Russian Conquest & the Manufactured Demographic §

Russian conquest and the demographic restructuring of the eastern Caucasus.

Across two wars and two treaties, Russia took the Caucasus from Qajar Persia. The frontier moved from the Caucasus crest to the Aras river, and the Russian state then organised the resettlement of around 130,000 Armenians from Persia and the Ottoman Empire into the new Erivan and Karabakh provinces, reshaping a region that had been overwhelmingly Caucasian Tatar (later Azerbaijani) into a contested mixed zone.