Karabakh Movement §

The Karabakh Movement (Gharabaghyan sharzhum) was the mass political mobilisation, in Soviet Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, demanding the transfer of NKAO from the Azerbaijan SSR to the Armenian SSR. It opened the post-Soviet era of conflict in the South Caucasus and created the political networks from which independent Armenia's first government would emerge.

The movement was preceded by petitions in 1945 (to Stalin from the Karabakh Communist leadership), 1965 (after the 50th-anniversary demonstrations in Yerevan) and 1977. None received substantive response. The 1985 onset of glasnost reopened space for grievance articulation. On 13 February 1988 a strike at the Stepanakert silk factory began; on 20 February 1988 the NKAO Soviet passed a resolution requesting transfer to the Armenian SSR. Mass demonstrations followed in Yerevan's Theatre Square (later Liberty Square): up to a million people gathered on 26 February 1988, the largest unauthorised gathering in Soviet history.

The mobilisation generated political coordination through the Karabakh Committee, eleven Yerevan intellectuals (among them Levon Ter-Petrosyan, philologist; Vazgen Manukyan, mathematician; Babken Ararktsyan; and Ashot Manucharyan). Moscow arrested the committee in December 1988 in the wake of the Spitak earthquake, holding them six months in Butyrka prison; their release in May 1989 made them national heroes. They became the leadership of the Pan-Armenian National Movement (HHSh), which won the May 1990 Armenian Supreme Soviet elections.

The movement coincided with, and was inseparable from, the parallel Azerbaijani national mobilisation under the Popular Front and the inter-ethnic violence that broke out across the region: the Sumgait pogrom (February 1988), the Kirovabad pogrom (November 1988), the Baku pogrom (January 1990) and the corresponding expulsion of the Azerbaijani population of Soviet Armenia. By the time both republics declared independence (Azerbaijan 30 August 1991, Armenia 21 September 1991 referendum), the Karabakh Movement had transitioned into the war over Nagorno-Karabakh which would last until the Bishkek ceasefire of May 1994.

(sourced opinion: de Waal reads the movement as the prototype of all post-Soviet ethnic mobilisations; Cornell frames it within a regional comparison with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Transnistria.)