A Working Atlas · v.0.1 · Draft

Two Peoples,
One Land

A relational atlas of the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples, their territories, demographics, leaders, parties, ideologies, atrocities and legal rulings, held in a single frame from the Russian annexation of 1813 to the depopulation of Karabakh in 2023. Compiled to clarify, not to settle.

Where this begins

Between September and December 2023, the entire Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh, somewhere above 100,000 people, fled the territory in roughly a week. The nine-month blockade that preceded the Azerbaijani military operation of 19 September was ordered lifted three separate times by the International Court of Justice and three times ignored. The European Parliament called the result ethnic cleansing. The self-declared Republic of Artsakh dissolved itself on 1 January 2024.

This atlas is built around that fact, and it does not stop there. The expulsion of 2023 reads cleanly as the sharp end of an arc that begins with the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in 1813 and runs through the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the Baku massacres of 1905, the mutual cleansings of 1918 to 1921, the Stalin-era assignment of Karabakh to Soviet Azerbaijan, the Sumgait and Baku pogroms, the Khojaly massacre, the Second Karabakh War of 2020, and at last the depopulation of 2023.

Two peoples, on the same small land, with overlapping memory and incompatible national narratives. The atlas treats both seriously. It is not symmetric in its conclusions, because the historical record is not symmetric. It is symmetric in what it documents.

Where to start

Three honest threads

Thread 1

Armenian dispossession, recurring

Armenians have suffered four large-scale clearances of densely Armenian territory in 110 years: the 1915 destruction of the Anatolian heartland, the 1920 destruction of Armenian Shusha, the January 1990 expulsion from Baku, and the September 2023 evacuation of Nagorno-Karabakh. Recognition of the first remains the central international project of the Armenian diaspora; the fourth, recent enough to still be argued about, has been called ethnic cleansing by the European Parliament and a forcible transfer protected against by the ICJ's November 2023 order.

Soviet-era demographic engineering kept the pattern alive in slow motion. The 1948–53 deportation of around 100,000 Azerbaijanis from Armenia is real and is recorded here, but the same decades saw the steady reduction of the Armenian share of the Nakhichevan ASSR, in Azerbaijan, from roughly 40% in 1917 to 1.4% in 1979 and 0% by the late 1980s.

Thread 2

Azerbaijani grievances, taken seriously

Azerbaijanis were displaced from the Armenian SSR in waves: roughly 100,000 in 1948 to 1953, and again the entire community, around 200,000 by Soviet enumeration, in 1988 to 1991 as the conflict reignited. The Khojaly massacre of 26 February 1992, in which Armenian forces killed somewhere between 161 and 613 Azerbaijani civilians fleeing the town, is recorded as such; the Maraga massacre of April 1992, less well known internationally and committed in the opposite direction, is similarly recorded. Approximately 750,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced by the 1988-1994 war from Karabakh and the seven occupied districts surrounding it; many lived in railway carriages or temporary settlements for two decades.

These facts coexist with what came after; they do not stand in place of it. They do not justify the 2020-2023 sequence; they explain why a politics of return was politically usable inside Azerbaijan, and why dismissing it as pure aggression misreads the constituency.

Thread 3

Karabakh, the spine of the conflict

Mountainous Karabakh held an Armenian majority continuously from at least the early 19th century through the late 20th. In July 1921, after first ruling that Karabakh should join Soviet Armenia, the Caucasian Bureau of the Bolshevik party reversed itself overnight under pressure from Nariman Narimanov and assigned the region to Soviet Azerbaijan as the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. Petitions to revisit this decision were raised in 1945, 1965 and 1977 and shelved each time. In February 1988 the local soviet voted formally to rejoin Armenia. The war that followed killed roughly 30,000 and displaced more than a million people on both sides. The question was finally settled by force in 2020 and 2023.

A persistent myth

"One nation, two states"

The Heydar Aliyev formula bir millət, iki dövlət, "one nation, two states", framing Azerbaijanis and Anatolian Turks as a single people separated only by a border, has been foundational for Azerbaijan's foreign policy since 1993 and shapes how the conflict is presented in Western capitals where Baku has cultivated political sympathy. As a description of identity, it is historically misleading.

Azerbaijani identity, as it exists in the Caucasus, is a distinct synthesis. Linguistically Oghuz Turkic, yes; but religiously overwhelmingly Twelver Shia rather than Sunni; politically and culturally formed under Qajar Persian rule until 1828 and then under Russian and Soviet rule until 1991, never under Ottoman administration. The founders of modern Azerbaijani secular culture, Mirza Fatali Akhundov in the 1850s, Hasan bey Zardabi in the 1870s, the Maarifçilik enlightenment, the social-democratic Hümmet party, were oriented toward Tiflis, Tabriz and Saint Petersburg. Not toward Istanbul.

Pan-Turkism is a layered later import. It arrived twice: with the Musavat-ruled First Republic of 1918-20 (whose ideologue Mammad Amin Rasulzade nevertheless argued for a distinct Azerbaijani national identity), and again, much more emphatically, after Heydar Aliyev's 1993 pivot to Ankara. The two-states formula serves the Aliyev dynasty and serves Erdoğan; it is not how Akhundov, Zardabi or Narimanov, the people who actually built modern Azerbaijani identity, understood themselves.

Acknowledging that distinctness is also how to take Azerbaijani agency seriously, including its choices, including those choices this atlas criticises. Treating Baku as merely a proxy for Ankara flatters Pan-Turkism and excuses Azerbaijani decisions; it does neither side any favours.

Epochs

On method

Every claim in this atlas is referenced to an underlying source: books, court rulings, UN resolutions, NGO investigations, primary documents. Where readings of an event diverge along political or national lines, the atlas exposes those readings side-by-side rather than flattening them. Where numbers are contested, ranges are given. Atrocities by either side are named as such. The atlas is a working draft; errors and omissions are mine. Send corrections.