Monument to “Black January” martyrs — some 130 residents of Baku killed by the Soviet army in 1990 when Russian troops put down protests as the Soviet Union crumbled. Black January marked the painful birth of independent Azerbaijan. Baku became free — but nationalist purges against the city’s Armenians, stoked by Armenian uprisings in the contested Nagorno-Karabakh region, also made the tolerant, polyglot capital less diverse.
