Alakbar Rezaguliyev was among the first artists to be arrested in Azerbaijan in what would later be termed as Stalin's Repression, in which an estimated 70,000 Azerbaijanis were executed or exiled along with hundreds of thousands of other citizens throughout the USSR.

All in all, Alakbar was arrested and sent to Gulag labor camps three times and spent more than 23 years of his life in exile: (1) Arkhangelsk at the Solovetsky Monastery in 1928; (2) Krasnoyarsk in Siberia in 1937, (3) and Altai, Central Asia in 1949.

He later told fellow Azerbaijani artist Rasim Babayev how it had 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).

When World War II broke out, Joseph Stalin exiled all Germans living in the Soviet Union.

The harsh experiences of imprisonment that he had suffered for more than two decades, after all, had been his fate merely through association and not based on any crime that he had ever committed himself.