Why Autonomy? The Making of Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region 1918–1925
ARSE`NE SAPAROV
Abstract
Mountainous Karabakh—an Armenian-populated area within Elizavetpol’ guberniya with a Turkic majority—became a source of dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan after the collapse of the Russian Empire. During the Soviet conquest of the region, the Bolshevik Party used the issue of Karabakh to promote its agenda by supporting at times the claims of its ally Azerbaijan, or those of Armenia when it needed to facilitate the capture of Zangezur. By 1921, when the Sovietisation of the region was complete, the Karabakh issue was still unresolved. The solution adopted was to leave Karabakh under Azerbaijani control on condition that it had autonomous status, but this was a solution that satisfied neither side.
THE ARMENIAN–AZERBAIJANI CONFLICT OVER Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the oldest in the post-Soviet space—dating from 1988. As with many of the post-communist conflicts, it started with popular demands to transfer from one sovereignty to another: in this case to transfer the Nagorno-Karabakh region from Azerbaijan to Armenia. It almost immediately turned violent and, with the dissolution of the USSR, a full-scale war erupted between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The ceasefire agreement signed in 1994 ended the active war and left the Armenians in control of most of the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region as well as several adjacent districts. Ever since then the line of contact between Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan has been reminiscent of the entrenched positions of the First World War. The Karabakh conflict has received wide academic attention. The Western literature addressing it has mainly concentrated on recent events as most works dealing with the conflict tend to focus mainly on the events of the post-Stalinist period, rarely venturing as far back as the period of the civil war of 1918–1921. Therefore, the reason behind the Bolsheviks’ decision to grant the autonomous status to Nagorno-Karabakh is left aside. It has become almost a cliché to blame the creation of the ethnic Armenian autonomy within Azerbaijan on Stalin, who by doing this created leverage against both republics. It seems that the absence of any Russian-language works on the subject is partially responsible for such lack of historical insight.
Indeed, Karabakh occupies an unusual place within the Soviet historiography of the civil war. Practically every autonomous formation in the USSR published its own history of the Bolshevik struggle during the civil war as a mandatory exercise in Soviet propaganda; but not so in Karabakh, where not a single volume in the Russian language dealing with these events appeared before the onset of the conflict in 1988. In fact, were a Russian-speaking reader to have been interested in the civil war in Karabakh, it would have been next to impossible for him or her to find out about these events.1 It should be mentioned that several works in the Armenian language appeared in Erevan (Hovhannisian 1971) and Baku (Shakhnazarov 1960; Avagyan 1962; Lernain 1963; Hovhannisian 1963; Barse 1963). Some glimpses of information could also be found in Russian-language works on the history of the region (Mil’man 1971; Kharmandaryan 1969). Nevertheless, it has remained an impossible task to understand the course of the civil war in Karabakh from the Russian-language sources. This perhaps explains the lack of historical analysis in Western works on the subject.
Towards the end of the Soviet Union the number of works addressing the Karabakh issue increased dramatically as both sides tried to back their political struggle with historical evidence. At the core of their debate lay the question of fairness and legitimacy. Armenian scholars saw the granting of Karabakh to Azerbaijan as unfair and illegitimate while their Azerbaijani colleagues quite naturally maintained the opposite view (Galoyan & Khudaverdyan 1988; Khurshudyan 1989; Kocharli 1989; Guliev 1989b). Several important collections of documents were published by both sides to prove their position (Libaridian 1988; Guliev 1989a; Mikaelyan 1992). After the dissolution of the USSR the debate continued along the same lines. In my opinion, the debate framed in terms of fairness compared to unfairness of the Bolshevik decision concerning Karabakh lacks an important element—the very logic informing that decision remains unclear.
The historiography of this issue poses yet another methodological problem. The history of the region is traditionally studied within two distinct periods—one covering the Revolution and civil war until the establishment of Soviet rule (Kazemzadeh 1951; Kadishev 1960; Swietochowski 1985; Hovannisian 1996b); and the other focusing primarily on Soviet economic and state construction in the early 1920s and 1930s (Kilbourn Matossian 1962). There are very few studies that link these two periods together (Altstadt 1992). The result of such periodisation is that the reasons for the granting of autonomy are usually studied within the second period after the Sovietisation of the region and the possible impact of the civil war on the Bolshevik decision-making is neglected.
The goal of this article is to understand the reasons that led the Bolshevik leadership to grant Karabakh to Azerbaijan and at the same time award it an autonomous status.
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