Yesterday pride and honor, today nation’s humiliation. What will be Azerbaijan’s attitude tomorrow to its history is a subject of hot discussions for country’s intelligentsia, media and civil society.

Republics of former Soviet Union. One day they are disembodied names on Soviet maps, whose very obscurity had seemed to suggest that the heirs of Lenin had solved the "nationalities problem" without compromising the revolutionary's anti-imperialist rhetoric. The next they are flesh and blood, sometimes bloody, nations, some with histories older than Russia itself.

Baku residents have recently seen the fall of Monument to 26 Baku commissars, a sacred place for many people during Soviet age. Today, 26 Baku commissars are called enemies. ‘In stead of monument to enemies there will be a nice park for people’ said Nariman Aliyev, a member of Union of Architectures, while taking questions from experts and journalists at the debate roundtable in Azerbaijan Media Center.

’26 Baku commissars shed the blood of Azerbaijan’s nation. Monument to enemies is nonsense. Why nobody is asking about monument to Hitler in Russia?’ was Aliyev’s primary message to the audience.

Mostly rhetoric, his speech, however, at some point disclosed speaker’s regret and fatigue. Aliyev expressed his increasing concern about reconstruction of Baku. ‘We are not an authority which makes a decision to plant or cut down the trees’ he declared answering audience’s charges for cutting greeneries. ‘When there is a question to set or dismount the monument we are not decision-makers at all’, he noted.

But Aliyev’s colleague and opponent in the debate, Fahraddin Miralayev, who is an author of reconstruction of Sahil park, believes only government has the right to install or dismount the monuments.  Miralayev’s statement sparked a storm of objections from participants ranging from unreconstructed Communists, to leading media representatives to nationalists who have the contempt that only Azerbaijan’s nationalities can be immortalized.

‘There is no guarantee that a couple of years later our national heroes’ remains will be disturbed”, said Ilhamiyya Rzayeva, an independent media expert.

“Azerbaijan Communist Party believes this undermines the Azerbaijan’s international image. Destruction of monuments of the Soviet period is disrespect for the past and future of the Azerbaijani nation,” Chairman of the ACP Central Committee Rauf Kurbanov said.

The event disproved beliefs about building underground parking in stead of the monument. ‘I was laughing when heard that nonsense. No parking place in stead of monument just a garden for citizens’, said Miralayev. Many journalist members of the debate club were lucky to pick up this news and immediately report it to their audiences.

Discussions and disputes on 26 Baku commissars monument spread beyond Azerbaijan Media Center and even Azerbaijan. As stressed by Ganira Pashayeva, MP from the Yeni Azerbaijan party and a member of Azerbaijan delegation at the PACE winter session ‘The memorial to 26 Baku commissars was a humiliation of Azerbaijani nation’.

Indeed, the debate record is a primer for anyone wanting a basic understanding of the history, cultures and nationality issues of the region and the relative social and economic roles of the Russians and other peoples. ‘There have been some worries this topic might be out of audience’s interest’, said Naila Aliyeva, Project Coordinator for Debates. ‘However, this debate shows that there are historical clues that could be never discovered’, she concluded.