The clash in Askeran was the prelude to the pogroms in Sumgait , where emotions , already heightened by news about the Karabakh crisis , turned even uglier in a series of protests starting on 27 February . Speaking at the rallies , Azerbaijani refugees from the Armenian town of Ghapan accused Armenians of " murder and atrocities " . According to the Soviet media , these allegations were disproved and many of the speakers were reportedly agents provocateurs . Within hours , a pogrom against Armenian residents began in Sumgait , a city some 25 kilometers north of Baku . The pogroms resulted in the deaths of 32 people ( 26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis ) , according to official Soviet statistics , although many Armenians felt that the true figure was not reported . Nearly all of Sumgait 's Armenian population left the city after the pogrom . Armenians were beaten , raped , mutilated and killed both on the streets of Sumgait and inside their apartments during three days of violence ( with no intervention from the police or the local bodies ) that only subsided when Soviet armed forces entered the city and quelled much of the rioting on 1 March . The manner in which they were killed reverberated among Armenians , recalling memories of the Armenian Genocide . On 23 March 1988 the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union rejected the demands of Armenians to cede Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia . Troops were sent to Yerevan to prevent protests against the decision . Gorbachev 's attempts to stabilize the region were to no avail , as both sides remained equally intransigent . In Armenia , there was a firm belief that what had taken place in the region of Nakhichevan would be repeated in Nagorno-Karabakh : prior to its absorption by Soviet Russia , it had a population which was 40 % Armenian ; by the late 1980s , its Armenian population was virtually non-existent
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Nagorno-Karabakh War