Stalinist purges in Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan
Great Terror in Soviet Armenia and Azerbaijan, 1937–1938. Stalinist arrests, executions and Gulag deportations eliminated party cadres, writers, clerics, former nationalists and suspected opposition networks, reshaping both republics through fear and cultural decapitation.
Account
Background
The Great Terror reached the South Caucasus as part of the all-Union Stalinist purge, but it also exploited local histories of nationalism, class conflict and party rivalry. Former Dashnaks, Musavatists, clerics, intellectuals and Communist officials could all be redescribed as enemies.
The purge
In Soviet Armenia, arrests struck writers and cultural figures including Yeghishe Charents, former national activists and party officials. In Soviet Azerbaijan, Mir Jafar Baghirov's leadership became notorious for severity, linking local repression to Stalin's central terror. The seeded record describes tens of thousands killed across the South Caucasus, with many more imprisoned or deported.
Meaning
The purges matter in this atlas because they broke memory transmission. People who had lived through the first republics, genocide, Musavat rule, Bolshevik takeover and early Karabakh decisions were silenced, executed or forced into ideological conformity. Later nationalist revivals had to reconstruct the past from censored fragments editorial.
There is also a comparative contradiction. Armenians and Azerbaijanis often remember Soviet rule through the injuries specific to their national communities, but the Great Terror was a shared system of state violence that destroyed both elites. Shared victimhood did not produce shared memory because Soviet national frameworks kept the suffering institutionally separate editorial.