Background

After the Second World War, Soviet Armenia received a wave of diaspora Armenian repatriates. At the same time, Stalinist authorities considered the Turkic Muslim population of the Armenian SSR politically suspect in the emerging Cold War borderland with Turkey. The Council of Ministers decree of 23 December 1947 authorised transfer of Azerbaijanis from Armenia to the Kura-Aras lowlands of Soviet Azerbaijan.

Deportation

Between 1948 and 1953, roughly 100,000–150,000 Azerbaijanis were displaced. Receiving areas in lowland Azerbaijan were climatically difficult for many deportees, and mortality was significant. The programme was not an uncontrolled population movement. It was a Soviet administrative deportation, carried out through state planning and justified in the language of economic resettlement editorial.

Memory and politics

This deportation is central to Azerbaijani memory of loss in Armenia, but it is often underdeveloped in Armenian public memory. That asymmetry matters. Armenians rightly stress the expulsion of Armenians from Azerbaijan in 1988–90; Azerbaijanis rightly point to earlier state coercion against Azerbaijanis in Armenia. The danger is false equivalence: different events had different causes and scales, but acknowledging one does not cancel the other editorial.

The 1948–53 deportation also complicates the idea of Soviet "friendship of peoples." Soviet power suppressed open ethnic conflict while sometimes moving populations in ways that embedded future grievance editorial.