In the Caucasus, There Is a Peace Agreement but Not Peace

Still, Moscow has not openly interfered in Armenian domestic politics, evidently because it feels fully in control anyway. With its military superiority, Russia can now afford some “soft power” for a change. Why repeat the mistakes it made trying to manage the domestic politics of Ukraine, Moldova, or Belarus?

Georgia, for all its pro-EU aspirations, is inexorably becoming a Turkish semi-protectorate. The South Caucasus has once again become contested borderlands. In effect, we see how the recent rise of capitalism in Asia also reproduces its highest stage: imperialism.

This produced a strange situation in which Moscow effectively consented to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, an antiestablishment “populist” who led a typical “color revolution” only three years earlier. In the wake of the Karabakh debacle, Armenia’s ousted elites reemerged as a so-called “joint opposition of seventeen parties” — I personally know two members of one of these parties, the chairman and his chauffeur. The confrontation leaves Armenians with a choice between the well-meaning but incompetent Pashinyan, and the old corrupt elites.

Bloodshed and military coups have been avoided. New elections are scheduled for June 20. This is remarkable, given how profound the shock of defeat and discovering enemy troops so near to Armenian homes was. According to all sociological polls and my own observations, the “Nikolistas” could still win as much as one-third of the vote, maybe even more. It would be great if a serious third force emerged to prevent a new monopolization of parliament. For now, a coalition government seems to be the best outcome.

Like all such conflicts, it is rooted in the region’s history. Karabakh is one of the few chunks of land that was able to preserve an Armenian population over centuries. Armenians are an ethnic formation dating back to Roman times like the Coptic population in Egypt, the Christian Assyrians in Syria and Iraq, the Basques, but also the Irish and Scots or the Jews in the West. These are basically the precocious “nations” of late antiquity.

Quite a different history, but this makes little difference in modern politics. Historically, Azerbaijan was an open geographical area of northwestern Iran, gradually penetrated by Turkic seminomadic tribes who moved among the older sedentary populations. Until the late nineteenth century there were no “Azerbaijanis,” but rather different Muslim groups. Emmanuel Macron once joked that Azerbaijan is younger than his wife — surely, something only the French president could get away with.

Things began to change in the early 1800s when the Russian Empire arrived, and then, in the 1870s, when oil was discovered. The first oil pipeline in history was built from the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, to Batumi, Georgia. The first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, was on the Caspian Sea going from Baku up the Volga River to supply Russia.

Oil created huge concentrations of wealth, but also a lot of social inequality. Baku was like Chicago in the 1880s: very smelly, very dangerous, and very cosmopolitan, but cosmopolitan doesn’t mean egalitarian or friendly. There were different working classes living side by side, which fed a lot of revolutionary activity as well as racism.

Yes, but also a cauldron of racist rivalries. Like in many areas where modernization and capitalism granted education and opportunities to landless people, Armenians advanced socially. Many became skilled proletarians working in the oil industry, but a wealthy merchant class also emerged.

Things broke down after the Russian Revolution in 1905. The Russian police could no longer maintain order, and Muslim pogroms broke out against the Armenians, who were accused of being both capitalist exploiters as well as socialist subversives at the same time. These pogroms were not the result of “ancient hatreds,” however, but a legacy of industrialization. The marginalized Muslims would look at these “smarter” Armenians and say, “Hey, this guy’s grandfather used to serve my grandfather, and now he’s a lawyer or an industrialist, and who am I?” That hurts.

The Baku Congress, Azerbaijan, 1920. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

This ended when the Bolsheviks invaded in 1920. Lenin, of course, realized the need for oil. More so, however, he wanted to project to the rest of colonial Asia the image of a rapidly developing socialist country where the Muslim workers and intelligentsia participated in harmony with many other nationalities. It was an attractive idea. Baku reverted to a Communist regime almost without a fight, and the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan was created including an autonomous province for the Armenians in Karabakh. All ethnic strife and nationalisms were expected to disappear with the rest of the backwardness.

Curiously, Bolshevik thinking in the early 1920s was very much like the European Union today: if ethnic conflict is created by economic backwardness, then it was logical to hitch Karabakh to Baku and its oil industry. Autonomous governance, promotions of ethnic cultures, and massive developmental aid — all under the supervision of progressive commissars.

In the meantime, the republic was also becoming increasingly Azeri — not for nationalist reasons, but because the Soviet constitution and Leninist practice prescribed the “nativization” of party cadres, as described by Terry Martin in his book, The Affirmative Action Empire. However, promoting local ethnic groups also meant recruiting more reliable people from the same district or clan into the party machine.

By the late 1980s, as the USSR decayed, things were about to explode in Azerbaijan. Corruption, after all, is ultimately a form of social exclusion. There still existed a very large Armenian population, numbering nearly four hundred thousand, of mostly urban professionals and skilled proletarians who staffed industry and education. Many were descendants of peasants from Karabakh — these kinds of remote mountainous areas always send their populations out as migrants.

The ethnic composition of Karabakh and similar outliers had been shifting throughout the Soviet period, increasing the share of Muslim Azerbaijanis in the area. The Armenian nationalist intelligentsia perceived this as a slow ethnic purge, yet impersonal demographics were the real cause. Azerbaijani villagers traditionally had bigger families and were more willing to take unskilled jobs, whereas Armenians were generally more oriented toward education and urban jobs. But at the same time, as all nations with long and often tragic histories, they cherished their nostalgic attachments to the ancestral landscape with its medieval churches and ornately carved stone crosses, khachkars.

In early 1988 the Karabakh Armenians petitioned Moscow to transfer their province to Armenia. It looked simple: why not reattach the Armenian autonomous province of Soviet Azerbaijan to the Soviet Republic of Armenia next door? The immediate result was a chaotic explosion, as wild rumors of a pending transfer gripped the imaginations of both Armenians and Azeris.

The immediate result was a chaotic explosion, as wild rumors of a pending transfer gripped the imaginations of both Armenians and Azeris. Over two hundred thousand ethnic Azeris, mostly rural laborers, still lived in Armenia. Frightened by another big population swap, they started leaving en masse and flooding into Azerbaijani cities.

Then, something simple and horrible occurred: the newly arrived Azerbaijanis demanded housing. People started knocking on the doors of ethnic Armenians and throwing them out. Local officials were either paralyzed by fear or actually led the pogroms, expecting to profit. Dozens of people were killed in this mayhem, and hundreds were brutalized. The remaining four hundred thousand Armenians were expelled from Azerbaijan.

There are many conspiracy theories that Moscow initiated the pogroms, or that they were part of a pan-Turkist plot. But it doesn’t take that to spark a pogrom. It only took the failure of local police, a few hooligans and criminals, and some wild rumors. It also took a general uncertainty among the Communist Party leadership, who no longer knew who was going to be the boss after seeing Gorbachev remove everyone else.

Heydar Aliyev’s nickname wasn’t “dragon” for nothing. He was very smart, imposing, and ruthless. His opposition soon started disappearing. Criminal gangs disappeared as well. Top officials and generals were often imprisoned, sometimes in spectacular arrests. Aliyev avoided signing any peace deal that could have recognized the Armenian gains in the previous war for years, instead biding his time and waiting for the petrodollars to pour in. Hereditary regimes have long time-horizons.

While Azerbaijan was being brought to order, British Petroleum appeared at the doorstep — seventy-five years after the Bolshevik nationalizations. The old oil fields were still there, but they needed a lot of investment in both technology and political stability. This probably also explains why much of the British press was so neutral about the war last year.

In 2003, Heydar Aliyev died. The exact date of his death is shrouded in rumors, suggesting that he had been probably dead months before his son, Ilham, could be elected as his successor in October of that year. The son was a playboy, no match for his father, despite appointing his strong-willed wife as his vice president.

Azerbaijan today is quite similar to Iran under the last shahs: they sponsored the Eurovision Song Contest and Formula 1 and commissioned expensive building projects, but they failed to redistribute their oil wealth to the rest of society.