Azerbaijan re-creates its own Komsomol to counter youth movements?
Chairman of IRELI speaks in the session with a portrait of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev in the backgroundThough I am not a member of any Azerbaijani youth organization or movement, I am very well acquainted with the field - and imagine my surprise when

A timely poster from Soviet Azerbaijan
The below poster was printed in Soviet Azerbaijan sometime between 1941 and 1945 and was a war propaganda aiming at ordinary people to shut up and silence their discontent with war-time difficulties. It literally says: "Beware! Don't talk too much!" Today, Soviet Azerbaijan is long demised, but the recent case of bloggers Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizade showed that the message conveyed in below poster is still the one conveyed by current Azeri government: "Beware! Don't talk too much! Or we'll land you in jail!"

Azerbaijan bloggers receive prison sentences - USEFUL LINKS
Yesterday, on 11th November, Sabayel District "Court" of Baku presided by "Justice" Araz Huseynov convicted Azerbaijani bloggers Emin Milli and Adnan Hajizade on faked and ridiculous charges and despite huge internal and international pressure. Both bloggers were accused of "attacking" and "beating" two sportsmen, one of them a Wushu master, despite huge evidence otherwise.Despite the huge success of lawyers and huge failure of "prosecutors", "judge" simply ignored Aristotelian log

A Republican in the Caucasus
"Republican" is a bad word nowadays - both in Azerbaijan, where arrogant ruling elite displays full scale of monarchical tendencies, and in the US, where Glenn Beck together with Sarah Palin have hijacked the party of Lincoln to monger hate sponsored by Murdoch. Neither my sympathies lie on any republican grand, but on timidly liberal Alexander II of Russia, whose reforms, though-ill fated, nevertheless broke away today's Azerbaijan from the ignorant orient and brought it into Europe.However, there is one Republican in the Caucasus who should deserve appraisal of all of you today, who in twenty days' time will become the former head of former Azerbaijan office of the Internation

Keep it simple, Kalashnikov!
Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the famous rifle bearing his name will turn 90 next month and thus, perhaps thought that it was suitable time to preach some morality. "I created this weapon primarily to safeguard our fatherland," he decried "criminal" use of his rifle. According to Reuters, in a videotaped address to "a conference of Russian arms traders and designers at a top-secret Soviet-era arms testing facility outside Moscow" he said that it was painful for him to see when crimin