Zubaira Tukhugov

Political and Military Life

Background

At the time of the revolution, Zubaira Tukhugov was a prominent member of the so-called political leaders and a teacher at a special boarding school. He had been sent away from there to the capital in the early 1920s after he had become disillusioned with the pace of education in that city. He eventually returned, because the power of this particular boarding school played a large role in shaping his political views. When a trial was held to try his accomplices in the illegal activities carried out in his school, two of the perpetrators were found guilty and, like Tukhugov, pardoned in 1933.

On the day of the big prison protests in 1935, Zubaira Tukhugov fled to the US of A, and then to Mexico in 1938, when he was in the "Axis of Mexico" along with a group of anti-fascist colleagues. After years of disfavor with the Russians, he returned to the USSR in 1945-46, in Stalin's absence as a special collaborator in the campaign for the defeat of fascism in the Eastern Front of World War II.

As a result of his activities in the revolutionary army in the Western-Slav border states, he was considered a dangerous foe of the authorities of the Ukrainian SSR and Azerbaijan's Baku Governorate and took part in a criminal trial at the Security Apparatus Court at SBPU.1 At the end of the three-year sentence he began a political career, first as an apologist for the tsarist state, and then, after the war, as a leader of a (separate) group in the anti-Soviet Uzbakhi movement in Baku. This group, the first to develop a feeling for the "problems of the state" among young people in Baku, drew its first serious recruits in the spring of 1950s. Tukhugov's main target was not the Jews of Baku but the "deviant elements" among the bourgeois youth. Between 1952 and 1955 he constituted a branch in Baku. He was a clear representative of the new generation of Baku intellectuals, composed of students, but not of Jews. The secret of his success was that his ideas were free of anti-Semitism.