Contemporary Studies

[Guest]

Minorities, Mullahs, and Modernity: Reshaping Community in the Former Soviet Union

 

Mark Saroyan

Edited by Edward W. Walker http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ias/saroyan/...aroyan_toc.html

 

 

BEYOND THE NATION-STATE: CULTURE AND ETHNIC

POLITICS IN SOVIET TRANSCAUCASIA*

 

INTRODUCTION

Ethnic activism has emerged as one of the most difficult challenges for the USSR in the Gorbachev era. From the Baltic republics to the Caucasus and Central Asia, the scope and intensity of ethnic activism, along with the diversity of the issues raised, came as something of a surprise both for Soviet leaders in Moscow and observers of Soviet politics in the West. Western analysts of the Soviet ethnic politics have traditionally focused on the changing nuances of meaning articulated in party ideological tracts and nationalities policy, but reliance on official political discourse has willy-nilly been considerably discredited as a barometer of the diverse social and political interests emerging in the USSR’s multinational society. In the not too distant past, the legitimate issues of ethnic politics were largely defined by this official discourse that tended to concentrate its attention on relations between the center and the republics and between the dominant Russian population and the rest of the country’s ethnic communities. Now, it is ethnic activism itself, as diverse as the ethnic communities in which it is based, that has increasingly come to define the issues on the USSR’s ethnic political agenda.

 

The overt articulation of ethnic political interests in political rhetoric was constrained by a formulaic obeisance to the ideological tenets of a “new historical community, the Soviet people” and the “friendship of peoples,” but other fields provided more open and flexible forums for the elaboration of ethnic interests. One of these realms was that of culture, the products of literary, artistic, and other intellectual endeavors. Indeed, some of the major trends in ethnic culture of the post-Stalin period prefigured the contours of ethnic politics in the Gorbachev era. The themes of yesterday’s ethnic culture have often emerged as the issues of today’s ethnic activism. Thus, the obsolete notion that culture in the USSR is a passive victim of state policy needs to be replaced with a view of culture as an active participant in the definition of social interests and the formation of political agendas.

 

The emergence of public protests and conflict over Artsax, a predominantly Armenian enclave in the Azerbaijani republic, not only rattled political stability in the Caucasian republics, it also raised the issue of the rights of ethnic minorities outside their home republics to the all-Union level. But the Artsax conflict and the tragic violence that it continues to produce are best understood in this broader context of the increasingly vocal assertion of political and cultural rights for ethnic populations without administrative autonomy. This article examines the cultural origins of this dimension of ethnic activism among the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. It reviews the ways in which Stalinist policies shaped the construction and reconstruction of ethnic identity and the changes that representations of ethnic identity underwent in the post-Stalin period. In this process of nation-building, culture, especially national literatures and historiographies, has served to legitimate the changing conceptions of ethnic identity. But the production of culture does not proceed independently of politics and institutions. Institutions do not unilaterally determine the forms and contents of culture, but the novel forms of political organization brought by Soviet rule in the Caucasian republics established a new context for both cultural activity and ethnic politics in the USSR.

 

STALIN ANSWERS THE NATIONAL QUESTION: NATIONAL-STATE CONSTRUCTION

One of the crucial issues facing the young Soviet government was the development of new forms of political organization for the country’s multi-ethnic population. Early Soviet policies concerned with state formation were decisively influenced by Joseph Stalin’s 1913 article “Marxism and the National Question.” The core of this article is Stalin’s definition of a nation: “A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”1

 

Stalin’s definition of a nation has elicited much debate and criticism, but one of the points least discussed is his inclusion of territory as an attribute of the nation.2 The salience of the territorial dimension to Stalin’s understanding of nationality is reflected in the text of the article itself, which reads like an extended polemic against Austro-Marxist theories of the national question that identify national rights with the ethnic community, or nation, irrespective of location. It is against the Austro-Marxist conception of the nation and the related program for extra-territorial cultural-national autonomy that Stalin established his counter-program for the self-determination of territorially based nations.

 

It was only after the 1917 revolutions that the Bolshevik leadership embraced the notion of federalism—an idea that had previously been vehemently denounced in Lenin’s writings on the national question. One of the fundamental innovations of federal state formation under Soviet rule was based in the Stalinist linkage of ethnicity, territory, and political administration and enshrined in the idea of national statehood (natsional’naia gosudarstvennost’). The concept of national statehood was made an institutional reality by the creation of a federation of political divisions that were in fact ethno-territorial units and organized into an administrative hierarchy extending from the highest form of national statehood, the national republic, to the lowest, the national district (natsional’nyi okrug). In this way, the building blocks for the new Soviet federal system were not simply geographic administrative divisions but a collection of national-territorial states.

 

The political practices that grew out of the idea of national-statehood contributed to the development of national identification within the bounds of the territorial state as a means to “modernize” Soviet society along the lines of an essentially West European model—despite the sometimes assimilationist views of Bolshevik leaders.3 Nation-building in the republics was engineered in order to coincide with the ethno-territorial organization of Soviet state formation. Traditional social identities that had been constructed around social categories such as class, clan, tribe, and local patterns of urban and rural residence gave way, under Soviet policies, to a newer, overarching identity based on ethnicity. Thus, ethnic consolidation, not assimilation nor the attenuation of ethnic identity, has become one of the hallmarks of Soviet power. The Soviet state further institutionalized ethnic identity in 1932, when it inaugurated an internal passport system that included an officially recognized ethnic affiliation for each Soviet citizen. Through the passport system the state established itself as a regulatory agency for ethnicity, since it both endowed its citizens with an ethnic marker and reserved the rights to maintain or change their formal ethnicity.4

 

Azerbaijan provides an example of the regulatory function of the state in formal ethnic identity. In 1937, the majoritarian population of the Azerbaijani republic, formerly known as “Türk,” was reidentified with a new ethnonym, “Azerbaijani” (in the Azerbaijani language, “azärbaïjanly”). The ethno-genesis of the Azerbaijani nation can thus be traced, in a formal, bureaucratic manner at least, to the late 1930s. Hardly unique in the history of the Soviet or other states, the Azerbaijani case demonstrates the logic of Stalinist national-state construction, whereby the formation of a Soviet republic named Azerbaijan required the existence of an Azerbaijani nation to inhabit it.5

 

More than just name changes, the formation of national-territorial administrations served to promote and reinforce ethnic cohesion in a number of ways. Most basically, the creation of a state apparatus endowed with the features of a modern nation-state, including national flags, seals, and anthems in the language of the titular nationality of each republic, provided a sense of political and sociocultural security for each titular national community. For Georgians and Azerbaijanis, whose territories were dominated under Tsarism by a combination of Russian political administration and Armenian, Russian, and, to some extent, European economic elites, Soviet power provided the symbolic attributes of national self-determination. For the Armenians, the existence of one’s own national state provided an important sense of psychological and physical security for a population at least one quarter of which was comprised of refugees from the widespread massacres in Turkey.6

 

The federal system of national republics established not just the symbolic trappings of modern nation-states, but also the institutional basis for the formation of indigenous ethnic leaderships. The policy of korenizatsiia (nativization), adopted at the Soviet Communist Party’s Tenth Congress in 1921, promoted personnel from each republic’s titular nationality into a program of training and recruitment for service in the republic’s political, economic, and cultural administration. Although after 1934 the pace of nativization faltered, the net result was the creation of an ethnic administrative elite that remains durable to this day. Despite the political ups and downs of centralizing and decentralizing tendencies in the Soviet federal system during various periods of its history, the day-to-day management of politics, economics, and culture has remained essentially in the hands of Armenians in Armenia and of Azerbaijanis in Azerbaijan. Particularly in the cultural sphere, overrepresentation of the titular nationality in terms of its proportion of the republic’s population is not uncommon, even in the post-Stalin period.7

 

CULTURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF AN ETHNIC HABITUS

The transformation of cultural institutions and practices played an important part in the Bolshevik vision of how to construct a socialist state. Lenin himself argued that one of the essential foundations of the new social and political order was the learning of socialism, and so the production of a new culture was aimed at instructing the people in socialism.8 Especially in the wake of the cultural revolution of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the production and distribution of culture was organized in and through a series of organizations, from the state publishing houses and the ministries of culture and education to the creative unions of artists, writers, architects, and other cultural producers.

 

In the national republics, the formation of this network of cultural administrations and the forms of cultural production they promoted reflected the encouragement of nation-building within the context of Stalinist national-state formation. Cultural institutions in the national republics organized the creation, not simply of a national culture in general, but of one that would contribute to the identity-formation and ethnic cohesion of the politically designated titular nationality of each republic. In the realm of culture, the interconnection between the institutional form of the national republic and the program of nativization and nation-building became most apparent. The formation of cultural organizations and the organization of cultural practice reflected a politically inspired operational code of “one republic—one culture” that fit securely within the institutionalization of the Stalinist troika: one nation—one territory—one republic. In this sense, the status of “titular nationality” in a national-state administrative territory provided more than merely a nominal prestige; in fact, such status entitled the given ethnic community to cultural hegemony within its own territory.

 

The conscientious promotion of an ethnic culture during the period of national-state construction did not simply reflect existing forms of cultural and ethnic identity; rather it actively constituted a distinct sociocultural space and identity for the titular community of each republic. While the culturally mediated “nationalization” of the republics often referred back to ethnic traditions, the process of national-cultural construction developed not simply from the amorphous activization of “tradition” by the cultural intelligentsia but reflected the “modern” institutional innovations of Soviet national-state formation. Cultural producers organized in the various creative unions often engaged in the invention and reinvention of traditions that would reinforce the position of the titular nation on the territory of each national republic. The hegemony of the titular nationality was reproduced in all spheres of cultural practice, from the publishing of books, periodicals, and newspapers to the activities of theater and folkloric song and dance ensembles.9 For example, the formation of the Azerbaijani Writers’ Union brought together writers mainly of Azerbaijani nationality to organize and regulate the production of a Soviet Azerbaijani literature— not simply literature in Soviet Azerbaijan.

 

During the Stalinist period of national-cultural construction, the formation of an ethnic environment centered around the production of cultural representations of ethnic identity in which the linkage of nation and territory was decisive. Thus, ethnic cultural practices promoted, as a rule, a conception of national identity that was inseparable from the given territory of the national republic.10 In the Armenian republic, for example, a toponymic transformation during the Soviet period replaced a majority of the previously widespread Turkic or Muslim place names with Armenian toponyms that more appropriately identify the given territory as Armenian.11

 

Historiography was produced backwards from the current connection between nationality and territory, and, as a result, the officially canonized history of the titular nationality and that of the republic became virtually interchangeable. Azerbaijani historians produced histories of “Azerbaijan” in the medieval period based not on the historical facts of a prior national state but on the assumption that the genealogy of the present-day Azerbaijani republic could be traced in terms of putative ethnic-territorial continuity. Similarly, the history of the early medieval Christian kingdoms of Caucasian Albania that developed on the territory of the present-day republic was assimilated by Azerbaijani historians into the history of the Azerbaijani nation, despite the absence of linguistic and cultural similarities between the Caucasian Albanians and the contemporary Azerbaijanis. In this way, cultural practices substantiated claims to ethnic continuity based on the modern form of the territorial national state.

 

In literature, the production of historical novels, including works idealizing the relatively recent experiences of revolution and collectivization, contributed to the historical reconstruction of national identity and often glorified ethnic heritage and continuity largely within the context of the national homeland—that is, the national republic. In Armenia, the writing of historical novels often served to assimilate pre-Armenian history into the history of the Armenian nation.12

 

ETHNIC HEGEMONY AND MINORITY CULTURE IN THE NATIONAL REPUBLICS

The hegemony of the titular nationality was reflected not only in the cultural practices of the dominant nationality, but also in the cultural institutions and practices of ethnic minorities—that is, the nondominant national communities of each republic. Ethnic cultural institutions for the so-called “nonindigenous” national communities are weak, unlike in their home republics.13 While there are national-language schools, newspapers, and dramatic and literary associations forming the nucleus of a cultural life for nontitular ethnic communities, these cultural institutions are few and operate with limited resources. Moreover, they lack the infrastructural support of the entire network of cultural organizations in the home republic. In practice, the privileges granted to the titular nationality led to the deprivation of other nationalities resident in the republic.

 

The consolidation of the titular national community’s hegemony resulted in the historiographic and present-day compartmentalization of other ethnic groups in everything from the writing of history to the preservation of historical and cultural monuments.14 The Azerbaijanis, once a majority of the population of present-day Armenia, remain to this day a people without history, at least in Armenia. Similarly in Azerbaijan, the legacy of Baku’s flourishing Armenian cultural past is not a topic for local research agendas. In a recent Azerbaijani study of nineteenth-century architecture in Baku, Armenian architects are assimilated into the broader category of Russian and European architects, and Baku’s numerous monuments of Armenian architecture are literally written out of the city’s history.15

 

Nontitular nationalities were eliminated not only from the past but from the present as well. Thus, if one walks through the overwhelmingly Armenian-populated districts of Havlabar in Tbilisi or Ermänikänd in Baku (literally, “Armenian village”), street markers, storefront signs, and other basic features of the urban landscape are uniformly in the titular nationality’s language (Georgian or Azerbaijani) as well as Russian. The numerous Azerbaijani villages of Armenia and Georgia likewise display a “typically” Armenian or Georgian character. Moreover, they lack the cultural features such as bookstores full of literature in the national language or monuments to heroes of ethnic history that one could find in profusion in similar regions of the home republic. In effect, the cultural construction of social space remains remarkably loyal to the logic of the national state. Assimilated into the dominant ethnic environment, very little distinguishes these “distinct” ethnic areas from the surrounding landscape except for the ethno-cultural identity of the inhabitants.

 

Apart from the institutional limitations on the cultural activity of nontitular national communities, the extent of which is only now emerging in the Soviet media, the compartmentalization of ethnic culture is evident in the dominant themes of these groups’ cultural practices. Whereas in the home republic ethnicity is an important theme of cultural production, and national culture and history are conventional subjects of glorification and idealization, outside the home republic there is a virtual absence of self-conscious, explicitly ethnic themes. In the minority national schools outside the home republic, instruction, though conducted in the minority language, does not include national history and culture. The genre of the historical novel, which has served as an indispensable vehicle for the reconstruction of ethnic history in the home republics, is absent from the works of Armenian writers active in Azerbaijan and Georgia. In this sense, cultural practices among these minorities reflect an operational code that largely precludes the construction of minority national culture outside the home republic.16

 

CHANGING ETHNIC REPRESENTATIONS: FROM NATION-STATE TO NATION

So far it has been argued that the formation of ethnic identity in the Transcaucasus was structured by the establishment of national republics and a process of cultural construction that favored a national consciousness based on the identification of the nation and with a specific territory and state administration (the home republic). During the Stalinist period of Soviet history, two notable exceptions to this trend occurred in the immediate post-World War II period in both Armenia and Azerbaijan.

 

Prior to and during the formation of a pro-Soviet Azerbaijani state in Northern Iran during 1945–46, ethnic culture in Soviet Azerbaijan was mobilized to assert the existence and ethnic rights of the Azerbaijani nation outside the home republic—namely, in the short-lived Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan. Cultural references to Iranian Azerbaijan multiplied, implicitly arguing that the Azerbaijani nation was significantly larger than simply the Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.17 In Armenia, widespread media coverage was given to the lot of Armenians in the foreign diaspora in connection with the campaign to encourage repatriation to the Armenian republic, particularly from the Middle East, that began in the immediate postwar period. Whereas in the Stalinist period reference to the national rights of the Armenian diaspora would have been considered nationalist deviation, now public culture in Armenia focused on Armenian national communities outside of the republic’s borders.18 These departures, by which cultural discourse included Azerbaijanis and Armenians living outside their home republics as parts of their respective nations, came to an end by 1949, when cultural practices once again refocused on the national republic as the sole haven of ethnic existence.

 

It was not until after Stalin’s death in 1953 that significant changes in the thematic patterns of cultural production in Armenia and Azerbaijan began to emerge in a consistent manner. If representations of ethnicity under Stalin were generally restricted to the Soviet nation-republic, in the post-Stalin period these representations were reconstructed in a more inclusive conception of ethnic experience unfettered by contemporary political borders. This meant that cultural practice came to constitute nationhood, not just within the realm of the officially designated Soviet nation-homelands, but more broadly, in the experience of the given national communities, irrespective of geographic location. Whereas ethnic cultural practices had been compartmentalized through the state-sponsored program of nation-building organized around the identity of state, territory, and ethnicity, the culturally mediated process of nation-building now moved to incorporate national existence beyond the borders of the national republic.19

 

THE DECOMPARTMENTALIZATION OF ETHNICITY IN ARMENIA AND AZERBAIJAN

The cultural reconstruction of a single Armenian nation that extends beyond the borders of the Soviet Armenian republic has been most visible in the formation of an official discourse about Western Armenia, the geographic name given to the once Armenian-populated provinces of the Eastern Ottoman Empire.20 In this way, Armenian nationhood was culturally decompartmentalized from emphasis on the Armenian republic to incorporate the once large Armenian populations of Western Armenia into the broader category of the Armenian nation.

 

The reintegration of Western Armenians into Soviet discourse about the Armenian nation developed along a number of lines, but one of the more important themes of this discourse concerns the genocide of Western Armenians that took place in the Ottoman state during the First World War. The genocide is one of the most significant events of modern Armenian history, but Soviet Armenian writing on this subject developed only in the early 1960s. The authoritative benchmark for this new, inclusive historiography was the publication of Jon Kirakosyan’s The First World War and the Western Armenians, published in 1965 and revised for second publication in 1967. The mid-1960s witnessed the production of a number of other works on the genocide, yet it was only during the late 1970s and 1980s that a number of Armenian scholars under the sponsorship of Kirakosyan began to turn out an entire series of publicistic articles and studies examining the genocide and countering Turkish governmental and academic denials of the massacres. Apart from the genocide, an increasing number of studies were produced on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social, economic, and political history of Western Armenia.21

 

Western Armenian themes also developed in literary studies, where, as in historiography, they emerged only in the late 1950s and early 1960s.22 This scholarship has produced not just general critical histories of Western Armenian literature, but also works on individual writers and movements within the broader phenomenon. Along with the academic study of literature, more and more attention has been given to the publication and distribution of Western Armenian poets and prose writers, and major Western Armenian literary figures were well represented in the multi-volume series, the Library of Armenian Classics, that began publication in the 1970s.

 

Not only has scholarship on and publication of Western Armenian literature developed during the post-Stalin period, but the Western Armenian theme has become popular in the literary production of Soviet Armenian writers themselves. Poetry with Western Armenian themes has been produced by leading Armenian literary figures, including Hovhannes Shiraz, Paruyr Sevak, and Gevorg Emin. Strongly nostalgic prose, especially works devoted to the nineteenth-century Armenian revolutionary movement in the Ottoman Empire, has figured among the most popular writing in contemporary Soviet Armenia.23 During the 1960s and 1970s, Armenian literature developed its own version of village prose, but the genre often reflected ethnic experiences in the rural areas of Western Armenia prior to the genocide during the First World War outside, rather than in, Soviet Armenia itself. By the mid-1980s, Western Armenian themes had become so widespread in Soviet Armenian literature that the former head of the Armenian Writers’ Union, Vardges Petrosyan, complained, in his address to the Ninth Congress of Armenia’s writers in 1986, that Western Armenian themes had virtually overwhelmed indigenous Soviet Armenian literature.24

 

Along with Western Armenia, the worldwide Armenian communities that comprise an ethnic diaspora (in Armenian, spyurk) have become an increasingly popular theme in Soviet Armenian culture. Similar to the Western Armenian thematic, diasporan themes emerged as a significant trend only in the post-Stalin period, particularly in the wake of Khrushchev’s destalinization campaign initiated at the party’s Twentieth Congress.25 Especially during the late 1950s and 1960s, a range of historical and political studies of the Armenian communities of the Middle East and elsewhere contributed to the integration of diasporan Armenian experience into the historiography of the Armenian nation as a whole.26 By the time of the publication of the first volume of the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia in 1974, it seemed only natural that the geographic diversity of Armenian national existence be reflected. At the end of each article devoted to a specific country and sometimes even city, the encyclopedia’s editors included descriptions of the history and present state of the given locale’s Armenian communities.

 

Along with the discursive inclusion of diasporan Armenians into the category of “history of the Armenian people,” diasporan writers and literature have been increasingly incorporated into the distribution of literature in Soviet Armenia. Not only is diasporan Armenian literature now a specific topic of Soviet Armenian literary studies, but also anthologies and separate publications of diasporan literature have become increasingly evident in Soviet Armenia’s literary landscape.27 Local Soviet Armenian literary practice has also incorporated diasporan themes, such as the popular travelogues of the poet Silva Kaputikyan, that have served to extend cultural representations of ethnicity from Soviet Armenia to a shared yet distinct Armenian ethnic experience in Lebanon, Argentina, and the United States.

 

One of the significant trends within the diasporan theme in Soviet Armenian cultural production is the “inner diaspora” theme (in Armenian, nerkin spyurk)—that is, the history and culture of Armenian settlements within the current territory of the Soviet Union. This trend includes studies of the formerly large Armenian communities of the Ukraine, Moscow, and Petersburg along with smaller communities in the Crimea and Central Asia.28 While the general diasporan themes developed beginning in the late 1950s, Soviet Armenian writing on the “inner diaspora” emerged much later and much more slowly. Moreover, the production and distribution of knowledge about the inner diaspora has, especially in comparison with the non-Soviet diasporan theme, in the case of history writing often been restricted to the prerevolutionary, pre-Soviet period.29

 

Official historiography of the inner diaspora often ends in 1917, but the continuing vitality of Armenian cultural practice outside Armenia became a subject of greater attention in the 1970s and 1980s. Studies of Armenian cultural development in Soviet Georgia, especially in the fields of literature and theater, have figured prominently. Armenian culture and literary activity of the Armenian communities in Southern Russia and along the Black Sea coast have more recently been highlighted.30 Some attention has been given to Armenian cultural activity in Soviet Azerbaijan, but recent Armenian publications have tended to focus on the poor state of Armenian cultural monuments in that republic’s formerly Armenian Artsax and Nakhichevan regions.31

 

In Azerbaijan, the themes of post-Stalin cultural production have likewise been decompartmentalized to allow a more inclusive representation of Azerbaijani ethnic experience. In post-Stalin Azerbaijani culture the representation of an Azerbaijani nation now extends beyond the borders of the republic to incorporate the Azerbaijani populations of northern Iran, known in Baku as Southern Azerbaijan, as well as the Azerbaijanis of Armenia, Georgia, and Dagestan.

 

Indeed, one of the main trends of Soviet Azerbaijani culture during the post-Stalin period has centered around Southern Azerbaijan, often referred to simply as the South (in Azerbaijani, Jänub). In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the South became an increasingly visible component of Azerbaijani cultural production in Baku. In literature, the abundance of Southern themes has even given rise to the formation of an entire subgenre of Soviet Azerbaijani literature, dubbed the “literature of longing” (in Azerbaijani, häsrät ädäbiïïaty) by its practitioners.32 Prose writers such as Mirzä Ibrahimov, and poets, including Balash Azäroghlu, Süleïman Rüstäm, Äli Tudä, and others, many of whom were born in Iran and later emigrated to Soviet Azerbaijan, have been at the forefront of this cultural movement which has warmly embraced the South as an integral part of the Azerbaijani nation. This developing reintegration of the ethnic experiences of the Southern Azerbaijani populations with those of their northern co-nationals was often exemplified in works with titles such as We Were Separated from One Root, suggesting that a single Azerbaijani nation exists in spite of its division between two states.33

 

Poets have been especially active in the production of a literature of longing that permeates contemporary Azerbaijani literary practice. Remarking that the South has played an important role in Azerbaijani literature’s return to its roots and to its identity, the former head of the Azerbaijani Writers’ Union, Ismaïyl Shykhly, in his address to the Eighth Congress of Azerbaijan’s writers, was moved to claim that: “We can find longing for the South and pain for the South in the works of practically all our poets.”34

 

Indeed, not only has the South become a theme of a domestically produced Soviet Azerbaijani culture, but the 1980s has witnessed an increase in the publication and distribution of Southern Azerbaijani literature in Baku. One large-scale undertaking in this trend is the publication of a four-volume anthology of Southern Azerbaijani literature, of which three volumes have already been published.35

 

Concomitant with the rise of Southern thematics in literary production, Soviet Azerbaijani historiography has increasingly focused its attention on the history and culture of the South. Reflecting on the need to reconstruct the public discourse on Azerbaijani history, the head of the History Faculty at Azerbaijan State University, I. Mahmudov, recently noted: “We have [previously] tried to look at our people’s historical past only within the framework of Soviet Azerbaijan’s current borders. As far as I’m concerned, when discussing all issues of our ancient, medieval, and contemporary history, the history of Southern Azerbaijan must not be forgotten.”36

 

The focus of this new, decompartmentalized historiography most often explores the modern history, culture, and politics of the South.37 One of the more important publications in this field is a recent volume that provides a comprehensive history of Southern Azerbaijan after 1828—the first Azerbaijani history that concentrates on the South’s distinct development since the division of Azerbaijan between the Persian and Russian empires.38 Thus, at the same time that Azerbaijani historians are endowing the South with its own historical identity, they are also working to reintegrate the South into their representation of a unified historiography for a unified Azerbaijani nation.

 

But the discursive unification of North and South in contemporary Azerbaijani cultural practice should not overshadow the more general expansion of the idea of a single Azerbaijani culture and nation, as is often the case with political reception and interpretations of this trend in the West.39 Representations of Azerbaijani national existence have simultaneously expanded to include the large Azerbaijani communities of present-day Armenia, Georgia, and Dagestan. The legitimation of this trend was recently argued by an Azerbaijani intellectual, who proposed that: “The arts and culture of the Azerbaijanis living in Georgia, Armenia, Central Asia and Iranian Azerbaijan are without a doubt an inseparable part of the arts and culture of the entire Azerbaijani people.”40

 

Although in Azerbaijani cultural discourse there is not, as yet, a notion similar to the Armenian one of an ethnic diaspora, nevertheless the culture of Azerbaijanis living outside both North and South has gained increasing attention in Baku. Especially prominent in this trend is the inclusion of Azerbaijani history and contemporary cultural activity on the present territory of the neighboring republics of Armenia and Georgia.41 The development of Azerbaijani culture, especially literature, in Dagestan has also been a subject of emerging exploration.42 At times, this trend has come to include references to a Turkic-speaking ethnic group in Iraq, the Turkmens, who are considered in Baku to be the descendants of Azerbaijani emigrants.43 Taken as a whole, these trends focusing on the South and the Azerbaijani communities outside Azerbaijan reflect a corresponding shift in the operative code of cultural practice from the compartmentalized Stalinist notion of “one republic—one culture” to the post-Stalin principle of “one nation—one culture,” irrespective of politico-administrative and geographic considerations.

 

CULTURAL CONTEXT AND THE LEGITIMATION OF

ETHNIC DEMANDS

Conventional political commentary on the origins of the current upsurge of ethnic demands points to the role that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost has played in legitimating the expression of ethnic claims and demands. Some exaggerate the role of state policy and argue that glasnost has somehow “caused” the expansion and intensification of these demands. While it is undeniably true that current policies have served to legitimate the claims for national and cultural rights “from above,” there has also been a legitimation of ethnic demands “from below,” especially from within the realm of cultural production.

 

In Armenia and Azerbaijan, cultural practices have provided a forum for the post-Stalin reconstruction of ethnic identity that embraces the nation as a whole and not just the population of the national republic. The climate of opinion formed in the realm of cultural practice has led to a crisis of political representation, in which demands for the national and cultural rights of co-nationals living beyond the borders of the home republics have figured prominently. In this way, not only has glasnost had an impact on cultural practices under Gorbachev, but the politics of culture has decisively influenced the culture of politics in Armenia and Azerbaijan. By providing a novel framework for the conception of ethnic identity, cultural practices have contributed to the legitimation of an agenda of ethnic rights which include problems of national existence beyond as well as within the borders of the republics.

 

It is in this context that the Armenian movement for Artsax emerged. In view of the post-Stalin shift in ethnic identity described in this paper, in which the culturally mediated definition of the nation emphasized ethnic and cultural attributes over political and territorial features, the demand for the legitimate reintegration of the Armenians of Artsax into the Armenian nation as a whole is a natural one.

 

The Armenian struggle over Artsax was expressed most overtly in its territorial designs, but behind the calls for annexation was the larger, indeed, more complex, issue of the rights of nationalities living outside their home republics.44 One of the fundamental thrusts of the Armenian movement for Artsax has been the restitution of Armenian national-cultural rights in Azerbaijan—from the provision of Armenian-language television and radio broadcasting to the improvement of Armenian educational, publishing, and other cultural facilities in the disputed region. In a word, Armenians demanded that the same national and cultural rights accorded to Armenians in the Armenian republic be provided to the Armenian populations of Azerbaijan.

 

The Artsax question is only one of a series of issues focusing on the rights of Armenians to their language, history, and culture—to their national identity—beyond the borders of their republic. In this sense, even the successful annexation of the Artsax autonomous region to Armenia would leave unsolved the related problem of national-cultural rights for the large Armenian communities of Azerbaijan that are located outside the region.45

 

Prompted in part by the pan-Armenian euphoria over Artsax, the Armenian republican media have reflected an upsurge of interest in the Armenian diaspora both within and beyond Soviet borders. During the past year, the multiplication of demands for educational and cultural rights of Armenians outside the republic has produced a pattern of concessions that have either followed or preempted these demands. In addition to the concessions made in Artsax, Armenian schools in Georgia are being rebuilt and renovated, and the teaching of Armenian history in Georgia’s Armenian schools has been improved with the publication of new Armenian-language textbooks and the creation of teacher-retraining programs.46

 

Similar developments outside the southern Caucasus have received wide attention in Armenia’s media. In order to meet the cultural needs of the growing Armenian community in Moscow, an Armenian cultural center was recently opened at the Permanent Representation of the Armenian SSR in the Soviet capital, where, in addition to other activities, special courses in Armenian language are now offered.47 In Rostov, the site of an old Armenian colony, a new association, “Nor Nakhichevan,” recently began operation, and instruction in Armenian language and literature has begun.48 New Armenian cultural organizations have also been organized for the Armenian communities in Leningrad, Tallinn, Riga, Lvov, Kharkov, and Simferopol, among others.49

 

This pattern of demands for the rights of a people beyond their national republic has also been replicated in the case of the non-Soviet Armenian diaspora. Special consideration to Armenia’s relations with the diaspora was given during a plenum of the Armenian Communist Party in September 1988. In line with the renewed attention to the Armenian diaspora, Norayr Adalyan, a secretary of Armenia’s Writers’ Union and the former editor of the union’s weekly newspaper, Grakan Tert, has argued that the “half of our people” living in diaspora merit greater consideration from Armenia’s political and cultural leaders. He complained that the efforts to expand diaspora-homeland relations through the state Committee for Cultural Relations with Armenians Abroad have been insufficient. He called for Yerevan to publish at least five or six books per year by diasporan writers, and added that local publications should be printed in larger press-runs to meet demands for their distribution in the diaspora.50

 

A number of organizational changes have also been proposed to expand relations with the diaspora. One of the points of the unofficial Artsax committee’s program was the formation of Armenian representations in foreign countries with large Armenian communities.51 The recent opening of Yerevan offices for the foreign-based Armenian General Benevolent Union and the Armenian Assembly of America, reportedly planned before the earthquake, provides expanded organizational channels for the development of close relations between the Armenian republic and Armenians of the diaspora.52

 

Demands for the expansion of relations with diasporan Armenians have obtained an economic dimension as well. In his address to the September 1988 plenum of Armenia’s Communist Party’s Central Committee, First Secretary Suren Arutunian (Harutyunyan) emphasized that perestroika allows for the improvement of economic cooperation between Armenia and the diasporan Armenian communities. Echoing this position, one recent article called for the creation of a special government office to foster greater economic collaboration between Armenia and Armenians in the diaspora.53 Such an organization could more efficiently promote investment by diasporan Armenians who have become especially active in the reconstruction of the earthquake-devastated regions of northern Armenia.

 

Though very few Armenians remain in present-day Turkey, the cause of Western Armenia has not lost its contemporary political relevance. As a direct result of popular demands voiced during the Artsax crisis, the republic’s leadership officially recognized the genocide of the Western Armenians as a national tragedy and proclaimed 24 April a republican holiday to commemorate the event. More than of just symbolic importance, Western Armenia has the potential to become a practical political cause. Despite the current lack of success in the campaign to annex Artsax to Armenia, Viktor Hambartsumyan, president of Armenia’s Academy of Sciences and a member of the Congress of People’s Deputies, spoke to the Supreme Soviet to voice Armenian political and territorial claims to the Western Armenian provinces now in Turkey.

 

In Azerbaijan, political demands for national rights for Azerbaijanis living outside the republic developed in the context of an inclusive cultural discourse on Azerbaijani nationhood, but there is little doubt that the political catalyst for the recent upsurge of demands is the Armenian movement for Artsax. In this sense, glasnost has permeated Azerbaijani political life as a result of the pressures of Armenian activism from below and not just at the behest of Moscow.

 

Often formulated as a set of counter-demands to the Armenian struggle for Artsax, Azerbaijanis have voiced repeated concern over the fate of their co-nationals and demanded the protection of their culture in the Armenian republic.54 Like the Armenian complaints, Azerbaijanis point to examples of cultural repression in the Armenian republic and call for the provision of full national and cultural rights for the Azerbaijanis of Armenia.55 In response to popular Azerbaijani demands for the elimination of Artsax’s autonomous status, numerous Azerbaijani intellectuals have argued instead for the formation of an autonomous district for Azerbaijanis in Armenia in order to protect their status as a national community.56

 

Azerbaijanis have also made broader claims for the protection of their nationhood. In reviewing the threat to Azerbaijani national existence outside Soviet Azerbaijan, the director of the Nizami Institute of Azerbaijani Literature, Ïashar Garaïev, complained that the more than 15 million Azerbaijanis in Iran are deprived of their rights to cultural and social development. Garaïev also points out that the large Azerbaijani communities in Georgia, Armenia, and Dagestan are generally less developed and not accorded the same rights as other local inhabitants. Attacking the inattention to Azerbaijani cultural facilities in these republics, he further complains that the Armenian government has changed Azerbaijani toponyms in Armenia in an effort to deprive Azerbaijanis of their own history.57 Similarly, Anar, the current head of Azerbaijan’s Writers’ Union, has made appeals to safeguard the Azerbaijani patrimony outside the republic by linking the protection of national monuments to the development of ethnic culture and national self-preservation in Armenia and elsewhere.58

 

Despite increased attention to the plight of Azerbaijanis living in Armenia and other parts of the Soviet Union (to a large extent a response to the Armenians’ Artsax movement), the formulation of ethnic demands emanating from Baku has increasingly revolved around the Azerbaijanis “on that bank”—that is, the Azerbaijani populations living south of the Araz River that separates the USSR from Iran. Garaïev’s comment rings a common note of concern: “Throughout history Azerbaijan has been parceled up many times. Three-fifths of its territory and its population have remained on that bank of the Araz. This is a historical injustice.”59

 

In a recent series of essays on history, culture, and education sponsored by the literary monthly Azärbaïjan, the inclusion of “Southern” themes in school and university curricula was a repeated point of concern. A Baku literary critic complained that the teaching of literature in the republic gives the impression that Azerbaijan is a nation of only five million, not twenty million.60 Similar demands for including study of Southern literature, history, and geography have been voiced by other Azerbaijani intellectuals.61 The demands to publish more literature on Southern Azerbaijan, as well as to publish more literature from writers living in Iran, are made in the name of the entire Azerbaijani nation. Thus, the increased attention to Southern issues in Baku often reflects the perceived political responsibility of Soviet Azerbaijanis to act on behalf of their foreign compatriots, whose ethnic cultural activity is stringently restricted by the Iranian government.62

 

Connected with the issue of Southern Azerbaijan is the important problem of access. Contemporary Soviet Azerbaijani is written with a modified Cyrillic script, but materials published in Southern Azerbaijan are in the traditional Arabic alphabet. As one critic complained: “One people with two alphabets! There isn’t a second phenomenon like this in the world. The alphabet divides not only our history but also our geography into two.”63 Such demands for expanded instruction in the “old” alphabet have been met by requiring coursework in the Arabic script for all students in the humanities and social sciences at Azerbaijan State University, and Azerbaijan’s Bilik (Knowledge) society has introduced a new public program to teach Azerbaijani in the Arabic alphabet. Promoters of the plan note that the allocation of additional resources necessary for the development of textbooks and other reading materials has not yet occurred.64

 

The desire for expanding relations with Azerbaijanis abroad has also increased. In 1988, the new Vätän (Homeland) society was organized to promote and regulate ties between the republic and Azerbaijanis living outside the USSR. Formed out of the Azerbaijani compatriots’ department at the Azerbaijani Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, the new organization provides an important institutional channel for the development of relations not only with Southern Azerbaijan, but also with Iranian Azerbaijani emigrants now living in the West, especially Europe and North America.65

 

Nonetheless, a review of Vätän‘s activities demonstrates the still limited potential for a rapprochement of Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan. In this respect, recent complaints voiced in the Azerbaijani press point out that improved access to relatives, friends, and compatriots living in Iran cannot be met without the right of free movement across the Soviet-Iranian border: “I well understand that the claim to change current borders means creating the danger of war. But along with respecting today’s borders, isn’t it [possible] to broaden economic and cultural ties between North and South Azerbaijan and to guarantee travel back and forth [across borders] on certain days of the week?”66

 

ETHNIC CULTURE AND THE EMERGENCE OF CROSS-REPUBLIC CONTACTS

The Homeland Society in Azerbaijan and Armenia’s Committee for Cultural Relations with Armenians Abroad each provide organizational channels for the development of contacts between the republic and co-nationals resident outside the USSR. A seemingly more contentious issue is the development of relations between the national republic and nationals living beyond the republic’s traditional political jurisdiction. Appeals for the protection of national communities outside the home republic are often linked with proposals to establish cross-republic institutional ties aimed at an improvement of ethnic integration regardless of traditional jurisdictional boundaries. Approximately one-third of the USSR’s Armenians live outside the home republic; hence the perceived need for greater extra-territorial cultural protection is particularly acute for the Armenians.67

 

Since the formation of a special government administration for Artsax in January 1989, cultural institutions in the region have developed greater organizational connections with like institutions in Armenia, thus providing a model for an emergent pattern of horizontal ties between republic-based nations and extra-republican national communities. Yerevan students have organized volunteer groups to work temporarily in Artsax, while admission of Artsax students to Armenia’s institutions of higher education, especially teacher-training institutes, has been facilitated. While the prospects of opening a branch of Yerevan State University in Artsax are dim, numerous newly established cultural organizations there have promoted a series of cooperative agreements with their counterparts in Armenia. Emphasizing the importance that these measures hold for the cultural and ethnic integration of the Armenian nation, activists have argued that the cultural contacts are conceived of as ties between “two sections of the same people.” Likewise, Armenian cultural leaders underscore that the further development of ethnic culture must transcend politico-administrative divisions and operate on the principle of “one people—one culture.”68

 

The expansion of Armenia’s cross-republic institutional ties has not been limited to Artsax. The Armenian Writers’ Union recently announced its intention to develop contacts with Armenian writers throughout the Soviet Union, especially the strong literary communities of Tbilisi, Baku, Rostov, and Sukhumi.69 Remarking on the advanced Armenian literary and publishing life of Sukhumi in the pre-Soviet period, one member of a Writers’ Union delegation visiting Armenians along the Black Sea coast, Vazgen Kansuzyan, asked rhetorically: “[And] now? Not one Armenian paper, not one page, not one word.” In view of the situation, Kansuzyan called not only for better organization of Armenian writers in the region, but also for the expansion of possibilities for publishing the works of local Armenians in Yerevan. In addition, he pointed to the need for Yerevan-based teacher-training courses to improve instruction in the Armenian schools of Abkhazia.70

 

In the various Soviet cities where Armenian cultural centers have opened to serve the local Armenian communities, cultural activists have appealed for material assistance, as well as moral support, from the home republic. In Tallinn, Armenian requests for a permanent building to house the cultural association were recently met by local authorities, but Tallinn’s Armenian activists plan to expand and renovate the premises by securing the aid of the Armenian republic’s various creative unions.71 In order to accommodate the sudden increase in cultural relations between the republic and Armenian communities throughout the USSR, the Armenian historian Sergei Vardanyan has pressed for the formation of a new government committee to organize and promote these cultural ties. The model for his proposal is the Committee for Cultural Relations with Armenians Abroad, an organization whose jurisdiction is over only Armenians outside the USSR.72

 

Azerbaijani measures to establish relations with co-nationals outside their republic have been especially concerned with the large community in Georgia, in part because most of the once large Azerbaijani population of Armenia has now emigrated. During the 1987 visit of the Tbilisi Azerbaijani writers’ group Dan Ulduzu to Baku—itself a product of improving ties—members of the Azerbaijan Writers’ Union emphasized that the republic’s cultural associations had special tasks to fulfill since Azerbaijani culture extended far beyond the current political borders of Azerbaijan. At a meeting with the Dan Ulduzu organization, Anar, head of the Azerbaijan Writers’ Union, addressed the directors of publishing houses and the editors of major Baku periodicals by name, to emphasize the need for them to facilitate local publication of Azerbaijani literature from Georgia.73

 

By 1989, the central committees of Georgia’s and Azerbaijan’s Communist parties had developed a program for the extension of rights to Georgia’s Azerbaijani community. According to the agreement, Azerbaijani language education in Georgia is to be expanded and improved and is to include instruction in the history and culture of Azerbaijan. An Azerbaijani cultural center, to be established in Tbilisi, will serve as a base for the exchange of cultural workers from the Azerbaijani republic and house museums devoted to Azerbaijani heroes; special retail outlets for Azerbaijani products and other cultural facilities are planned for the Azerbaijani-populated districts of Georgia.74

 

Azerbaijan’s promotion of extra-republican cultural-institutional ties has reached Moscow as well. The establishment of an Azerbaijani cultural center in Moscow to serve the cultural needs of the Azerbaijani “diaspora” has recently been complemented by the introduction of Azerbaijani radio broadcasts to bring music and news of the home republic to the estimated 50,000 Azerbaijanis resident in the country’s capital.75

 

NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY AND SOVIET POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

Ethnic politics in the national republics has increasingly revolved around claims for sovereignty and the rights of citizenship in an effort to substantiate demands for more control over local affairs. Claims of sovereignty are hardly new in Soviet politics.76 But today arguments are no longer made for the sovereignty of the national republics; ethnic activists currently conceive of a kind of sovereignty that inheres not simply in the national republic but in the nation, without regard to political borders. The decompartmentalization of ethnic identity developed in the realm of culture throughout the post-Stalin period has now emerged full-blown in social and political activism under Gorbachev.

 

The explosion of demands for ethnic rights in the national republics has been met with the Kremlin’s promise of greater autonomy and the decentralization of decision-making in political, economic, social, and cultural affairs. Nonetheless, the emergent principle of a “strong center and strong republics” has done little to meet the challenge of demands in Transcaucasia, which move across republican borders to focus on the rights of national communities living outside their home republics. In the wake of the Artsax crisis, and especially since the Nineteenth Party Conference held in 1988, the Kremlin leadership has expressed a preparedness to protect the rights of national communities without forms of administrative autonomy, including ethnic groups living outside their designated homelands.77 But this tendency represents more a collection of ad hoc measures in face of acute ethnic political crises than the reflection of a coherent nationality policy.

 

The problem of ethnic minorities is especially challenging since the provision of greater autonomy to the national republics often contradicts the center’s professed concern for the protection of minority civil and cultural rights. Ethnic leaderships in the national republics of Transcaucasia are increasingly responsive to demands for the “restructuring” of ethnic cultural institutions to benefit the titular national communities at the same time that minority national communities are demanding more resources for their own cultural development. In Azerbaijan, for instance, discussions of language policy have concentrated on the extension and reinforcement of Azerbaijan improvement of their own ethnic cultural facilities in the region; the Azerbaijanis have emphasized the need to earmark these national languages.78

 

Moreover, competition over the allocation of scarce resources in the Caucasus has repeatedly led to conflict between the region’s dominant and nondominant ethnic groups. This ethnic competition is one of the reasons for the continuing political crisis over Artsax; while Armenians are claiming specially allocated government resources for the improvement of their own ethnic cultural facilities in the region, the Azerbaijanis have emphasized the need to earmark these resources for the development and protection of Azerbaijani culture in the Azerbaijani-populated areas of Artsax.

 

A similar conflict over the organization and financing of ethnic cultural development has emerged in the case of Georgia’s Abkhaz minority. This conflict has resulted not in greater protection of Abkhaz culture but in the activization of anti-minority chauvinism among the Georgians. In this context, the emergence of more strident ethnic activism among the Georgian republic’s large Armenian and Azerbaijani minorities lies ominously on the horizon.

 

Where national republican leaderships are intent on further “nationalizing” their ethnic space, minority ethnic communities quickly learn the implications of increasingly “strong republics.” The massive, violent exchange of ethnic populations that occurred between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the fall of 1988 came after nearly a year of tense political struggle, but it ultimately reflected a kind of common sense imposed by the logic of the nation-state. Especially in the Transcaucasus, the promise of greater autonomy and sovereignty for republics founded on an ethnic principle can thus easily translate into the powerful and even violent domination of titular nations over national communities that are institutionally deprived of the benefits of such newly gained power.

 

Despite the expressed will to solve the complex challenge of the Soviet Union’s new national question, the Gorbachev leadership has in effect proposed political solutions to a fundamentally institutional problem. Thus, while the Kremlin moves to reinforce the rights of the national republics and redefine Soviet federalism, ethnic politics has already transcended the institutional bounds of the national-republic system. The emergence of cross-republican cultural ties has mitigated the severity of ethnic competition, but these developments in the Caucasus, even in the case of Armenia’s relation with Artsax, remain fairly limited.

 

To borrow a metaphor from Samuel Huntington, ethnic political activism has outpaced the state’s capacity for innovative political institutionalization.79 Popular participation in movements for national rights outside the home republic has greatly outflanked the ability of party and state officials to find new forms to manage the national-cultural demands of these communities without administrative-territorial autonomy. Indeed, as long as the system of national states remains one of the organizing principles of Soviet rule, the problem of minority populations resident in someone else’s ethno-territorial space will continue to challenge Soviet policy-makers as a living legacy of Stalinist national-state formation.

 

 

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NOTES

* I would like to thank the Social Science Research Council and the International Research and Exchanges Board for research support, and Martha and Tony Olcott, Louisa Schein, and Michael Coop er for their critical comments on earlier drafts of this article.

 

 

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1. J. V. Stalin, Works, vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), p. 307.

 

2. For recent Western discussions of Stalin and the national question, see Walker Connor, The National Question in Marxist-Leninist Theory and Strategy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), and Hélène Carrère-d’Encausse, Le Grand Défi: Bolchéviks et nations, 1917–1930 (Paris: Flammarion, 1987).

 

3. On the connection between national-state formation and social modernization, see Gregory J. Massel, The Surrogate Proletariat (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1974).

 

4. On the workings of the passport system in Soviet ethnic relations, see Victor Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1982), pp. 91–129.

 

5. In addition to the “ethnic” Azerbaijanis, distinct ethnic groups living in Azerbaijan, including the Talysh, Kurds, and others, were also reidentified as Azerbaijani during this period. The prominent Azerbaijani historian Süleïman Äliïarov has recently argued that the full history of ethnonymic changes undergone by the Azerbaijanis should become public knowledge and no longer hidden. See his comments in “Bizim sorghu,” Azärbaïjan, no. 7 (1988): 176. In fact, the 1937 name-change was only the last move in a lengthy debate that emerged in the late nineteenth century over how to name the Azerbaijanis. For a brief discussion, see E. M. Akhmedov, Filosofia azerbaidzhanskogo prosveshcheniia (Baku: Azämäshr, 1983).

 

6. For estimates on the influx of Armenian refugees into Russian Armenia from Turkish Armenia, see G. E. Avagyan, Haykakan SSH bnakchutyune (Yerevan: Yerevani Hamalasarani Hratarakchutyun, 1975), pp. 32–33.

 

7. Grey Hodnett, Leadership in the Soviet National Republics: A Quantitative Study of Recruitment Policy (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1978), p. 399.

 

8. V. I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,” in his Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1971), pp. 470–83.

 

9. For a recent general discussion of trends in the production and consumption of titular national culture in the republics, see Sotsial’nokul’turnyi oblik sovetskikh natsii (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), esp. pp. 180–295.

 

10. Here, as elsewhere in this article, I am emphasizing predominant trends in cultural practice. Nevertheless, cases in which ethnic representations move beyond the national republic can be identified in, for example, literary production. For instance, Vahan Totovents’ three-volume novel published in the 1930s, Baku (Yerevan: Haypethrat, 1930–34), and Mämmäd Said Ordubadi’s three-volume novel of the same period, Dumanlv Täbriz (Baku: Azämäshr, 1930–48).

 

11. A useful reference for study of Armenia’s toponyms is A. A. Asla

[Guest]

TROUBLE IN THE TRANSCAUCASUS

 

More than disaster relief was on the minds of Soviet authorities in the wake of the 7 December earthquake that devastated two major cities and innumerable towns and villages in the north of the tiny republic of Armenia. Profiting from the diversion of public attention to the tragedy, the Soviet government unleashed a coordinated attack against the movement for the annexation of Artsax, an Armenian enclave in the neighboring republic of Azerbaijan. Several members of Armenia’s unofficial Artsax committee were jailed, and a media blitz was launched against the leadership of the movement in both Armenia and Azerbaijan. For the moment, Moscow has set aside the new politics of accommodation in favor of old-style coercion, in an effort to stifle a campaign that over the past year had pushed glasnost to its limits.

 

When hundreds of thousands of Armenians began gathering in protest rallies in late February 1988, few imagined that their action would produce a civic movement that would force Gorbachev into a quandary. Optimistic about the promise of perestroika, Armenians expected authorities to resolve their demands quickly by allowing them to annex Artsax. For its part, the Moscow leadership thought that a 400-million-ruble ($560 million) redevelopment program for Artsax, thrown together last March, and increasing contacts between Armenia and the disputed region would mitigate the crisis if not resolve it. In a Soviet television interview after his tour of the earthquake-ravaged zone, Mikhail Gorbachev complained that the government’s financial generosity to the tiny enclave should have been enough to satisfy the Armenians. But a leader of the Artsax committee responded that Moscow had merely applied an economic solution to a political problem.1

 

After a year, the Armenian-Azerbaijani struggle for Artsax has produced two powerful, broad-based social movements that have exposed contradictions in the Soviet political system as well as in Gorbachev’s vision of reforming it. And neither Western nor Soviet journalists have been much help in interpreting the conflict: both groups have explained it largely in terms of traditional enmity between Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis, without exploring the two peoples’ intertwined histories. The actual historical legacy suggests that the conflict is more than a natural consequence of ethnic and religious differences.

 

The dispute over Artsax is somewhat different from the usual Soviet nationality problem, in which primary conflicts occur between the hegemonic Russians and the rest of the country’s ethnic populations. Elsewhere Gorbachev has faced unprecedented challenges from the nationalities: riots broke out in the Kazakh capital of Alma-Ata when he replaced a corrupt party chief with a Russian; and Baltic groups have sought to extend economic and political reforms far beyond what even radical reformers in Moscow have advocated. Gorbachev’s handling of these conflicts has won enormous respect in the West, if not at home. The Artsax crisis, by contrast, has pitted two neighboring republics against each other in a series of political battles and recurrent violence; Russian intervention has been required to maintain order. And the crisis has left Gorbachev at an impasse.

 

Baku, the present capital of Azerbaijan, was an industrial center in Tsarist Russia. Its oil fields produced about half of the world’s oil supply before World War I, stimulating an industrial boom in the late nineteenth century and contributing to the formation of an Armenian economic elite, based in the cities of Baku and Tbilisi, capital of neighboring Georgia. This emerging capitalist class formed the nucleus of an Armenian society outside what is now Armenia, complete with political associations, an active press, and cultural establishment, churches, and schools. When smaller numbers of Azer- baijani entrepreneurs began to enter into their own region’s development, they met head on with the already powerful and well-established Armenians, who maintained hegemony until the collapse of Tsarism.

 

In the heart of Baku’s commercial district, an Armenian church built in 1863 stands as a historical reminder of Armenian prosperity in Azerbaijan. Early this century, Tsarist authorities scrapped proposals to build a central mosque for Shi’ite Azerbaijanis in the same district because of the church’s proximity, and the mosque was eventually tucked away in a Muslim neighborhood outside the city center.

 

While Armenian society was flourishing in urban centers, the territory of what is now Soviet Armenia remained an undeveloped agricultural region, dominated by large Azerbaijani landowners and populated by a mostly Azerbaijani peasantry. Armenians were a majority in only three of the seven districts that formed the present Armenian republic. Even Yerevan, now the capital of Armenia, was a small town with numerous Azerbaijani bazaars and mosques surrounding the city center.

 

So while Armenians dominated Azerbaijan economically and politically, Azerbaijanis constituted a demographic force in the heart of the traditional Armenian homeland. In this brew of class distinctions reinforced by ethnic and religious differences, tensions flared during periods of instability. The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 resulted in intercommunal violence and massacres that spread across both territories. In the wake of the 1917 revolution, Armenian irregulars razed dozens of Azerbaijani villages in Armenia, expelling the residents. Anti-Armenian violence also struck Azerbaijan, and in 1919 most of the Armenian population of Shushi, once the cultural center of Artsax, was forced to leave.

 

The Russian revolution of 1917 reshaped the constellations of power in the region, known as the Transcaucasus. After Tsarist authority collapsed in February 1917, a Transcaucasian federation attempted to unite Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian political parties. But the efforts soon failed, and in May 1918 three separate, independent republics were set up in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Beleaguered by military confrontations over borders and by their own internal conflicts, the fledgling independent states were ultimately sovietized, and the three Transcaucasian peoples came back into the fold of the new Soviet empire.

 

Bolshevik leaders decided to build socialism on the basis of a federal system of national republics. “National-state construction” was to remake ethnic relations in the Soviet Union by establishing ethnic administrations in each of the country’s non-Russian communities. Following Marxian notions of level of economic development and size of population, each ethnic community was endowed with its own territory. The territories were then organized into fifteen national republics and dozens of less prominent autonomous republics, provinces, and regions. The Mountainous (Nagorno) Artsax Autonomous Province was one of these regions, created in 1923 for the Armenians who, as a result of the military balance of power before sovietization, had remained within the newly formed Azerbaijani republic.

 

At the top of this hierarchy, national republics were given all the trappings of modern nation-states: flags, national anthems, and ministries—even ministries of foreign affairs. A panoply of state-sponsored cultural institutions, including schools, research institutes, and literary and artistic unions, promoted the cultural development of the dominant community, the so-called titular nationality, in each republic. In addition, an institutionalized program of affirmative action, known as nativization, trained ethnic cadres for service in the state and party apparatus. This contributed to the formation of ethnic elites composed of the titular nationality in each of the territorial administrations. In a system where ethnic identity is organized by the state and ethnic affiliation is included on each citizen’s internal passport, ethnicity can be considered in everything from political recruitment to job promotions.

 

With this system, the Bolsheviks hoped to ensure more equitable relations between the traditionally dominant Russians and the formerly subject nations of the Tsarist empire. But the same institutions that have, in the Soviet view, solved the national question by granting special privileges to ethnic communities in their own republics have also created new forms of oppression. The political borders of the national republics often do not correspond with ethnic borders, and ethnic communities without their own administrations or resident outside their officially designated “homelands” are often deprived of the privileges and rights they would receive in abundance in the home republic.

 

So the seemingly irrational intransigence of the Armenian movement’s demand to annex Artsax to Armenia in fact makes political sense. Armenians in the Artsax autonomous province complain of seventy years of abuse by Azerbaijani authorities in Baku. Resources for economic development have been withheld or diverted elsewhere, they argue, and Armenian cultural and educational facilities in the province have been systematically underfunded and restricted. Armenians in Artsax rightly recognized that only the Armenian republic’s administration would assure their security and development.

 

But Gorbachev and his colleagues in Moscow face more than just the unintended consequences of Soviet nationality policy. They must now deal with Armenians and Azerbaijanis who have turned the slogans of glasnost and perestroika to their own ends and have acquired immense political power generated by the internal course of their social movements.

 

When mass public demonstrations broke out in Armenia last spring, many Western observers assumed that rallies of such size and discipline must have been organized by the Communist Party. Instead, by the time of these demonstrations, several years of effort by the Armenian cultural intelligentsia had already mobilized Armenian consciousness. During the Stalin, Khrushchev, and even Brezhnev periods, Armenian intellectuals spearheaded campaigns to incorporate Artsax into the Armenian republic, but they remained silent as countless letters and petitions sent to Moscow were shelved and forgotten. When Gorbachev came to power, announcing his radical programs of restructuring and openness in a new Soviet Union, Armenians embraced the programs as a means to revive their pursuit of the Artsax issue. Armenian media references to Artsax multiplied, and Armenian academics engaged in heated scholarly battles with their Azerbaijani colleagues over the history of the region.

 

By fall 1987, the Artsax campaign had moved from scholarly journals to the public arena. Petitioners reportedly collected 400,000 signatures in Armenia supporting annexation of Artsax.2 Later in the fall, Haidar Äliyev, an Azerbaijani, was removed from his post in the Communist party’s ruling Politburo, and Armenians assumed that the last high-level opponent to their demands was now out of the picture. During a November trip to Western Europe, Gorbachev’s top economic adviser, Abel Aganbegyan, an Armenian born in Georgia, publicly spoke of the economic rationality of uniting Artsax with Armenia. News of Aganbegyan’s comments reached an eager Armenian population, galvanizing support for the campaign among Armenians in both Artsax and Armenia. News also spread quickly to Baku, where by early December, intellectuals had turned literary events into sessions denouncing Aganbegyan and the Armenian claims to Artsax.3

 

The mass public rallies in Yerevan in late February 1988 were catalyzed by a special session of Artsax’s regional council, which issued a call for the province’s transfer to Armenia. In mid-March, the local party organization in Artsax took a similar position. Within weeks, Armenians were mobilized in a pan-national campaign for Artsax. Organizing committees for the Artsax campaign sprang up in factories, collective farms, schools, and institutes. Workers staged general strikes unprecedented in Soviet history, and establishment intellectuals cooperated with party and government officials to seek a “positive solution” to the Artsax question.

 

Despite sometimes tragic developments, including anti-Armenian riots and killings in the Azerbaijani town of Sumgait, tens of thousands of Armenians realized that they could make party and state organizations work in their interests and that they could organize public protests without fear of retribution from Moscow. They lobbied members of the republic’s Supreme Soviet, or parliament, threatening not to vote for them in upcoming elections if they failed to support the popular demands. Once the broad-based social movement had obtained a measure of political power unimaginable in the Brezhnev period, few were willing to give it up.

 

Moscow’s failure to satisfy Armenian demands, combined with this new sense of power and solidarity cemented by weeks of strikes and public protests, reinforced Armenian determination and emboldened the population to continue the struggle for Artsax. But the organized civic campaign broadened to include problems of the environment, Armenian culture, and other social and cultural issues. The old practice of covert politics and backroom discussions gave way to public politics in the streets of Armenia and Artsax, transforming them into common ground for hundreds of thousands of Armenians—formerly subjects, now citizens.

 

The scope and persistence of the Armenian movement for Artsax also left its mark on the Azerbaijanis. Historically, Azerbaijani nationalism formed in reaction to a dominant Armenian nationalism, and this tendency has been replicated in the Artsax movement. Azerbaijanis, too, began organizing protest rallies to prove themselves capable of greater political sophistication than they exhibited in the violent Sumgait riots. The themes were similar to the Armenians’: historical claim to Artsax, distortion of the issues and the movement by the news media in Moscow, demands for protection of their co-nationals in the neighboring Armenian republic. Just as Armenians had drawn on Leninist language and the Soviet constitution to articulate their demands, Azerbaijanis branded Armenian activism with the traditional Soviet epithets of extremism and national chauvinism and accused Armenians of violating Soviet laws and the Leninist principle of friendship of nations.

 

Azerbaijani activists, too, embraced a broad range of social and cultural issues revolving around their new sense of citizenship and national identity. During the public gatherings in Baku, some Azerbaijanis called for the elimination of Artsax’s autonomous status, but more authoritative voices advocated instead establishing an Azerbaijani autonomous region in Armenia.4 If Armenians could claim their national rights, so could Azerbaijanis.

 

Gorbachev’s response was avoidance. He maintained that the accumulation of problems for the Armenians of Artsax was a Stalinist legacy that had been left to fester during the period of stagnation, the current catch phrase for the lengthy Brezhnev era. Gorbachev has yet to admit that the Artsax crisis was in part due to the ethnic political institutions that define Soviet rule. At the party conference last June he skirted direct discussions of the Artsax crisis and instead spoke vaguely of increasing the autonomy of the republics. He has continued to avoid the issue by pointing to the concessions already made and by holding out the promise of a special party plenum devoted to nationality problems sometime this year.

 

Gorbachev apparently hoped that time would mitigate the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. Instead, tensions have increased. Growing frustrations resulted in isolated incidents of armed strife between Armenians and Azerbaijanis until late last fall, when the conflict escalated to the verge of a civil war. Fearing that an upcoming meeting on Moscow’s project for constitutional reforms would authorize Artsax’s transfer away from Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani crowds attacked the Armenian neighborhoods of Kirovabad, a city north of the Artsax province. Anti-Armenian attacks spread throughout the republic, leading to a mass exodus of tens of thousands of Armenians. Back in Armenia, Armenians replied in kind, attacking Azerbaijani villages and forcing thousands of Azerbaijanis out of the republic. As each side witnessed the violence and massive deportations of their compatriots from the neighboring republic, Gorbachev and the Moscow leadership stood helpless. Armenians who had carried Gorbachev’s portrait during the spring rallies now joined Azerbaijanis in denouncing the central government for its inability to maintain the security of Soviet citizens outside their home republic.

 

The year-old crisis between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the isolated Armenian mountain district of Artsax has confused the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev and his colleagues in Moscow have circled round and round the issue, trying to resolve one of the most fundamental political crises in contemporary Soviet politics with ad hoc measures. In yet another initiative in December, prominent Soviet academician Andrei Sakharov went on a peacemaking mission to the Transaucasus with full support from Gorbachev, but he received a lukewarm reception in Armenia and was simply rebuffed in Azerbaijan.

 

In frustration, the Kremlin leadership has retreated to the Brezhnevist tactics of arrests and intimidation to undercut the movement’s strength. This may prove to be a serious miscalculation. Over the past year, thousands of Armenians and Azerbaijanis have learned the politics of protest, and both peoples are prepared to settle in for their own version of citizens’ movement, Soviet style.

 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

NOTES

1. “Interview with Levon Ter Petrosyan,” Asbarez (Glendale, Calif.), 24 December 1988.

 

2. Armenian Weekly, 3 October 1987.

 

3. Azarbaijan (Baku), no. 2 (1988).

 

4. Kommunist (Baku), 25 November, 3 December 1988.

 

 

Back | Back to TOC | Forward

THE “Artsax SYNDROME” AND

AZERBAIJANI POLITICS

In future histories of the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, Azerbaijan will hold a place of particular distinction. The Azerbaijani republic will be remembered as one of the first sites where independent political forces mobilized as a popular movement in the spirit of perestroika. At the same time, Azerbaijan will be recorded in historical annals as the first republic to experience an acute collapse of the Stalinist system of party rule and Brezhnevist stagnation along with the violent repression of political forces militating for a new, Gorbachev-style Soviet politics.

 

The process of reform initiated by the Gorbachev coalition in Moscow is frequently perceived as a top-down process begun at the center and extending to the periphery. By contrast, the impulse for political change in Azerbaijan came not from Moscow but from Azerbaijan’s own periphery—the Nagorno-Artsax Autonomous Oblast (NKAO), a largely rural, Armenian-populated province situated on the republic’s western border. Using the Gorbachevian language of perestroika, glasnost, and democratization, Armenian deputies to the region’s provincial council gathered on 20 February 1988, in the administrative center, Stepanakert, to articulate in legal form their decades-old aspirations for union with Armenia. The ensuing contradictions of change in Azerbaijan, marked by tense political struggle and punctuated with bloody intercommunal conflict, reached a climax with a final round of anti-Armenian violence in Baku in mid-January 1990. The massive intervention of Soviet troops in Azerbaijan’s capital on 19–20 January 1990 brought to a close the initial period of perestroika in Azerbaijan.

 

This article examines the origins of political change in contemporary Azerbaijan, the troubles attending the efforts to promote a democratizing politics, and the contradictory imperatives of reform in a republic with a multi-ethnic population and competing visions of perestroika. While much of the experience of the past two years speaks to the unique historical and demographic conditions in which a new kind of politics emerged, developed, and ultimately failed in the republic, the Azerbaijani case holds important lessons for the reform process in other Soviet republics.

 

As in Azerbaijan, politics in the Gorbachev era in all the Soviet republics is a complicated process of negotiation, compromise, and recurring conflict involving the local and central apparatuses of the Communist Party, newly forming yet quite powerful independent political associations, and populations that have largely failed to experience the benefits of a democratizing polity and a marketizing economy. Given the multinational composition of the populations in the republics—aggravated by the unequal distribution of political power, cultural prestige, and economic resources—the implications of ethnic differences inform the larger set of complex and troublesome challenges to the success of reform in the respective republics and the Soviet Union as a whole. It is thus the depth of the similarities, and not the equally important differences, that draws attention to Azerbaijan as an example of the ways in which conflicts between the old system and an emergent new politics can result in failed, and potentially violent, outcomes.

 

INSTITUTIONAL ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNIC POLITICS

One of the fundamental institutional innovations carried out by the Soviet leadership in the wake of the October Revolution was the linking of ethnicity, territory, and political administration in the process of state-building. Termed “national statehood,” the Soviet image of a new form of the state was put into practice through the creation of a hierarchical system of ethno-territorial administrative divisions extending from the national republic down to the national district (okrug). The building blocks of the new Soviet federation thus did not simply replicate the geographic divisions existing under Tsarist dominion. Rather, the Soviet federal system fostered new, national-territorial formations that would contribute to the consolidation of ethnic identity by institutionalizing nationality at the level of the state.

 

The Soviet process of nation-building was planned in order to coincide with the formation of the novel national-state structures.1 Cultural organizations, from state publishing houses and ministries of culture and education to unions of writers, artists, architects, and others, were established to aid in creating new cultures or, at times, renovating ancient cultures. Primacy in Soviet cultural construction was accorded to the “indigenous” national community of the given national-territorial administration, referred to as the “titular nationality” in Western Sovietological discourse.

 

In Azerbaijan, for instance, the artistic unions engaged chiefly in organizing and regulating the production of a specifically Azerbaijani culture. As a political corollary to the beneficial arrangements provided for the “indigenous” nationality, other national communities living in the republic, irrespective of how long they had lived on the territory of the given republic, were considered “nonindigenous” and essentially excluded from the broader process of republic-based national-cultural development. Iranian-speaking Talysh and Kurds, and Dagestani groups such as Lezgius and Avars, as well as other smaller ethnic communities resident in the Azerbaijani republic, were assimilated into the dominant Azerbaijani nationality. National cultural development for other communities, such as the Armenians, with their stronger sense of ethnic identity forged in national institutions with a longer history, was frequently restricted or simply neglected.

 

At the level of the national republic, then, traditional social identities of the “indigenous” community, based on clan, region, urban residence, and even class, gave way under Soviet policies to the formation of a modern, overarching ethnic identity developed through new political and cultural institutions inscribed in the national republic. The state’s role in consolidating nation-building is especially evident in the case of Azerbaijan, where with the exception of the short-lived independent Republic of Azerbaijan (1918–1920), there was no prior history of independent, specifically Azerbaijani state-building.

 

Soviet power not only provided the Azerbaijanis with their first long-term and extensive experience in national-state building, but it also gave them their name. In the late nineteenth century, Azerbaijani intellectuals had engaged in lengthy debates over how to name their nation, since they were variously referred to as Caucasian Turks, Muslims, or Tatars in official Tsarist usage, as well as in local Russian and Armenian historical and literary sources.2 Early Soviet terminology identified them as “Turk.” Beginning in the late 1930s, however, the indigenous population of Azerbaijan was reidentified as “Azerbaijani” (in Azerbaijani, “azärbayjanlï”).3

 

A program of “nativization” (korenizatsiia) complemented the nation-building process by fostering the creation of a native ethnic leadership through target programs of recruitment and training for service in the national republic’s political, economic, and cultural administration. Korenizatsiia as a kind of institutionalized program of “affirmative action” for the “indigenous” nationality has resulted in the formation of national elites in the national republics. Nativization also resulted in the political disenfranchisement of so-called nonindigenous groups. This policy proved to be especially important in legitimating Soviet power among the Azerbaijanis of the republic, who in the prerevolutionary period had been dominated politically by the Tsarist Russian administrative elite and economically by a mix of mainly Armenian and Russian entrepreneurs.4 The establishment of Soviet authority in the region thus served to disenfranchise the Russian and, especially, Armenian elites while it empowered Azerbaijanis in the fields of political administration and economic management. However, these Soviet-sponsored political institutions and practices created conditions for the emergence of ethnic-based conflicts under a more liberalized regime.

 

Artsax AND THE ORIGINS OF POLITICAL CHANGE IN AZERBAIJAN

Several years into Gorbachev’s program of political and economic reform, Azerbaijan was one of many republics that remained aloof from the processes of renewal emerging throughout the Soviet Union.5 Kämrän Baghïrov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, was quite representative of the attitudes of his party organization. In addresses to republic and all-Union party meetings, he barely paid lip service to perestroika, glasnost, and democratization. In practice, reform touched neither the Azerbaijani party apparatus and governmental administration nor Azerbaijani society as a whole.

 

Although independent political forces have usually emerged in urban areas, a coalition for political renewal in Azerbaijan first developed among the Armenians living in Nagorno-Artsax—a remote rural area along the republic’s western border. The fact that the first and most persistent bearers of a glasnost-style political activism in Azerbaijan emerged not among the majority Azerbaijanis but from within the Armenian population of the NKAO would set the process of political change in the republic along a troubled, contradictory path.

 

The movement for the union of NKAO with the Armenian republic is often cast in terms of a territorial conflict between the two neighboring republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan. And the Artsax movement did indeed develop into an unprecedented inter-republican crisis that by the fall of 1989 had grown into full-scale warfare between the two republics. However, contrary to Azerbaijani critics who have sought to paint the movement solely as a product of foreign Armenian agitation and intervention in Azerbaijani affairs promoted by nationalist Armenian political organizations operating outside the republic and the Soviet Union,6 the movement for Artsax’s union with Armenia was initiated—and has been continued—primarily by the Armenians living in the NKAO itself.7 Given the national-state formation of the Soviet Union as outlined above, Artsax Armenian arguments for union with the Armenian republic can be seen more as an autochthonous, rational response to contemporary institutional constraints than as the amorphous eruption of latent, primordial ethnic and religious sentiments.8

 

Indeed, the list of Armenian complaints in the cultural sphere, from underfunding of local Armenian education to the lack of Armenian-language textbooks and television broadcasts, is comprehensible in an institutional context in which the state’s subsidization of cultural development favored the Azerbaijanis over other ethnic communities resident in Azerbaijan. In this regard, the dramatic multiplication of demands for more cultural ties between Artsax and the Armenian republic reflects the historical lack of attention that Azerbaijani republican ministries have accorded specifically Armenian interests in the sphere of cultural production as much as it does the desire for union with Armenia. In a recent exposé on the extent of cultural disenfranchisement in Artsax, instructively entitled “Why and How All This Started,” an Armenian cinematographer recounted a story of the shelving of a documentary film dedicated to the sixtieth anniversary of the NKAO. The reason, the film-maker notes, was that the film was considered by authorities in Baku to be “too Armenian” in its content, despite the fact that it recounted the history of a region with a majority Armenian population.9 A similar pattern was reflected in the complaints of Armenian writers and journalists in Baku, who argued that Armenian national themes were not considered a legitimate field of local cultural expression in the Azerbaijani capital.10

 

The leitmotif of cultural disenfranchisement runs throughout the Artsax Armenian movement, but this should not turn one’s attention away from equally important issues of political and economic autonomy. In fact, one of the earliest Armenian samizdat texts, originating from Stepanakert in 1962, was much more strident and expansive on economic problems than on cultural issues in the NKAO. The complaints raised in this document range from underinvestment in the NKAO economy to numerous examples of the subordination of local enterprises to the administrative control of organizations and other enterprises located in Baku and in other cities outside the autonomous oblast.11

 

Almost three decades later, these same issues form the nucleus of contemporary Armenian claims to economic autonomy in the NKAO. Manipulating the Gorbachevian language of khozraschet (self-financing and economic self-management), Armenian-dominated enterprises in the NKAO have chosen to develop economic ties with Armenia at the expense of administrative linkages with the Azerbaijani economy. Thus, local enterprises have increasingly sought to produce manufactured goods and other commodities not according to the Azerbaijani state plan but in line with market and planning needs in Armenia.

 

The virtual independence of economic decision-making emerging in the NKAO has put an ironic twist on economic demands emanating from Baku. While Azerbaijani economists are arguing for greater devolution of economic decision-making to the republic level,12 the refusal of NKAO enterprises to supply Azerbaijani commodity markets and the negotiation by them of contracts with firms based in the Armenian republic have elicited Azerbaijani condemnation of local economic autonomy in the NKAO as a violation of Azerbaijan’s sovereignty and calls for the reassertion of republic control over the production and distribution of goods in Artsax.

 

In political affairs, the Artsax movement threatened the Azerbaijani republic not just with Armenian nationalism, but also with independent political activity by traditional organs of the party and state control apparatus. One of the first ethnic-based splits in the Communist Party apparatus under Gorbachev took place between the Communist Party of Azerbaijan and the once-subordinate Armenian-controlled NKAO oblast party committee (obkom). Despite initial hesitation of party organizations in the NKAO, by mid-March of 1988, the NKAO obkom publicly backed the 20 February 1988 request by the NKAO oblast soviet of people’s deputies for union with Armenia. Faced with a lack of positive response from Moscow and Baku, NKAO political authorities have increasingly taken the management of local political affairs into their own hands.

 

Artsax AS CATALYST FOR ETHNIC ACTIVISM IN AZERBAIJAN

The NKAO Armenian movement and subsequent development of a political crisis over Artsax catalyzed Azerbaijani consciousness not only about events in the troubled region, but also about broader issues facing the Azerbaijan SSR. Nonetheless, Azerbaijanis recognize the pivotal role that Armenian militancy has played in informing Azerbaijani national and political self-awareness. In a revealing commentary given to a Turkish newspaper reporter, an Azerbaijani journalist provided a concise reflection on this phenomenon.

 

We had a weak sense of solidarity in the past and minded our own business. The developments [in the NKAO, Armenia, and Azerbaijan] have helped to unite us. A national feeling and state of awareness have emerged in the community for the first time. We had not observed this in the past. I can say that Azerbaijan has changed. It is as if the Armenian attitude has awakened the people and moved them to safeguard their rights.13

Even a brief review of the emergence of independent Azerbaijani politics reflects the deep and decisive way that the Armenian movement has informed a range of issues brought up by Azerbaijanis. The reactive, at times even emulative, character of the Azerbaijani movement with regard to the Armenians is clear. At protests in November 1988, for instance, Azerbaijani militants demanded that some form of autonomy be established for Armenia’s Azerbaijanis on the model of the NKAO in Azerbaijan. Such demands were subsequently reflected in the arguments of Azerbaijani intellectuals published in the republic press.14

 

The pattern of reaction to Armenian activism at times led to irony. An Azerbaijani journalist, commenting on the Azerbaijani response to Armenian efforts to extract themselves from Azerbaijani rule, argued that the Azerbaijanis wanted “the Armenians of Nagorno-Artsax to respect Azerbaijani laws. They are acting as if they were free.”15 In this sense, Armenian “freedom” was seen as a direct challenge to Azerbaijani interests in the republic.

 

Azerbaijanis often attempted to downplay the actual stimulus that motivated the candid expression of their concern by shifting focus from the NKAO to other problems in the republic. The Azerbaijani poet Hidayat, for example, contrasted the poor socioeconomic conditions about which the Armenians of the NKAO were complaining to the situation in Baku, which, he argued, was much more serious than in the autonomous province.16 Similarly, after the massacre of Armenians in the industrial town of Sumgait in February 1988, the idea of “Sumgait” emerged in the Azerbaijani imagination not as a tragedy of anti-Armenian violence but as a manifestation of the city’s endemic social, economic, and environmental problems.17 Azerbaijani journalists focused their attention on the destructive effects of industrial pollution in the area and the simultaneous need for the development of the local economy and the expansion of public services.18 In the spring of 1989, Azerbaijani television broadcast a program on Sumgait that was much commented on in the republic press.19 Entitled “Death Zone” (Ölü zona), the broadcast ironically ignored the massacre of Armenians and other civilians in Sumgait to focus on the fatal effects of industrial pollution on the city’s residents.

 

THE POLITICS OF PARTY PARALYSIS

Despite the quick pace of events in early 1988, from the beginning of the popular movement in Artsax and the massacre of Armenian civilians at the end of February to Moscow’s announcement of a program of social and economic development for the NKAO on 26 March, Azerbaijani political authorities were slow to respond to pressures at home for a more active stance with regard to the Armenian movement. At meetings of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan in late April, party activists, led by First Secretary Baghïrov, focused primarily on the serious economic situation facing the republic and called for more party control and for improvement in the provision of social services.

 

But the ongoing political conflict over the status of the NKAO soon fully discredited Baghïrov as republic party chief. At a May party plenum, the party named Äbdülrähman Väzirov, a former Komsomol official and Soviet ambassador to Pakistan, to replace Baghïrov as party first secretary. Väzirov faced a double challenge. On the one hand, he had to revitalize the party organization in line with the general process of political and economic reform occurring in the rest of the country. On the other hand, he had to restore social order and attempt to rebuild the Azerbaijani population’s confidence in a party that seemed to have been incapable of defending Azerbaijani national interests from the threat of Armenian nationalism in the NKAO and in Armenia.

 

Väzirov’s vision of renewal in both the party and society developed along fairly conservative, almost predictable lines in the following months. The outlines of his strategy were reflected in his address to the Nineteenth All-Union CPSU Conference in July. Almost a third of his speech was devoted to articulating Azerbaijani positions on the Artsax crisis, but he also focused on the political destabilization brought about by the party’s paralysis and the accumulation of unresolved social and economic problems in the republic. Remarking on the justified dissatisfaction of the Azerbaijani population, he emphasized the need to “strengthen the leading role of the party” and argued that “the Azerbaijani people ties its hopes and future to the Communist Party.” In this regard, one of his proposed solutions to the current crisis was the reinvigoration of the party apparatus. Reminiscent of Yegor Ligachev’s position at the CPSU’s twenty-seventh congress, Väzirov stressed the need for cadre renewal through improved recruitment and training and the introduction of cadre exchanges and rotation of duties.>2.

 

During the late summer and fall of 1988, Väzirov began to pursue his program for the renewal of the party. In a short two and one-half months, 43 secretaries of district and city party committees, including 22 party first secretaries and 17 chairmen of urban executive committees, were replaced.21 A Central Committee plenum in mid-November adopted a massive reorganization and streamlining of the Azerbaijani party’s central apparatus, to take effect from the start of 1989. The number of Central Committee secretaries was cut from 6 to 5, and—mirroring the reduction of departments of the CPSU Central Committee—Väzirov reduced the number of departments of the Azerbaijani Central Committee from 16 to 6. Viktor Polyanichko, formerly a high-ranking Soviet political adviser in Afghanistan, was appointed to the post of second secretary of the Azerbaijani party and named head of its reorganized Organizational Party Work Department. In the course of the restructuring, the party slashed its regular staff by 30 percent—from 194 to 136 functionaries. In addition, as with the CPSU apparatus in Moscow, new Central Committee commissions were established, including an Oversight Commission to monitor the activity of the republic’s city and district-level party organizations. The organizational structure of city and district party committees was also streamlined.22

 

Väzirov sought to renew the party’s leadership in the social sphere by initiating a series of new programs. The most pressing problems involved economic development and investment, especially in the poorer rural and mountainous regions. At the Central Committee’s August plenum, party leaders called for the creation of new jobs in a number of the republic’s districts.23 In October, the party announced programs for the social and economic development of the Nakhchïvan autonomous republic (ASSR), as well as of districts encompassing the plains portion of Artsax (as opposed to Artsax’s mountainous portion, the NKAO).24 The party also devoted attention to the republic’s urban areas. An important new housing program designed to overcome the backlog in the provision of apartments in both urban and rural districts was announced by Väzirov simultaneously with the Central Committee’s plenum of mid-November. One month later, the Azerbaijan Council of Ministers acted on a recommendation from the party’s Central Committee in announcing a five-year program of social and economic measures for Sumgait. The development scheme, with a total price tag of 500 million rubles, allocated nearly 300 million rubles for investment in public housing and social services.25

 

Despite party restructuring and announcements of new social programs, mass rallies erupted in the Azerbaijani capital on 17 November 1988. These stemmed from popular dissatisfaction over a number of issues that the Azerbaijani party and state officials were failing to address, including that of asserting republic control over the NKAO. In particular, Azerbaijanis were angered by the construction of new facilities in the NKAO’s Topkhana forest preserve by an aluminum enterprise headquartered in the Armenian republic. The Topkhana construction, authorized by Armenian officials in the NKAO but not by Baku, was in the Azerbaijani view yet another Armenian violation of the Azerbaijan republic’s sovereignty.26 A collective letter written by four Azerbaijani intellectuals reflected the public’s demands that the CPSU Central Committee and the USSR Supreme Soviet assure Azerbaijan’s sovereign rights in the NKAO in line with the central government’s confirmation of Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity expressed on 18 July 1988.27 At the same time, Azerbaijani demonstrations were fueled by fears that an upcoming session of the USSR Supreme Soviet on constitutional reform would lay the groundwork for an eventual transfer of the NKAO to the Armenian republic.

 

The rallies and demonstrations gained intensity and spread in widening circles after the USSR Supreme Court’s 21 November announcement of a death sentence for an Azerbaijani involved in the Sumgait massacre of February 1988. Large meetings were staged in Baku, Kirovabad, Nakhchïvan, Shäki, and Zagatala, and smaller rallies and demonstrations took place in Shamkhor, Äli Bayramlï, Qädäbäy, Minqächevir, and Gutgashen.28 News from the NKAO and Moscow and fears of the persecution of Azerbaijani citizens in Armenia proper led to mass dismissals of Armenians from jobs and bouts of violence against Armenians throughout Azerbaijan. In the city of Kirovabad, home to some 50,000 Armenians, Azerbaijani attacks on Armenian neighborhoods and the expulsion of Armenian residents from their homes developed into battles with government troops. A similar pattern of anti-Armenian violence and confrontations with troops was repeated in Baku and other Azerbaijani districts having Armenian minority populations. The result was a mass exodus of Armenians from the republic.

 

REASSERTING PARTY CONTROL

The “agitated days of November,” as the mass protests and violence came to be known in the Azerbaijani press, reflected the political quandary facing Azerbaijan. A movement of mass protest developed in reaction to Armenian actions in the NKAO, coupled with the reluctance of Azerbaijani officialdom to address contradictory Armenian and Azerbaijani demands, had led not only to the intensification of interethnic animosity and violence, but also to a widening gulf between the party and an increasingly activist Azerbaijani society. At the same time, however, Azerbaijani militants were as yet unable to organize themselves into a coherent political movement, and the party was able to take advantage of this to suppress the troublesome independent associations and to reassert itself politically.

 

Moscow’s establishment of a “special government administration” for the NKAO on 12 January 1989, which came as a belated measure to forestall the continuation of months of intercommunal violence in the region, helped to defuse tensions temporarily in the autonomous oblast as well as in the rest of Azerbaijan. The installation in the NKAO of a governmental commission under the leadership of the Kremlin’s Artsax troubleshooter, Arkadii Vol’skii, was greeted by the Azerbaijani party as an important measure for bringing greater control to the oblast. Azerbaijani officials emphasized that the establishment of the Vol’skii commission meant that the NKAO was to remain within the Azerbaijan SSR, and they welcomed the subsequent dissolution of recalcitrant, Armenian-dominated local party and government organizations in the NKAO.29 These steps gave the Azerbaijan party a brief respite during which to concentrate on rebuilding itself internally and externally.

 

On the internal front, the party took its cue from Moscow’s condemnation of the involvement of party cadres in the violence and rioting of the November days.30 Three full and two candidate members of the republic party’s Bureau, as well as several members of the Central Committee, were retired.31 Similarly, several leading cadres in the republic Komsomol were stripped of their positions in the youth organization’s Bureau and Central Committee.32 In addition, Väzirov undertook a more broad-ranging purge of the party and security organs during December 1988 and early January 1989. Commenting vaguely on the extent of dismissals from the republic’s KGB and Ministry of Internal Affairs, Väzirov noted that 2,532 cadres, including 612 in positions of leadership, were censured by the party, and 222 officials were removed from their posts. A total of 65 people were expelled from the ranks of the party and the Komsomol.33 However, despite the broad criticisms and forced retirements, many party functionaries who had been involved in the unrest apparently remained in their positions.34

 

Preparations for March elections to the new USSR Congress of People’s Deputies, a process that in many other republics provided unprecedented opportunities for the exercise of popular power, in Azerbaijan reflected the regime’s continued conservatism. Complete election results were never published in the republic press, but party officials boasted of the high proportion of “worker,” “peasant,” and “women” candidates—in many cases far above the all-Union averages for these categories.35 This, and the reported 98.5 percent public participation in the 26 March balloting,36 evoked a Brezhnevist, not a Gorbachevian, image.

 

Although incomplete press coverage makes it difficult to judge accurately, there appear to have been certain discrepancies between the number of candidates elected at the pre-electoral meetings and those formally registered as candidates in the NKAO by the electoral commissions.37 A review of local press accounts of discussion meetings and registration of candidates and of election results published in Moscow reveals the overall conservative trends in Azerbaijan’s sixty-three electoral districts. Leading Azerbaijani party and government officials were registered as candidates in fifteen districts, and lesser officials ran in five others. With the sole exception of party chief Väzirov, party officials never ran unopposed. Yet in ten of eleven cases, Communist Party officials won their election campaigns against lesser officials or workers from factories or farms.

 

Six districts had single-candidate elections: these included the candidacy of Väzirov in the Imishli national-territorial electoral district and of Vladimir Chernavin, commander-in-chief of the Soviet navy and a deputy USSR minister of defense, in the Länkäran territorial district. In the Imishli district, Väzirov’s candidacy was discussed with those of two other individuals, the first secretary of the Füzuli district party committee and the head of the party organization at a local collective farm. Rather than challenge the republic party chief, the latter two nominees withdrew from the contest and backed Väzirov as the district’s sole candidate. During the election campaign following the electoral commissions’ official registration of candidates, the press highlighted visits by Väzirov and other party-backed candidates to their respective districts for meetings with voters.38

 

In a number of cases, three and even four candidates ran for a single seat, but most of these were in the eleven districts where contests were among females and often quite young peasants and workers. In the Yevlakh territorial district, which is probably not atypical, electors ultimately endorsed candidates that they considered to lack the necessary qualifications for deputy, including knowledge of the Russian language.39

 

TOWARD A POPULAR MOVEMENT

As the republic party moved to reconsolidate power, independent forces were having trouble establishing themselves on the republic political scene. The first concerted effort to establish independent Azerbaijani political associations seems to have emerged during the “agitated November days” of 1988. In an article published on the first page of the republic’s literary weekly, Babäk Ädaläti explained that he and other like-minded individuals had come together to form what he variously referred to as a “people’s front” or a “people’s national front.”40 Adaläti’s primary concern was the expansion of relations with Southern Azerbaijan—that is, the Azerbaijani population of northern Iran. The popular appeal of this theme, one never addressed by Azerbaijani officialdom, would eventually exacerbate tensions in an already destabilized Azerbaijan.41

 

This initial attempt at forming a popular front movement was frustrated before it really even got off the ground. Azerbaijani militants active in the protest rallies at the time traced its failure to government repression.42 After the imposition of martial law throughout the republic in late November, authorities arrested numerous Azerbaijanis who had played a central role in speaking to the crowds assembled in Baku’s Lenin Square and charged them with anti-Soviet agitation and other violations of the law. At the Academy of Sciences and other cultural institutions, intellectuals who had helped incite the crowds were subjected to criticism and even dismissal.43

 

The political environment in Azerbaijan was hardly conducive to the formation of independent political associations. Azerbaijani political life was marked by the continued hegemony of an entrenched party elite that was only beginning to be transformed under the party’s relatively new leadership. Party officials condemned the independent activists as “semi-literate, ideologically unprincipled, and irresponsible.”44 Väzirov referred metaphorically to the proliferation of independent publishing in the republic as a case of “ideological AIDS.”45

 

Official intransigence was only part of the story. Just as important a factor in the failure of a more effective independent Azerbaijani political movement to emerge was what I would call the “Artsax syndrome.” The relentless insistence of the NKAO Armenians on self-determination repeatedly called for Azerbaijani reactions and made it difficult for the Azerbaijani movement to shift the focus of its activity and of popular Azerbaijani attitudes toward more broad-based national emancipation, irrespective of the Artsax crisis.46

 

In March 1989, some two dozen intellectuals organized an “initiative group” for an Azerbaijani Popular Front (APF). The group’s governing council was composed entirely of middle-level intellectuals, including journalists and scientific researchers at the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences, all of whom were of Azerbaijani nationality. Most of the remaining members of the initiative group had a similar profile, although it included a sprinkling of workers and two Russians—one an engineer and the other an economist. The advisory council of the initiative group included several prominent Azerbaijani writers such as Ismayïl Shïkhlï, Yusif Sämädoghlu, and Sabir Rüstämkhanlï, but with these exceptions, writers were at first notably absent from the ranks of the APF’s leadership.47

 

The Azerbaijani Popular Front was not an umbrella group for previously existing organizations but rather was composed mainly of individuals. This is an important distinction, since the APF’s formation did not reflect an attempt to build a coalition between organizations that had already worked out their own respective programs and concerns regarding political, economic, cultural, or environmental issues. Rather, as an association attempting to accommodate varying interests and political orientations of diverse individuals, the APF contained within its own internal organizational structure the possibility of sharp political divisions and eventual fragmentation.

 

A central political aim of the Azerbaijani Popular Front was, predictably, rejection of Armenian claims to self-determination in the NKAO and maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Azerbaijani republic. The APF also envisioned a broad program with respect to political, economic, cultural, and environmental issues in Azerbaijan. In contrast to the popular fronts in the Baltic republics, the APF did not assert near- or long-term claims for the separation of Azerbaijan from the Soviet polity; instead, it focused on enhanced political and economic sovereignty for the Azerbaijani republic within the context of the Soviet federal state.48

 

The notion of sovereignty, a pivotal concept in the program put forward by the APF, comprised two distinct aims, one with external, the other with internal dimensions. With respect to the federal structure of the Soviet Union, APF activists called for greater devolution of decision-making authority and autonomy to the Azerbaijani republic in its dealings with both the center and the other union republics. Within Azerbaijan itself, the APF program demanded the establishment of sovereign Azerbaijani control over the republic’s political, socioeconomic, and cultural life, as well as over the natural resources of the republic. One of the key points of the APF’s program was the extension of Azerbaijani sovereignty to the entire territory of the republic, including the NKAO and the Nakhchïvan ASSR.

 

The APF’s vision of sovereignty necessarily called for an end to the violation of the republic’s rights by external forces—namely, Moscow and the Armenian republic—as well as by internal forces—that is, the Armenians of the NKAO. In this regard, the APF activists condemned the activities of the NKAO’s special government commission headed by Arkadii Vol’skii as a case of Moscow’s interference in the domestic affairs of the republic. Similarly to the Azerbaijani party leadership and protesters at public rallies, the Azerbaijani Front condemned what it viewed as repeated Armenian violations of Azerbaijani sovereignty, whether the sources of such activities emanated from the Armenian republic or from Armenian militants within the NKAO itself. Thus, the APF’s appeal for the republic’s economic sovereignty implied at once greater autonomy for Azerbaijan in its foreign economic relations—whether within or beyond the USSR’s borders—and the reintegration of enterprises in the NKAO back into the Azerbaijani economy.

 

Despite the APF’s relatively moderate program of reform in the republic, it was repeatedly shunned by the republic’s political establishment. Official arguments on behalf of democratization of the republic’s political life were often coupled with condemnations of “meeting dictatorship,” a reference to the fact that the independent organizations in Azerbaijan often developed out of participation in rallies held in the republic’s public squares.49 After the formation of the APF initiative group, Azerbaijani activists applied to the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR for legalization. But in conformity with the conservative principles of the Väzirov leadership, the Azerbaijani legislature did not even debate the issue.

 

In April 1989, top Azerbaijani party officials, including Väzirov, had several unpublicized meetings with representatives of the APF to discuss prospects for the organization’s legalization. These early attempts at negotiation failed. The party condemned the APF’s alleged aspirations to challenge party hegemony in the republic and for the time being refused to have further contacts with the group.

 

During August and September, the APF organized increasingly large rallies and strikes. Väzirov condemned these actions, arguing that they would only distract from the solution of the republic’s “real” problems and weaken the struggle for Azerbaijani sovereignty.50 As unrest in the republic grew, the party first secretary eventually began to speak as if he was willing to negotiate with popular forces, but he refused to name as his negotiating partner the Azerbaijani Popular Front.51 The party apparently hoped that the APF would somehow simply disappear from the Azerbaijani political scene if it were not officially recognized. (The authorities dealt more harshly with smaller independent associations, such as Birlik [unity], a group seeking a union of Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan. Police forcibly dispersed a Birlik rally in early July and arrested leaders of the organization.)5.

 

In the months following the formation of the initiative group, the APF had remained largely an isolated group of intellectuals that failed to win either the active participation of the Baku-based Azerbaijani intellectual elite or effective support from Azerbaijani society at large. This pattern persisted even after the front’s official founding congress, held in Baku in mid-July 1989. The prominent Azerbaijani poet Bäkhtiyar Vahabzadä argued that “other republics have popular fronts, why shouldn’t we have one?”53 But structural impediments blocking the growth of the popular front in Azerbaijan were stronger than convictions in Azerbaijan supporting such an organization. In general Azerbaijani society proved itself to be essentially conservative and failed to share the APF’s dedication to the Gorbachevian ideals of political and economic reform or to lend active support to the movement. Instead, both outside and within the front, popular participation in Azerbaijani politics remained predicated on anti-Armenian sentiments and an intense interest in the Artsax crisis.

 

The relatively conservative spirit of Azerbaijani society was compounded by the influx during the fall of 1988 of nearly 200,000 Azerbaijani refugees displaced from the Armenian countryside, plus numerous refugees from the NKAO itself. The refugees, who flooded into Azerbaijan’s urban and rural districts, had been traumatized by the combination of psychological terror and periodic violence against them and entered a society already strained by high unemployment, an endemic housing shortage, and a relatively poor distribution of social services, not to mention the political crisis over the NKAO.54 In this setting, the refugees often emerged as the most active elements in Azerbaijani society and also the ones most permeated with anti-Armenianism. APF activists could not expect appeals for political and economic reform to resonate strongly with the Azerbaijani population and faced the unhappy prospect that only an anti-Armenian, NKAO-oriented platform could bring thousands of Azerbaijani supporters into the streets.

 

In the APF’s internal struggle between efforts to expand the agenda seeking the democratization of Azerbaijan and the temptation to cater to the acutely anti-Armenian orientation of the Azerbaijani populace, the Artsax syndrome proved the more powerful force. Even Azerbaijan’s intellectual mainstream remained aloof and suspicious of the APF and its increasingly radical political strategies, preferring to play a cautious game by shunning the front and focusing on Artsax as the republic’s primary problem. Thus, in late August, several hundred Azerbaijani intellectuals organized, with official consent, a Committee for Aid to Artsax that could serve as an alternative to the front and channel popular discontent toward the narrow goal of securing Azerbaijani rights over the NKAO.55

 

By that time, the political struggle between Azerbaijan and the NKAO had intensified. The series of attacks and counterattacks that had become common in and around the NKAO were on the rise. And the Armenians of the NKAO, convinced that the Vol’skii commission was implementing pro-Azerbaijani policies in the region, organized unauthorized elections to a National Council to replace the special government commission.56 Prevented from establishing direct union with Armenia, the National Council fashioned itself as the only legitimate authority in the oblast and issued a proclamation of independence to add an aura of legality to what had long since become a political fact.

 

Paradoxically, the Azerbaijanis viewed the Vol’skii commission with equal suspicion, but condemned it for facilitating the NKAO’s union with Armenia and subverting Azerbaijani sovereignty over the region. The establishment of an independent Armenian National Council in the NKAO only exacerbated Azerbaijani resistance to the Armenian movement and catalyzed Azerbaijani popular opposition to Azerbaijan republic authorities, who appeared more and more incapable of restoring Azerbaijani control over the NKAO.57

 

In this context, the APF initiated appeals for a series of industrial strikes in the republic in order both to force the government to recognize the APF as a legitimate political force representing Azerbaijani public opinion and to obtain the reestablishment of direct Azerbaijani rule throughout the republic’s territory, including the elimination of the Vol’skii commission in the NKAO. Beyond these central concerns, the APF also demanded the nullification of the March elections, the lifting of the curfew imposed in response to the November 1988 demonstrations, and the release of imprisoned political activists.58

 

Despite the powerful momentum created by the strike movement, Azerbaijani political authorities continued to shun the front and its program for a resolution of the Artsax crisis. In response, APF activists intensified their struggle by calling for a railway strike to prevent the transport of supplies to both the NKAO and the Armenian republic. Although it was termed “economic terrorism” in the Armenian press and was more widely viewed as a “blockade,” Azerbaijani activists defended the campaign as a case of “economic sanctions” or “reactive economic measures” against violations of Azerbaijan’s national-territorial sovereignty.59 APF representatives also viewed the railway strike as an important tactic in forcing party authorities in Azerbaijan to legalize the front and accede to a series of other APF demands. According to APF Executive Board member Äbulfäz Äliyev, the front did not exclude the possibility of organizing a general rebellion.60

 

THE APF AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF

AZERBAIJANI CHAUVINISM

Faced with unabating strikes and rallies at home and with threats from Moscow over its failure to terminate the transportation blockade, the Communist Party of Azerbaijan granted a series of concessions to the APF, including an extraordinary session of the republic’s Supreme Soviet in mid-September at which front representatives were permitted to speak. Fulfilling demands of APF activists, the republic legislature voted to abolish the Vol’skii commission and to begin drafting laws on Azerbaijan’s political and economic sovereignty.

 

In spite of the permission g