The Sumgait pogrom was perpetrated by ethnic Azerbaijanis against the Armenian population of the town of Sumgait, in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, in February 1988. The pogrom took place during the early stages of the Karabakh movement. On February 27, 1988, mobs of Azerbaijanis formed into groups and attacked and killed Armenians on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting occurred, and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the violence to continue for three days.
On February 28, a small contingent of Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) troops entered the city and unsuccessfully attempted to quell the rioting. More professional military units entered with tanks and armored personnel vehicles one day later. Government forces imposed a state of martial law and curfew and brought the crisis to an end. The official death toll released by the Prosecutor General of the USSR was 32 Armenians, although other estimates reach up into the hundreds of victims.
The violence in Sumgait was unexpected and was widely covered in the Western media. It was greeted with general surprise in Armenia and the rest of the Soviet Union because the Soviet government had largely suppressed ethnic conflicts in the country and had promoted policies such as fraternity of peoples, socialist patriotism, and proletarian internationalism to avert such conflicts. The policies of glasnost and perestroika, introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, had decreased suppression of the population, which had the unintended consequences of allowing ethnic conflicts and ethnic nationalism to increase in the Soviet Union. The massacre, together with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, presented a major challenge to Gorbachev, and he was later criticized for his slow response to the crisis.
Because of the scale of atrocities against the Armenians as an ethnic group, the pogrom was immediately linked to the Armenian genocide of 1915 in the Armenian national consciousness. Russian political writer Roy Medvedev and USSR Journalists' Union described the events as genocide of the Armenian population. The Sumgait pogrom is commemorated every year on February 28 in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh (before the flight of its Armenian population), and among the Armenian diaspora.
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