"A considerable number of Armenian collective farmers express the desire to have Mountainous Karabakh, which is part of the Azerbaijan SSR but populated mostly by Armenians, joined to Armenia."
Anastas Mikoyan · 1945
From the November 1945 correspondence between G. Arutyunov (First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party) and Anastas Mikoyan, the senior Armenian in the Politburo, when the question of transferring Karabakh to Armenia was raised with Stalin. The proposal was shelved after Baghirov's counter-proposal. Cited by de Waal from Soviet archive copies.