The journey from the Moscow Avenue to the Heydar Aliyev Avenue

I look around me, and my soul is suffering humanity pains. I looked inside me, and saw that human troubles come from a man, and often because he does not look directly at the objects around him.

(Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Radishchev)

...Moy Age allows me to travel through time in my memoirs, moving sometimes through the streets and avenues of Baku. This applies particularly to areas where the change is striking and there is something to compare. These avenue undoubtedly includes Moscow Avenue, which is now Heydar Aliyev Avenue.

In Soviet times, I as a journalist who writes on social and economic issues had to visit  enterprises, encircling Moscow Avenue, beginning from subway station Azizbayov  to the Machine-Building Plant named after Lieutenant  P.Shmidt.

When you go from the subway to the center, on the right Is a tube plant, on the left  is  defense plant, on the right - slate, tegmental, on the left - shoe factory, wine, vegetable oil, on the right mechanical. If you turn slightly to the side – you see a refrigerator factory, sparkling wines, air conditioners, Instrument. And flagship petroleum engineering plant named after Lieutenant Schmidt completed the Avenue.

At this five-kilometer path segment was concentrated the economic power of the country with actual production, many thousands real workers' collectives.

Paradoxically, most enterprises were erected or upgraded during the leadership of Azerbaijan in 1969-1982 years by Heydar Aliyev, and Moscow Prospect was renamed in his name in 2004 immediately after his death, and all his industrial creations were buried.

Heydar Aliyev Avenue today has been transformed from an industrial area into a fashionable office area with high-rise buildings erected and unjustified in terms of the economic feasibility. This is exponential waste area and a museum  of theft and corruption. We drive to the subway, now with the epic name of Koroglu; on the right you can see whether empty stadium, or the Palace for celebration; then the so-called Olympic village, the tower of the new offices of SOCAR, SOFAZ, Azersu and other glass unprofitable monsters that completes the Cultural center named  after Heydar Aliyev.

It's more like a monument to the destruction of industry in Azerbaijan, a process which began with the so-called voucher privatization. It has now turned out that it was carried out not for the modernization of industry, but  for clearing  building sites for the laundering of dollars falling from the sky. This is a traditional style for all the corrupt and authoritarian regimes in the world, for it is the philosophy of such systems.

... At night, returning to the country by  the Heydar Aliyev Avenue  you can see empty skyscrapers, glittering with colored garlands, trying to impose the image of a traveler greatness of modern Azerbaijan. "But not all is not gold that glitters." Behind the idols of glass showcases are ruins, decay and futility of the way in which  the country rolls in time and space...