Most narratives of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict focus on the land, the geopolitics, the formal wars. The story of Baku in January 1990 is about the erasure of people. It is a story of neighbors.
For days, fueled by nationalist fervor and anger over the Armenian movement in Karabakh, mobs moved through Azerbaijan’s capital. They had lists of addresses. They knew where Armenians lived. What followed was not a battle but a hunt. Apartment doors were broken down. Families were dragged into the streets. The violence was intimate, face-to-face. People were beaten with iron bars. Some were set on fire. Women were raped. The police and authorities, by many accounts, stood aside or participated.
The few who survived did so by hiding in basements, by bribing officials, by being smuggled out in the trunks of cars. Over the course of a week, a community that had been part of Baku’s fabric for generations—artists, scientists, shopkeepers—was systematically terrorized into flight. An estimated 200,000 Armenians fled the city, leaving behind their homes, their possessions, their history. They became refugees on trains and ships, their exodus a brutal, forced migration that emptied Baku of its Armenian population almost entirely.
The pogrom is often a footnote, overshadowed by the larger war that followed. But it represents a critical, hideous pivot: the moment when a political dispute over territory was executed as a visceral campaign against civilians. It reframes the conflict not as a clash of armies, but as a calculated project of making a city, and eventually a region, ethnically pure. The violence was the means. The silence left behind was the goal.