There is something uniquely nauseating about the annual choreography of state-sponsored mourning. Every January, the city of Baku puts on its finest cloak of performative grief to commemorate 'Black January'—the 1990 moment when the Soviet Union, in its final, pathetic death rattle, decided that the best way to keep a family together was to run over the children with tanks. It is a ritual as predictable as the tides and twice as salty. For those who aren't up to speed on their late-twentieth-century imperial collapses, January 20, 1990, was the day the Kremlin realized that the 'brotherhood of nations' was a lie that no one was buying anymore, so they opted for the much more traditional approach of high-velocity lead and armored treads.

Let us contemplate the exquisite irony of Mikhail Gorbachev, the West’s favorite birthmarked liberal, presiding over a massacre that would make a czar blush. While the American press was busy polishing his Nobel Peace Prize and praising his 'visionary' approach to glasnost, Gorbachev was busy signing off on 'Operation Strike.' This charming little endeavor involved smashing through barricades and shooting anything that moved in the streets of Baku. It was the ultimate 'it’s not you, it’s me' breakup move, except the 'me' was a dying superpower and the 'it’s not you' was punctuated by automatic weapon fire. The West, meanwhile, watched the carnage with the same detached curiosity one might afford a documentary about dung beetles. As long as the oil kept its potential and the Soviet monster kept eating its own tail, the moral compasses in Washington and London remained conveniently demagnetized. They wanted the USSR gone, but they didn't particularly care if the departure lounge was carpeted in corpses.

The victims, numbering somewhere around 150, have since been canonized into the bedrock of Azerbaijani national identity. They are no longer people; they are historical currency. In the eyes of any state, a corpse is far more useful than a citizen. A citizen has demands, complaints, and the annoying habit of wanting to vote for someone who isn't a permanent fixture of the palace. A martyr, however, is silent, obedient, and can be trotted out every January to justify whatever current brand of authoritarianism is being served. The transition from Soviet satellite to independent nation wasn't a journey toward some shining beacon of liberty; it was a lateral move from one bureaucratic labyrinth into another, slightly more modern one with better PR and more expensive watches. The tragedy of 1990 is the perfect foundational myth for a regime that needs to remind the populace that things could always be worse—you could be under a Russian tank instead of a local one.

The commemoration itself is a masterclass in the aesthetic of grief. The red carnations are piled so high you’d think the city was trying to bribe the earth to stop rotating. It’s a performance of memory that carefully ignores the inconvenient bits of history—like the fact that many of the same people now weeping over the victims were likely the ones enthusiastically clapping for the Politburo just a few years prior. But consistency is for the poor; the powerful understand that history is a whiteboard, and the eraser is always in the hand of the guy with the most guns. The state media treats the day like a sacred liturgical event, ensuring that the younger generation understands that their primary duty is to be grateful for the 'stability' that follows a good massacre.

Let’s not forget the 'liberation movement' itself. It’s the same tired script we see in every corner of this wretched planet: a group of people realizes they hate their current masters, so they fight and die to replace them with a new set of masters who look like them and speak their language, only to find out that the boot on their neck feels remarkably similar regardless of the flag flying over the palace. The dream of independence is usually just the desire to be exploited by someone you recognize at the grocery store. Azerbaijan’s independence was bought with the blood of people who thought they were fighting for something more than a change in the letterhead at the Ministry of Interior.

So, as the dignitaries lay their wreaths with practiced solemnity and the cameras capture the perfectly timed tears of officials who wouldn't know a sacrifice if it hit them in their offshore accounts, we are reminded of the fundamental truth of human civilization: we are a species that loves a good tragedy, provided we can use it to build a wall or start a political dynasty. The 1990 crackdown wasn't just a failure of Soviet policy; it was a testament to the eternal incompetence of leadership. From the Kremlin’s panicked flailing to the modern state’s curated nostalgia, the cycle remains unbroken. The dead stay in the ground, and the living continue to use their bones as rungs on a ladder that leads absolutely nowhere. It’s enough to make one miss the cold honesty of the tanks. At least then, you knew exactly where you stood: right in the path of a collapsing empire.