Sumgait Pogrom - Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy Theories

The pogrom also led way to the formulation of several conspiracy theories. One of the prominent proponent of one of these theories was Azerbaijani historian and head of the Azerbaijan Academy of Sciences Ziya Bunyadov, who claimed that the massacre had been premeditated by the Armenians to cast a negative light against Azerbaijan. By late 1988, most Sumgait Azerbaijanis had come around to the view that the Armenians had provoked the rioting with this objective in hand. In an article that appeared in the Azerbaijani journal Elm, Bunyadov claimed that Armenians had organized the pogroms: "The Sumgait tragedy was carefully prepared by Armenian nationalists...Several hours after it began, Armenian photographers and TV journalists secretly entered the city where they awaited in readiness." Bunyadov's thesis was hinged on the fact that Sumgait Armenians had withdrawn more than one million rubles from their savings before the attacks. To support his thesis, he had also drawn attention to the fact that one of the participants in the riots and killings was Eduard Grigorian, a man of mixed Russian-Armenian lineage who had three previous criminal convictions and pretended to be Azerbaijani. Grigorian was a factory worker who took part in gang rapes and mass attacks and was subsequently sentenced to 12 years for his role in the massacres. Grigorian had been brought up in Sumgait by his Russian mother following the early death of his Armenian father, and his ethnic identity is considered irrelevant since he appropriately fit the profile of a "pogromshchik, a thuggish young man, of indeterminate nationality with a criminal past, seeking violence for its own sake."

Davud Imanov, an Azerbaijani filmmaker, expanded on this theory in a series of films called the Echo of Sumgait where he accused Armenians, Russians and Americans of conspiring together against Azerbaijan and claiming that Karabakh movement was a plot organized by the CIA. According to CPSU Politburo member Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev, the Sumgait pogrom was arranged by KGB agents provocateur to "justify the importance of the Soviet secret services"