If before 1990s, for the question "Are you muslim?" the answer was, "Yes, I am", and everything was simple, then later, the answers began to diversify.

Yuxu (The Dream) rock band - was one of the most unforgettable Azerbaijani music bands at the end of the ‘80s and beginning of the ‘90s in Sumqayit. Because of the city’s terrible environmental problems and horrifying concentrated industrial use of chemicals, Sumgayit was often referred to as the “Soviet’s Pride, Azerbaijan’s Hell”. The city was known for its extremely diverse and rebellious population, as well as for its high poverty rates. For these reasons, Sumgayit had favorable conditions for the emergence of rock music.      

“The book of all books is already closed” - The author of these words is a famous book seller in the capital of Azerbaijan, Baku and Sumqayit (a city 30 km away from Baku) Khan Rasuloglu. Rasuloglu, 54, has been involved in the business of selling books for the last 20 years. Currently, he has book shops in both Baku and Sumqayit.  

Cotton, as white and soft as it is as a fiber, is a tough bush – and Qaratel Quliyeva’s hands carry the marks of the hard work.

The voices of regular people that Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich records in her Secondhand time: The last of the Soviets reveal a country, the writer’s native Belarus, which in the 1990s is yearning for meaning. When the USSR collapsed their world, and million of others’, shattered, Communism gave way to a capitalism, and the Soviet citizens plunged it into existential crisis. Quickly, euphoria gave way to despair.