Armenia’s Race for Survival

The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan wasn’t fueled by ancient, mythical hatreds, not initially, at any rate. Rather, the dispute’s origins lie in the rise of modern nationalism amid the breakup of one imperial order—the great multinational empires that collapsed in the storm of the Great War—and the birth of a new one: the Soviet Union. At its most utopian, the Communist empire sought to bring about the emancipation of many peoples by transcending peoplehood as such. In practice, Gorbachev and his predecessors merely managed to freeze in place the various post-World War I nationalisms for the better part of a century—until one day, they couldn’t.

“The conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan wasn’t fueled by ancient, mythical hatreds.”

In 1918, in the aftermath of World War I, and centuries of first Persian and then Russian imperial rule, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were born as independent states. In Armenia’s case, the Turkish genocide of its Armenian population added an especially powerful impetus to independence. Almost immediately, border disputes arose between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis in three mixed provinces: Nakhichevan, Zangezur, and Karabakh.

The status of the first two of those regions—Nakhichevan and Zangezur—was decided in pitched battles waged by the two nationalist sides. Nakhichevan, a sliver of land lodged between Armenia and Turkey, fell into Azerbaijani hands, forming an Azeri exclave, and so it remains today. In Zangezur, in southern Armenia, the Armenians prevailed. In each case, the victorious side achieved a measure of ethnic consolidation—which is to say that it burned the other’s villages and drove out its population.

Left undecided, however, was the fate of Karabakh, which the Armenians call Artsakh. The mountainous spiritual heartland of the Armenian people, it’s where their alphabet was created, and where Armenian statehood endured even as it was extinguished elsewhere by the empires. Karabakhi Armenians retained their independence even through centuries of Iranian suzerainty, with their rulers styling themselves—and being recognized by the Persians as—“shahs.”

The indigeneity of the Armenians to Karabakh is irrefutable, given the presence of centuries-old churches and cross stones. Yet that hasn’t discouraged the current Baku regime from trying its hand at historical revisionism and bogus “archaeology” that involves removing Armenian inscriptions from churches—that is, when it hasn’t demolished memorial sites. These revisionist efforts include a bizarre claim that the Armenians are “interlopers,” who seized the region from Roman or Caucasian Albanians, a long-since-disappeared people not to be confused with Balkan Albanians. As Grigor Hovhannesyan, a former Armenian ambassador to Washington, told me with a sigh, “the nouveaux riches of this world can rewrite history.”

In the event, in 1920, the Red Army rolled in, conquering both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Soon the Bolsheviks would impose their big freeze on all national disputation. But what to do about Karabakh? Among their most fateful decisions, as far as the people of this region were concerned, was to grant Karabakh the status of an autonomous region within the new Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, having initially contemplated it as part of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Their logic—or illogic—has been the subject of voluminous Soviet historiography in the century since. In immediate geopolitical terms, the Bolsheviks were keen to appease oil-rich Azerbaijan, which they hoped would also coruscate as a revolutionary beacon, summoning the downtrodden masses of the Middle East to rise up against their rulers. But as historian Thomas de Waal has noted, there were other reasons, drawing on both older traditions of Russian statecraft and the precepts of Marxist ideology. For one thing, the Soviets took up the Russian imperial model’s insistence that individual governorates should make geographic and economic sense, and by their lights, the Azerbaijan republic wouldn’t be whole without Karabakh, since, for example, Azerbaijani shepherds would graze their livestock in the region. From a Marxist perspective, moreover, the Soviets believed that they could open up new utopian horizons by impelling ethnically diverse peoples to live side-by-side, forcing strangers to become “brotherly peoples.”

Here’s the crazy thing: For a long time, it all kind of worked.

For starters, there were the cosmopolitan foundations bequeathed by centuries of imperial rule. Azerbaijanis, while starting out as a Tatar or Turkic people with origins in the Central-Asian steppes, had already been deeply Persianized; Baku was a profoundly cosmopolitan place by the 19th century, home to many Jews as well as Armenians. Armenia likewise boasted a Tatar minority with its own mosques. Armenians also have profound links with Iran going back to their origins as a nation; the dynasty that Christianized Armenia a few years before the Constantinian conversion was an offshoot of the Persian Arsacids; the Armenian and Persian languages share a remarkable number of cognates. Atop this multinational foundation, the Bolsheviks sought to raise up a drab, secular-minded, Pravda-reading Homo Sovieticus, for whom what was supposed to matter wasn’t Armenian-ness or Azeri-ness, but the joint struggle for actually existing socialism.

And again, it sort of worked. Armenia thrived within the USSR, emerging as one of the most prosperous Soviet republics, owing to the technical and literary talents of Armenians, their seemingly preternatural ability to navigate Kremlin structures, and the Russians’ old affection for an Orthodox Christian nation that had somehow survived the rigors of dialectical materialism. Despite its carbon wealth, Azerbaijan was much poorer, though in later decades, Azerbaijani Soviet leaders managed to turn their republic into a minor regional manufacturing center. Russian was often the lingua franca of the public square—and sometimes also of the bedroom: For there were intermarriages on both sides of the internal Soviet border—an inconvenient fact that today baffles and repels both peoples.

For de Waal, the Achilles heel of Soviet imperialism was obsessive centralization. Although Moscow forced Azerbaijanis and Armenians (and many other rivalrous ethnicities besides) to live next to each other, all relations had to route through Moscow. Thus, these communities never developed a way of resolving their tensions at a lower level, by talking to each other. Instead, if some dispute arose over, say, the allocation of certain resources, both sides would separately dispatch envoys to the Kremlin; often, but not always, the Armenians fared better, owing to their mastery of the ways of Moscow.

For so long as Soviet power was waxing, and Soviet ideology retained its vitality, the thing could be kept together. But by the 1980s, neither was the case. To an extent unbeknownst to Gorbachev, the whole system was coming apart by the time the two Armenian writers visited him to make their case (in February 1988). The sense that the big Soviet freeze was thawing had given the Karabakhi Armenians an opening, which they used to repose the question left unsettled by the post-World War I settlement: namely, the question of their independence from Azerbaijan.

In the weeks and months that followed, peaceful protests gave way to flare-ups of violent intercommunal tension. For a short while, Homo Sovieticus made his last stand, and a nobility shone through his inescapable weakness: For when Azerbaijanis agitated by the Karabakhi uprising staged a vicious anti-Armenian pogrom in the Caspian city of Sumgait, young Communist militants were the only Azerbaijanis to come to the aid of their “brotherly people,” the Armenians. In doing so, they drew on left-internationalist traditions that were fast waning.

War broke out. Both sides committed atrocities: benzene injected into captured soldiers’ bodies, massacres of fleeing civilians, population transfers. Cases of infantrymen looking through their rifle’s sights, only to glimpse former neighbors and friends donning enemy uniforms, were hauntingly common. The Armenians benefited from a combination of zeal, initiative, early access to Soviet arms, and the assistance of the newly unemployed Russian officer class. When the dust settled, in 1994, Azerbaijan lost Karabakh, though no government—not even the Armenian one that had fought for it—formally recognized the newly formed Republic of Artsakh. For the Armenians in Armenia proper, it sufficed that their Karabakhi cousins were secure from potential ethnic cleansing, with a roadway known as the Lachin Corridor linking the two societies. So it was that the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute entered the 21st century, once more in a frozen state.