Sumgayit, Azerbaijan

The city of Sumgayit in Azerbaijan, on the Aspheron Peninsula on the Caspian Sea, is only 19 miles (about 30 kilometers) from the country's capital, Baku, and is the center of the local chemical industry. It is regarded as one of the most polluted places in the world.

Sumgayit was officially proclaimed a city on November 22, 1949. In 1959, the city's population was 52,000—already the third-largest city in what was then the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1973, the National Steel Corporation of Pittsburgh was involved in consultancy work on the establishment of an alunite mine that helped provide Sumgayit with more alumina. At its height during this period, the aluminum complex at Sumgayit was capable of producing 5 million evaporators a year—enough to provide for some 70 percent of all the refrigerators being made annually in the Soviet Union.

In addition to power generation, Sumgayit was already important for sulfuric pyrite and borax waters, helping to produce sulfuric acid and acetylene. There was also a plant for the manufacture of carbon black used in the rubber industry and for printing, and a synthetic rubber plant. In 1959, work started on the construction of an aluminum oxide facility. There was also a plant for making chlorine. It was not long before the city became heavily polluted in spite of its being described in the Soviet Union's literature as a “new town” with some of the best (seemingly) urban facilities in the world.

The work at Sumgayit attracted many people from other parts of Azerbaijan, as well as Armenians, in addition to engineering experts and their families from Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union. There had long been tensions before the 1920s between [Page 407]the Armenians, who were Christian, and the Azerbaijanis, who were Shiite Muslim, but there were few problems, religious or racial, until the 1980s. Indeed, there were no churches or mosques in the city. By 1990, there were between 200,000 and 265,000 people living there.

On February 29, 1988, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, ethnic tensions in Sumgayit resulted in attacks on ethnic Armenians that resulted in 26 being killed and several thousand injured; six Azerbaijanis also were killed. The rioting lasted for three days, and by the time it was over, some 2,000 of the estimated 10,000 Armenians in the city had fled. The Azerbaijani nationalists blamed the Armenians for inciting the rioting in their effort to discredit them. They also claimed that the fighting had started after reports of Azerbaijani homes being destroyed in Armenia. At the same time, there were immense tensions in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which was a mainly Armenian enclave within the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic. Disturbances within the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic had seen as many as 3,5000 Azerbaijanis flee and be resettled in Sumgayit. Foreign visitors were barred from the region until August 1988, by which time tensions in Sumgayit had subsided. In January 1990, there were further tensions, causing the Soviet Union's central government, under direction from Mikhail Gorbachev, to send soldiers into Baku and Sumgayit.

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