Memory of Victory and a Complicated Legacy: How Azerbaijan Marks the 81st Anniversary of the End of World War II

On Friday, marking the 81st anniversary of the victory over fascism, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and First Vice President Mehriban Aliyeva laid a wreath at the monument to twice Hero of the Soviet Union Major General Hazi Aslanov in Baku’s Highland Park near the Alley of Martyrs. The annual ceremony remains one of the few state traditions linking modern Azerbaijan with its Soviet past — a past the country simultaneously honors, reassesses and, in some respects, seeks to distance from its modern national identity.

For Azerbaijan, World War II has never been an abstract chapter of history. Nearly every family carries its own story of the front line, wartime sacrifice or life in the rear. In 1941, the population of Soviet Azerbaijan stood at around 3.4 million people, and more than 681,000 were mobilized to the front. One in every five residents of the republic became involved in the war effort. Among them were representatives of dozens of ethnic groups living in Azerbaijan, while more than 10,000 of those mobilized were women. Around 250,000 people from the republic never returned home.

Today, those figures continue to appear in official speeches, school lessons and television documentaries, but in Azerbaijan the memory of the war also carries another dimension — an economic one. Without Baku’s oil, as even Soviet military commanders later acknowledged, the Soviet victory might have proved impossible or, at the very least, far more costly.

During the war, Azerbaijan supplied more than 70 percent of all Soviet oil production. Baku produced fuel for tanks, aircraft and the navy, while local factories manufactured more than 130 types of weapons and ammunition. In the rear, the republic effectively transformed into a wartime economy: around 70 percent of workers in factories and collective farms were women.

In those years, Baku was not only the oil capital of the Soviet Union but also a major logistical and humanitarian center. Residents contributed 15 kilograms of gold, 952 kilograms of silver and 320 million rubles from personal savings to the defense fund. More than 1.6 million essential goods and 125 railway wagons of warm clothing were sent to the front. During the siege of Leningrad, Baku enterprises shipped food supplies, medicines and medical materials to the besieged city. Before the summer of 1942 alone, wagons carrying black caviar, dried fruits, tomato puree, juices and therapeutic food products were dispatched from Baku to Leningrad.

Dozens of battalions and divisions were formed on Azerbaijani territory and fought their way from the Caucasus to Berlin. The 77th, 223rd, 396th, 402nd and 416th national rifle divisions participated in major battles across multiple fronts. More than 400,000 soldiers and officers from Azerbaijan received military decorations. A total of 123 people became Heroes of the Soviet Union, including 44 ethnic Azerbaijanis.

The first Azerbaijani to receive that title was senior sergeant Israfil Mammadov. Yet it was Hazi Aslanov who became the central symbol of Azerbaijani wartime memory. The commander of a tank brigade and a twice Hero of the Soviet Union, he remains one of the country’s most revered military figures.

Yet decades later, the memory of the war in Azerbaijan remains not only heroic, but deeply complicated.

Alongside the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis who fought in the ranks of the Red Army, some natives of Azerbaijan fought on the side of Germany. For many of them, this was linked less to support for Nazi ideology than to hopes of establishing an independent Azerbaijani state following the possible collapse of the Soviet Union.

During the war, political émigrés formed the Azerbaijani National Committee, which was intended to govern the country in the event of a German capture of the Caucasus. In 1941, the Caucasian-Mohammedan Legion was established and later renamed the Azerbaijani Legion. According to various estimates, around 38,000 Azerbaijanis fought on the German side.

Some units, including the “Aslan,” “Bergmann” and “Donmek” battalions, fought on the Caucasus front and received praise from German commanders for discipline and combat effectiveness. In 1943, the 162nd Turkic Infantry Division was formed, and in 1944 the Azerbaijani Legion was reorganized into the structure of the so-called Azerbaijani Liberation Army.

For decades, this part of history remained effectively taboo during the Soviet era. Today, it is discussed more cautiously and without the rigid ideological language of the past. For modern Azerbaijan, as for many post-Soviet states, World War II has become not only a story of collective Soviet victory, but also a story of difficult choices, tragedy and the search for national identity.

In Baku today, the memory of the war exists on several levels at once. On one side are official state ceremonies, wreaths, veterans and Soviet symbols. On the other is an effort to integrate that memory into the modern national narrative of an independent Azerbaijan, which no longer views the Soviet era solely through the lens of “brotherhood of peoples.”

That is why Victory Day in Azerbaijan remains not only a day of remembrance, but also a reflection of an ongoing conversation about what the country once was — and what it wants to become in the future.