The Soviet Settlement §

The Soviet borders

The 1922 formation of the Soviet Union folded the Caucasian SSRs into a Transcaucasian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (TSFSR) which existed until the 1936 Soviet Constitution dissolved it into three separate union republics: Armenian SSR, Azerbaijan SSR and Georgian SSR. NKAO inside Azerbaijan and the Nakhichevan ASSR (also inside Azerbaijan, as guaranteed by the 1921 Treaty of Moscow which gave Turkey guarantor status) were locked in.

The 1937 purges

The 1937-38 Stalinist purges in the South Caucasus were carried out under Lavrentiy Beria and his subordinates Mir Jafar Baghirov (Azerbaijan) and Aghasi Khanjyan (Armenia, until his 1936 death in disputed circumstances at Beria's hand). The cultural and political leadership of all three republics was destroyed: writers, party officials, military commanders. Neither the Armenian Apostolic Catholicos nor the Azerbaijani religious leadership escaped.

The demographic acts

The 1946-48 Armenian repatriation brought approximately 100,000 diaspora Armenians from the Middle East and the Balkans into Armenian SSR; many were placed in the apartments of Azerbaijani families about to be displaced. The 1948-53 deportation, authorised by USSR Council of Ministers Resolution No. 4083 of 23 December 1947 (signed by Stalin), relocated approximately 100,000 Azerbaijanis from Armenian SSR to the lowlands of Azerbaijani SSR. Approximately half died of malaria, dysentery, exposure or starvation in resettlement zones. The decree is the documentary basis on which the 1988-91 expulsion dispute tests the "voluntary departure" framing in mirror image.

The slower demographic act was the engineering of Nakhichevan ASSR: from approximately 40% Armenian on the 1917 enumeration to 1.4% by 1979. The NKAO trajectory was the inverse: Armenian share fell from 94% (1923) to 76% (1979), through Azerbaijani in-migration to NKAO's small towns and to Stepanakert/Khankendi itself. Both shifts were Soviet-period state engineering.

Heritage in the period

Both peoples' heritage suffered. The Soviet anti-religious campaigns of the 1930s closed Bibi-Heybat in Baku (demolished 1936), the Demirbulag and Sartip-Khan mosques of Yerevan, and dozens of Armenian monasteries in Nakhichevan. The Etchmiadzin Cathedral was effectively closed to public worship 1938-43 before being reopened under the wartime religious thaw.

Petitions, ignored

NKAO Armenian petitions to be transferred to Armenian SSR were raised in 1945 (to Stalin), 1965 and 1977, and shelved each time. The post-1953 silence was not consent; it was the surface tension of an unresolved structural arrangement. That tension would surface explosively in 1988.

What the period set

The Soviet settlement froze the 1921 territorial decisions for 70 years. The institutional structure (NKAO inside Azerbaijani SSR, Nakhichevan ASSR inside Azerbaijani SSR with Turkish guarantor rights, no land border between Armenia and Karabakh except through Azerbaijani-controlled Lachin) was the architecture inside which the 1988 Armenian challenge would be made and the 1992-94 war would be fought. The 1948-53 deportation was the unaddressed grievance the post-1988 Azerbaijani state would later use to anchor the "Western Azerbaijan" framing.