Russian Conquest & the Manufactured Demographic §

A frontier moves south

The two Russo-Persian wars of 1804-13 and 1826-28 transferred the eastern Caucasus from Qajar Persia to the Russian Empire. The Treaty of Gulistan (October 1813) ceded the Karabakh, Ganja, Shirvan, Quba, Baku and Talysh khanates; the Treaty of Turkmenchay (February 1828) added the Erivan and Nakhichevan khanates and fixed the Aras river as the Russo-Persian frontier, which has, with minor adjustments, remained continuously valid for nearly two centuries.

The 1828-30 organised migration

Article 15 of Turkmenchay guaranteed the right of Armenian subjects of the Shah to relocate into Russian territory. Approximately 40,000-45,000 came from Persian Azerbaijan in 1828-30, principally from Tabriz, Salmas and Khoy. A parallel Treaty of Adrianople (1829) authorised migration from the Ottoman Empire after the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-29; another 80,000-90,000 came from Erzurum, Bayazid and the Pontic littoral. The total of around 130,000 over two years reshaped the Erivan and Karabakh provinces.

The atlas's editorial position on the historiographic dispute, taken seriously in its own dispute entry, is that both sides describe the same documented event. What is contested is whether the people who moved were returning (the Armenian framing: descendants of populations forcibly relocated by Shah Abbas in 1604-05 and the Ottoman cleansings of the 17th-18th c.) or being settled into new ground (the Azerbaijani framing: the Russian state engineered an Armenian-majority eastern South Caucasus where one had not existed for centuries). The 1823 Russian survey of Karabakh khanate (Bournoutian) records the khanate as roughly 78% Muslim and 22% Armenian as an aggregate, with the mountainous core overwhelmingly Armenian and the lowland districts overwhelmingly Muslim. Both populations are pre-modern. The post-1828 in-migration densified the highland Armenian core and added Armenian settlement in the Erivan city and surrounding plain, where the pre-1828 population had been roughly 70% Caucasian Tatar (Azerbaijani), 30% Armenian.

The institutional architecture

The Polozhenie of 1836 reorganised the legal status of the Armenian Apostolic Church under Romanov rule, weakening the Catholicos's jurisdiction in favour of the Russian Synod. The Erivan Province (1849), the Tiflis Governorate, the Baku Governorate (1859) and the Elizavetpol Governorate (1867) were carved over the next four decades. The Sardar Palace of the pre-1828 Erivan Khanate, the Demirbulag Mosque and several smaller mosques attached to the Erivan Fortress were demolished in stages between the 1860s and 1914, erasing the civic-religious infrastructure of the city's pre-conquest Caucasian Tatar population.

What the period sets in motion

The mixed populations of pre-1828 Karabakh, Erivan and Nakhichevan were intensified, not created, by Russian rule. The Armenian repatriations from Persia and the Ottoman Empire produced demographic facts that Soviet Azerbaijani historiography would later treat as a "manufactured" anomaly and Armenian historiography would treat as restoration of an older population. The frame for the next 200 years was set in this period: two real peoples, both pre-modern, both claiming continuity, on the same small and contested ground.