摘要：The analysis focuses on the trajectory of Azerbaijan over the last two decades. Azerbaijan not only provides a good empirical summary of the depressing trend in a large set of countries, from the Balkans to the Caucasus and Central Asia--political contestation leading to ethnic conflict, state breakdown, and an apparent return to Third World backwardness. It also happens that the Azerbaijan revolution, intertwined with an ethnic uprising in Nagorno Karabagh, an autonomous Armenian province inside the Azerbaijan SSR, signalled the final crisis of Soviet power. The manifest powerlessness of Gorbachev's administration in face of the escalating violence in the Caucasus started a chain reaction of national uprisings which in 1991 resulted in the disintegration of the USSR. But if we focus on Azerbaijan alone, we may succumb to the usual pitfall of attributing Soviet disintegration to nationalism alone. Therefore let us first undertake a compressed analytical description which should allow us to see more clearly something central to all the uprisings that precipitated the Soviet collapse--the position of national intelligentsias under state socialism.
