Nagorno-Karabakh War - Revival of The Karabakh Issue

Revival of The Karabakh Issue

After Stalin's death, Armenian discontent began to be voiced. In 1963, around 2,500 Karabakh Armenians signed a petition calling for Karabakh to be put under Armenian control or to be transferred to Russia. Also in 1963, there were violent clashes in Stepanakert, leading to the death of 18 Armenians. In 1965 and 1977, there were large demonstrations in Yerevan, which also called for unifying Karabakh with Armenia.

As the new general secretary of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, came to power in 1985, he began implementing his plans to reform the Soviet Union. These were encapsulated in two policies, perestroika and glasnost. While perestroika had more to do with economic reform, glasnost or "openness" granted limited freedom to Soviet citizens to express grievances about the Soviet system itself and its leaders. Capitalizing on this new policy of Moscow, the leaders of the Regional Soviet of Karabakh decided to vote in favor of unifying the autonomous region with Armenia on 20 February 1988. The resolution read:

Welcoming the wishes of the workers of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region to request the Supreme Soviets of the Azerbaijani SSR and the Armenian SSR to display a feeling of deep understanding of the aspirations of the Armenian population of Nagorny Karabakh and to resolve the question of transferring the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR, at the same time to intercede with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to reach a positive resolution on the issue of transferring the region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR.

On 24 February, Boris Kevorkov, the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region party secretary and an Azerbaijan loyalist, was dismissed.

Karabakh Armenian leaders complained that the region had neither Armenian language textbooks in schools nor in television broadcasting, and that Azerbaijan's Communist Party General Secretary Heydar Aliyev had extensively attempted to "Azerify" the region and increase the influence and the number of Azeris living in Nagorno-Karabakh, while at the same time reducing its Armenian population (in 1987, Aliyev would step down as General Secretary of Azerbaijan's Politburo). By 1988, the Armenian population of Karabakh had dwindled to nearly three-quarters of the total population.

The movement was spearheaded by popular Armenian figures and found support among intellectuals in Russia as well. According to journalist Thomas De Waal some members of the Russian intelligentsia, such as the dissident Andrei Sakharov expressed support for Armenians. More prominent support for the movement among the Moscow elite was interpreted by some in the public: in November 1987 L'Humanité published the personal comments made by Abel Aganbegyan, an economic adviser to Gorbachev, to Armenians living in France, in which he suggested that Nagorno-Karabakh could be ceded to Armenia. Prior to the declaration, Armenians had begun to protest and stage workers' strikes in Yerevan, demanding a unification with the enclave. This prompted Azeri counter-protests in Baku.

After the demonstrations in Yerevan to demand unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia began, Gorbachev met with two leaders of the Karabakh movement, Zori Balayan and Silva Kaputikyan on 26 February 1988. Gorbachev asked them for a one-month moratorium on demonstrations. When Kaputikyan returned to Armenia the same evening, she told the crowds the "Armenians triumphed" although Gorbachev hadn't made any concrete promises. According to Svante Cornell, this was an attempt to pressure Moscow. On March 10, Gorbachev stated that the borders between the republics would not change, in accordance with Article 78 of the Soviet constitution. Gorbachev also stated that several other regions in the Soviet Union were yearning for territorial changes and redrawing the boundaries in Karabakh would thus set a dangerous precedent. But the Armenians viewed the 1921 Kavburo decision with disdain and felt that in their efforts they were correcting a historical error through the principle of self-determination, a right also granted in the constitution. Azeris, on the other hand, found such calls for relinquishing their territory by the Armenians unfathomable and aligned themselves with Gorbachev's position.

On 19 February 1988, during the seventh day of the Armenian rallies, the first counterprotest was held in Baku. The poet Bakhtiar Vahabzade and the historian Suleiman Aliarov published an open letter in the newspaper Azerbaijan, declaring that Karabakh was historically Azerbaijani territory.