Old leader dies
The week's news at a glance.
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.
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Selling sex: why investors are wary of OnlyFans despite record profits
In The Spotlight The platform that revolutionised pornography is for sale – but its value is limited unless it can diversify
-
Garsington Opera opens its summer festival with two 'very different productions'
The Week Recommends A 'fabulous' new staging of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Donizetti's fake-love-potion comedy L'elisir d'amore
-
The Rehearsal series two: Nathan Fielder's docu-comedy is 'laugh-out-loud funny'
The Week Recommends Television's 'great illusionist' has turned his attention to commercial airline safety