Heydar Aliyev
Heydar Aliyev was president of Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, the KGB general who had run the Soviet republic from 1969 to 1982 and sat in Brezhnev's and Andropov's Politburo, was retired by Gorbachev in 1987. He went home to Nakhchivan in 1990 to run the exclave. He came back to Baku in June 1993 when the elected president Elchibey fled a military revolt with the Armenians winning the war in Karabakh. He took the parliament's chair and then, in October, the presidency with ninety-eight per cent. The ten years were the ceasefire of May 1994 that froze the war with Karabakh and a seventh of the country in Armenian hands and eight hundred thousand Azerbaijanis displaced. There was the contract of the century signed that September with BP and the Western majors for the Caspian oil that had been the point of the country since the Nobels, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline agreed in 1999 to take it west around Russia. There were the coup attempts of 1994 and 1995 put down, the opposition jailed or exiled and the elections of 1998 and 2003 arranged. There was the succession, which he settled in August 2003 by making his son Ilham prime minister from his hospital bed in Cleveland and withdrawing from the election in his favour two weeks before the vote. He was born in Nakhchivan in 1923, the son of a railway worker, joined the NKVD in 1944, rose through the republic's KGB to head it in 1967, and was made first secretary in 1969 to clean up a party the Kremlin considered the Union's most corrupt, which he did with purges and then with a machine of his own. In 1982 Andropov brought him to Moscow as first deputy prime minister, the first Muslim in the Politburo. Gorbachev, who found him the embodiment of the old order, forced him out five years later. The personality cult that the country wears, the parks, the airports, the foundation his daughter-in-law runs, the portraits in every office, and the title of national leader, was built by his son after his death in Cleveland in December 2003, when the war he froze was still frozen and the oil he sold had begun to flow. His son won the war in 2020 and 2023 with the money, and the monument at Shusha says whose victory it was.
- Lived: 1923 CE – 2003 CE
- Nationality: Azerbaijani
- Roles: president, politician
