Armenians Flee Sumgait
Notice
This terse official communiqué from the Armenian SSR government reports on the arrival of 1,761 Armenian refugees fleeing the Sumgait pogroms of February 1988. Bureaucratic in tone, it carefully avoids naming the violence, referring only to "well-known events." Behind the dry accounting of housing arrangements and investigative procedures lies one of the Soviet era's most shocking outbreaks of ethnic violence.
Original Source: Komsomolets, 19 March 1988.
As has already been announced, since the well-known events in the city of Sumgait, families and citizens of Armenian nationality have been arriving in the [Armenian] republic.
At present 1,761 people (435 families) have come to the Armenian SSR. Some of them have been housed with relatives, and others have been temporarily housed in republic holiday houses.
A commission to examine questions pertaining to the new arrivals from Sumgait is working under the first deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Armenian SSR, comrade V. M. Movsisian.
A decision of the republic's government provides the arriving families and people in need with effective material and other assistance. The requests and appeals of citizens are examined, and the corresponding measures are taken.
A special group of the Procurator of the USSR is conducting an investigation of the events in Sumgait. The Procurator of the USSR has delegated the Procurator of the Armenian SSR to form an investigative group to find victims and eyewitnesses who have left Sumgait and who are now in the republic, in order to conduct the necessary investigative acts, following the criminal investigation procedural laws for establishing the condition of commission of a crime.
Source: Soviet Multinational State: readings and documents, ed. Martha B. Olcott with Lubomyr Hajda and Anthony Olcott. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1990.