As the USSR disintegrated, Azerbaijan's legislature passed the Constitutional Act on the State Independence, restoring the sovereignty it had briefly held between 1918 and 1920 before Soviet annexation. The declaration came amid the escalating Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with Armenia, a dispute over the disputed enclave that would erupt into full war within months of independence being secured.
Azerbaijan's path to independence was shadowed from the start by conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous, majority-Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijani territory that had been simmering with ethnic violence since 1988. As Soviet central authority crumbled through 1991, both Armenia and Azerbaijan raced toward independence while simultaneously arming for the war over the enclave that most observers considered inevitable.
The October 18 declaration echoed the short-lived Azerbaijan Democratic Republic of 1918, the first secular democratic republic in the Muslim world, which the Red Army had crushed in 1920. This time independence stuck, but the celebration was brief; by early 1992 Azerbaijan and Armenia were engaged in full-scale war over Karabakh, a conflict that killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, and whose aftershocks, including further wars in 2020 and 2023, continued to define Azerbaijani and Armenian politics for over three decades.
Key people: Ayaz Mutalibov