tragedy was planned by Armenian nationalists.” This narrative later became the primary “official version” in Azerbaijan. A testament to this is the statement made by Ilham Aliyev in 2019: “I say with full responsibility that Sumgayit events were perpetrated by Armenian nationalists and Armenian units.”
The falsity of the aforementioned narrative is evidenced by numerous testimonies, media reports, judicial records, and other materials that clearly identify the real perpetrators and victims of the massacres. Despite attempts at an information blockade, numerous publications in both the Soviet Union and other countries shed light on the genocidal acts committed in Sumgait.