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The Karabakh Wars, 1985-2025

Subject essay: Ronald Grigor Suny

In the story of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, nationalism certainly contributed to the collapse of the empire, but even more important was the weakening of the central Soviet government that resulted from the policies of Gorbachev. Ambitious central and non-Russian politicians in the republics seized the opportunity presented by Moscow’s unsteady hold on the country to demand, first, greater autonomy, then sovereignty, and finally, independence and separation from the Soviet Union. The rapid evolution from protest to revolution is illustrated by the protracted struggle over the autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh (Mountainous Karabakh; in Armenian, Artsakh), an Armenian exclave within the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan, one of the first places to exploit the freedoms offered by perestroika and glasnost’ to redress what local Armenians believed was not only an unjust violation of Lenin’s principle of national self-determination but an unnatural separation of two parts of their nation. The Karabakh conflict, which began in 1988, was fought in two major wars, and continued until an Azerbaijan’s ethnic cleansing of the region of Armenians in 2023, reflects in microcosm the larger evolution and the effects of Soviet nationality policies and is a potent example of how ethnic differences develop into conflict, violence, and war.

Profoundly shaped by the seventy-year experience of Soviet rule and the larger global context of twentieth-century nationalism, Armenians and Azerbaijanis lived in different discursive universes and different collective affective dispositions, even as they shared general notions about the legitimacy of the nation-form, the role of the international community, the Soviet legacy, and other matters. Like other peoples who have suffered unhealed trauma maintained in their historical memory, Armenians make up an affective community of a distinct type, one in which the tragedy of displacement, ethnic cleansing or genocide shapes the dominant forms of understanding of the nation and its antagonistic, threatening others. For Armenians the war with Azerbaijan over Karabakh was framed in the most powerful of all frames, that of genocide, the fear of total extermination at the hands of traditional enemies. The world is one in which they have been victims of greater powers, most importantly the Turks. They have turned the Turkic-speaking Azerbaijanis into the current stand-in for the Anatolian Turks of that carried out the Genocide of 1915.

For Azerbaijanis the world had also been one in which their agency has been sharply limited by the empires that dictated their fate. Among the agents of empire were the Armenians, whom they saw as favored by the outside forces that imposed themselves on Azerbaijan. As the proximate and more vulnerable victimizers, the Armenians are the ones on whom Azerbaijanis have turned their wrath – in the pogroms of 1905, the wars and massacres of 1918-1919, and the interethnic killing of 1988 and 1990 – rather than the Russians who ruled the empires in which they lived. Armenians are seen as an inherently aggressive, rapacious people, who initiated the conflict, victimized the Azerbaijanis, and used their privileged position in the world community (and with Russia) to perpetuate the humiliation of Azerbaijan.

The Karabakh conflict was the peculiar legacy of Soviet nationality policies. For much of the Soviet period the conventional wisdom of most Western writers on Soviet treatment of non-Russians was that Russification and repression weakened the nationalities of USSR and made them pliable victims of totalitarian manipulation. What was largely missed in this bleak picture were the ways in which Soviet policies consolidated non-Russians in territorialized political units and fostered sub-all-Union national consciousnesses. On February 13, 1988, street demonstrations began in Stepanakert, the capital of Karabakh, and six days later they were joined by mass marches in Erevan. In an unprecedented action, the Soviet of People’s Deputies in Karabakh, up to this time a typical rubber-stamp Soviet-style legislature, voted 110-17 to request from Moscow the transfer of Karabakh to Armenia. A new era of nationalist politics had opened in the USSR that within three years would challenge the authority of a defunct superpower.

The years 1988-1990 were crucial and complex. First in Sumgait, an Azerbaijani city near the capital, Baku, and later in Baku itself, ugly riots broke out with Armenians singled out for beatings, even murder. In the drab industrial town of Sumgait, Armenians were set upon by neighbors, hacked to death before the eyes of family members, several set afire. For Armenians the pogroms of Sumgait and Baku were the bloody proof that Armenians could never live under Azerbaijani rule and feel safe. Despite the reconstruction of the events of January 1990 by Azerbaijanis as “Black January” and its retelling as a story of Russian invasion and wanton killing of Azerbaijanis, those events were precipitated by several days of Azerbaijani attacks on local Armenians, followed by Soviet troops preventing further massacres.

For the next two decades the victory of the Armenians in the first Karabakh war (1988-1994) yielded no peace. Armenian forces compelled Azerbaijanis to evacuate large swaths of their country. Compromise between the two now-independent countries proved impossible. Suddenly, without warning, on the morning of September 27, 2020, armed forces from Azerbaijan launched an offensive across the armistice line established in 1994. Backed by Turkey and deploying the lethal Bayraktar drones as well as Israeli weapons, the Azerbaijanis battered the less well-armed Armenian fighters. This was the first war in which robotic weapons determined the outcome.

In September-October 2023, Azerbaijani forces drove the remaining 150,000 Armenians out of Karabakh. This constituted what the United Nations defined as “ethnic cleansing:” “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” Azerbaijan now dominated most of the land it had lost twenty-six years earlier. Autocracy had triumphed over democracy in the South Caucasus, and the dictatorial, corrupt Aliev regime had gained a kind legitimacy -- no longer simply based on dynastic succession of father to son but the aura of glorious victory over its inimical neighbor. The Russians no longer defended their most loyal ally, and the elimination of the Armenians in Karabakh occurred without much protest from Western powers that at the same time were supporting Ukrainians in their defense of democracy and national self-determination. Comparing the conflict in Karabakh with the war in Ukraine, one can conclude that the unraveling of the Soviet Union is still going on.

17 Moments in Soviet History - The Karabakh Wars by Ronald Grigor Suny is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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