Declaration of three South Caucasian republics §

Background

The Russian Revolution destroyed the imperial framework that had governed the South Caucasus since the nineteenth century. After the collapse of tsarist authority, Armenian, Georgian and Muslim Azerbaijani leaders first tried to manage the region through the Transcaucasian Commissariat and then the Transcaucasian Sejm. That federation was always fragile. The three national movements faced different strategic realities: Georgian Mensheviks looked toward German protection, Azerbaijani leaders toward Ottoman and wider Turkic support, and Armenian leaders toward survival against the Ottoman army after the genocide editorial.

The Ottoman advance in spring 1918 made federation nearly impossible. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk had allowed the Ottomans to reclaim Kars, Ardahan and Batum from collapsing Russia. Armenian forces fought desperate defensive battles at Sardarapat, Bash Abaran and Karakilisa in May 1918, while refugees crowded into the eastern Armenian districts.

The event

Georgia declared independence on 26 May 1918. Azerbaijan followed on 28 May, establishing the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic with an initial political centre in Tiflis and then Ganja before Baku was taken later in the year. Armenia declared independence on 28 May under far worse conditions: no secure capital at first, a devastated refugee population, and an Ottoman army close enough to threaten the core Armenian districts.

The declarations created three modern republics, but they did not settle borders. Karabakh, Zangezur, Nakhichevan and Lori became immediate disputes. Armenian leaders claimed highland Karabakh and Zangezur on demographic and historical grounds; Azerbaijani leaders claimed them as essential territorial links and as part of the former imperial administrative space. The same moment that created national sovereignty also created the territorial contradictions that would outlive the republics themselves editorial.

Aftermath

The First Republic of Armenia survived only until the Soviet takeover of December 1920. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic survived until the Red Army entered Baku in April 1920. In that short interval both states built ministries, armies, diplomatic missions and national narratives. They also fought or sponsored local struggles over disputed zones.

Hovannisian treats Armenia's first republic as a state born into catastrophe, forced to act like a sovereign before it possessed the material basis of sovereignty. Kazemzadeh stresses the interlocking diplomatic pressures, especially Ottoman, British and Bolshevik policy. Both readings are needed: the republics were national projects, but they were also products of imperial collapse and external military timing. sourced opinion

Memory and politics

28 May became Armenian Republic Day and a core symbol for the ARF, which led the first republic and later preserved its state tradition in diaspora. In Azerbaijan, 28 May is Republic Day for the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and a central point in the country's claim to democratic statehood before Soviet rule. The shared date is striking: Armenia and Azerbaijan commemorate state birth on the same day while remembering the territorial disputes born with that statehood in incompatible ways editorial.

The event's analytical importance is that it marks the passage from communal security dilemmas to interstate claims. Before 1918 Armenians and Azerbaijanis fought mostly inside empires. After May 1918 they fought as national states, or as state-backed local forces, over the same mountains, roads and towns. That shift helps explain why later legal instruments such as the Kavbiuro decision and the Treaty of Kars carried such lasting weight.