After several days of ongoing unrest Moscow authorities occupied the city with paratroopers and tanks. Almost all the 14,000 Armenians in Sumgait fled the city after the pogrom. British journalist Thomas de Waal, who in 2005 published a documentary book "Black Garden" on the Karabakh conflict, writes: "The first-ever mass violence of the late Soviet era" was the pogrom of Armenians in Sumgait – unrest sparked on ethnic grounds in the town of Sumgait in Azerbaijan SSR in February 1988, accompanied by mass violence against the Armenian population of the town along with looting, arson, murders and destruction of property. On February 1988 at the session of Politburo of the Central Committee in Moscow it was officially acknowledged that mass pogroms and murders in Sumgait were carried out based on ethnicity. It was then that the academician Ziya Bunyadov, whom Tom de Waal calls "Azerbaijan's foremost Armenophobe" in his book, became famous with his article "Why Sumgait?" in which he blamed the Armenian victims for organizing the pogrom.