Old leader dies

last updated 8 January 2015

Baku, Azerbaijan

Heidar Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan from 1991 until he stepped down this year due to ill health, died this week at age 80. Aliyev was one of a number of Soviet-era apparatchiks who shed their communist ideals and reinvented themselves as nationalist presidents of the newly independent former Soviet republics. He paid lip service to democratic reform but ran the country in an authoritarian style. With Aliyev’s death, Eduard Shevardnadze, the recently deposed leader of Georgia, is the last surviving member of Leonid Brezhnev’s Politburo. Aliyev has been succeeded by his son, Ilham Aliyev, who was elected president a few months ago in a vote widely derided as fraudulent.