Bolshevism §

Bolshevism is the Marxist-Leninist current that, from the 1903 split of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party at its London congress, organised under Vladimir Lenin's leadership a vanguard-party model committed to the violent overthrow of the autocracy and to the construction, through proletarian dictatorship, of a socialist society. It seized power in Petrograd on 25 October (7 November) 1917, won the Russian Civil War (1918–22), and reconstituted the imperial space as the Soviet Union in 1922.

For the South Caucasus, Bolshevism arrived in two waves. The first, the March Days Baku Commune of March–July 1918 under Stepan Shahumyan, was a short-lived Armenian-Bolshevik condominium destroyed by the September 1918 Army of Islam entry into Baku. The second, decisive wave came with the Red Army's reconquest of Azerbaijan (April 1920 Bakinian operation, dropping the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic into Soviet Russia) and Armenia (November–December 1920, following Armenian-Turkish war defeat).

The Bolshevik settlement of the Karabakh question is the founding act of the modern conflict. The Caucasian Bureau decision of 4–5 July 1921, with Stalin's decisive intervention as Commissar of Nationalities, reversed an initial decision to assign Nagorno-Karabakh to Soviet Armenia and instead awarded it to Soviet Azerbaijan with autonomy. The 7 July 1923 decree formalised the NKAO. Nakhichevan had already been awarded to Azerbaijan by the Treaty of Moscow (March 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (October 1921) in negotiation with Kemalist Turkey.

Bolshevik nationalities policy (Soviet internationalism) institutionalised ethnic categories within a federal taxonomy of titular republics, autonomous republics, and autonomous oblasts. The Great Terror of 1937–38 decapitated both the Armenian and Azerbaijani party intelligentsias. In its mature Stalinist phase Bolshevism subordinated proletarian internationalism to a Russian-state national-imperial frame. The doctrine was formally abandoned with the dissolution of the CPSU in 1991; the Communist Party of Armenia and the Communist Party of Azerbaijan dissolved with it, although personnel networks (Heydar Aliyev's, above all) carried over.