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Heydar Aliyev

May 10, 1923 – December 12, 2003

Azerbaijani politician who led Soviet Azerbaijan from 1969 to 1982 and was President of independent Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003.

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Biography

Heydar Aliyev was born in Nakhchivan in 1923. He studied architecture at the Azerbaijan Industrial Institute from 1939 to 1941 and then made his career in Soviet state security, joining the Azerbaijani NKGB in 1944, training in Leningrad and rising to head the KGB of the Azerbaijan SSR with the rank of major general.

In 1969 he became first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and ran the republic for thirteen years through a wide patronage network, while cultivating Leonid Brezhnev. Yuri Andropov brought him to Moscow in 1982 as a full Politburo member and first deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, but Mikhail Gorbachev removed him in 1987.

Returning to Nakhchivan, he recast himself as a moderate nationalist, left the Communist Party in 1991 and governed the exclave largely independently of Baku. He was elected leader of the new New Azerbaijan Party in 1992. After the June 1993 military revolt against President Abulfaz Elchibey he became speaker of parliament and acting head of state, and was then elected president with nearly 99 percent of the vote.

As president he rebuilt the army, accepted the 1994 ceasefire in the Nagorno-Karabakh war and opened Azerbaijan's Caspian oil to Western consortia, beginning with the 1994 production-sharing agreement. His rule was authoritarian, with rigged elections and a personality cult. Ill, he handed his candidacy to his son Ilham in 2003 and died in Cleveland that December.