The Sumgait pogrom was a pogrom that targeted the Armenian population of the seaside town of Sumgait in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in late February 1988. The pogrom took place during the early stages of the Karabakh movement. On February 27, 1988, mobs of ethnic Azerbaijanis formed into groups and attacked and killed Armenians on the streets and in their apartments; widespread looting and a general lack of concern from police officers allowed the violence to continue for three days. On February 28, a small contingent of Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) troops entered the city and unsuccessfully attempted to quell the rioting. More professional military units entered with tanks and armored personnel vehicles one day later. Government forces imposed a state of martial law and curfew and brought the crisis to an end. The official death toll released by the Prosecutor General of the USSR (tallies were compiled based on lists of named victims) was 32 people (26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis), although other estimates reach up into the hundreds of victims. The violence in Sumgait was unexpected and was widely covered in the Western press. It was greeted with general surprise in Armenia and the rest of the Soviet Union since ethnic conflicts in the country had been largely suppressed by the Soviet government, which had promoted policies such as fraternity of peoples, socialist patriotism, and proletarian internationalism to avert such conflicts. However, with the policies of glasnost and perestroika that were put in place by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 which relaxed suppression of the Soviet government, it was now possible for ethnic conflicts and ethnic nationalism to rise in the Soviet Union. The massacre, together with the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, presented a major challenge to Gorbachev. He was later criticized for his slow reaction to the crisis. Because of the scale of atrocities against the Armenians as an ethnic group the pogrom was immediately linked to the Armenian genocide of 1915 in the Armenian national consciousness. Russian political writer Roy Medvedev and USSR Journalists' Union described the events as genocide of the Armenian population. The Sumgait pogrom is commemorated every year on February 28 in Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh, and among the Armenian diaspora. Background The city of Sumgait is located near the coast of the Caspian Sea, only thirty kilometers north of the capital Baku. It had been renovated in the 1960s and had become a