Alakbar Rezaguliyev

Alakbar Rezaguliyev (31 January 1903 in Baku, Baku Governorate – 31 January 1974 in Baku) (alternative spelling: Alekper Rzaguliyev) (Azerbaijani: Ələkbər Rzaquliyev; Russian: Алекпер Рзакулиев) was an Azerbaijani artist.

Alakbar was born in Baku, into the large family of a small businessman-shopkeeper. Although there were no artists in his family, Rezaguliyev showed artistic talent at an early age. He studied at Moscow Technical Art College from 1925 to 1928. After graduation, he returned to Baku.

Alakbar was among the first to be arrested in what would later be termed as Stalin's Repression, in which 70,000 Azerbaijanis were executed or exiled along with hundreds of thousands of other citizens throughout the USSR. His friend was accused of advocating "pan-Turkish ideas," and Alakbar was deemed guilty by mere association. When Alakbar was thrown into prison, he didn't even know what he was being accused of or why. Altogether, Alakbar spent more than 23 years of his life in exile. He was sentenced to six years. After being released, he returned and married Sona Huseynova in 1935; the couple had two daughters, Adila and Sevil. He and Sona later divorced.

On November 3, 1937, again Alakbar was arrested. He told his fellow artist Rasim Babayev how it happened: "One day I was walking down Komsomolskaya Street when I ran into Ruhulla Akhundov (one of the Bolsheviks who helped establish the Soviet system in Azerbaijan). "Ruhulla looked annoyed at seeing me and remarked rudely: 'Hey, you dumb guy, are you back here again?' And with those words, I was sent directly back to prison" - this time, to Siberia and later on to Solovki, an island in the Arctic where there are monasteries. Alakbar would go on to do a series of paintings depicting the isolation of those years there.

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