4. Transcaucasian Independence Movement

When Gorbachev launched perestroika in 1985, the republics of Transcaucasia were absorbed by economic stagnation and corruption of the local authorities. The hard-line partocracy was suspicious of Gorbachev’s intentions because they might jeopardise great privileges which nomenklatura enjoyed during previous decades. However, ordinary people in the region greeted the reforms with enthusiasm. They associated with the restructuring the hopes for the improvement of living standards, political atmosphere and national autonomy. Despite the popular support and because of the resistance of the conservatives, changes in Transcaucasia occurred slowly and the region lagged behind the renovation process in Moscow.

Reluctance of the republican party élite to follow Gorbachev’s reforms from above increased the tendencies for liberalisation from below. A number of ‘informal’ organisations were founded in Transcaucasia to promote the new political course. Due to the favourable political environment created by glasnost, the old dissident groups went out of underground and joined the legal political activity. Whereas in Russia the informal groups were aimed to encourage political and economic reforms in the USSR, the task of the organisations in the other republics included also the nationality issues.

The first manifestation of nationalism in Transcaucasia took place in the ecological field. Informal organisations in Azerbaijan demanded from the authorities to close down the aluminium and chemical plants in Sumgait, one of the most polluted Soviet cities. A series of protest actions against the irresponsible projects in Armenia took place in 1987 in Yerevan. In Georgia, the rise of nationalism was facilitated by a strong campaign against the construction of the Transcaucasian railroad across the Main Caucasian Range. The railroad might cause avalanches, landslides and a pollution of the river of Aragvi, the main source of the drinking water of Tbilisi.[50] The protest movement was initiated by the Helsinki Union of Georgia led by a prominent dissident Zviad Gamsakhurdia.

However, the most striking example of the role of ecological movement in national awakening was the mass protest in autumn, 1988, in Azerbaijan against the self-willed construction of the aluminium plant by Armenia in the place of Topkhana in Nagorno- Karabakh. The project envisaged clearing of a historical forest in Topkhana and destruction of a national relic, the Topkhana Cave, which had been taken under the state protection. By the moment when the news reached Baku, the Armenians had already wiped out a significant area from the verdure, including many species of unique plants and rare insects entered in the ‘Red Book’.[51] The consequences of the Topkhana plans had been profound for the Azeri national rebirth. During the unprecedented three-weeks continuous meeting in Baku in 17 November - 5 December, 1988, the demand to stop the construction had unexpectedly developed into a political scale. People protested against the Armenian claims to Nagorno-Karabakh, demanded to grant the Azeris in Armenia equal autonomy and to expand the sovereignty of Azerbaijan within the Union.[52] They criticised the republican authorities for the failure to defend national interests and to promote economic liberalisation and democratisation. As soon as the demand of autonomy reached Armenia, nearly 200,000 Azeris were forcibly expelled from there. The arrival of the refugees to Baku radicalised the meeting. Fearing a complete loss of control of the situation in Baku, the republican leaders appealed to Moscow for the introduction of the Soviet troops to the city. The violent dispersal of the peaceful meeting by the military on 5 December had shocked the Azeris and had had profound effect on the rise of nationalism in Azerbaijan.

On the meeting, for the first time during the Soviet rule, the colours of the Azerbaijani national flag were shown in public. This vividly exemplified the evolution of the ecological protest into nationalism. It would be, however, wrong to assume that Azeri nationalism was engendered by Topkhana. It was in summer, 1988, when the Initiative Centre for the Azerbaijani Popular Front (APF) had been created by a group of intelligentsia. The purpose of the APF at first was to promote perestroika in the republic, to consolidate the opposition to the corrupted party bureaucracy, and to defend territorial integrity of Azerbaijan.[53] Therefore, Topkhana served as a catalyst for the popular movement which, in turn, had emerged long time before.

In Armenia, solitary nationalist organisations for the regaining of independence functioned in underground during zastoi.[54] In the late 1970s, three Armenian terrorists, the members of one of the organisations, were convicted to death by the Soviet court for the bombing in Moscow metro. After the execution, repression followed and the organisations ceased to exist. The rise of Armenian nationalism was inspired in the 1980s by the Karabakh movement. The ‘Karabakh’ Committee, which was created in the early 1988 to pursue the annexation of the Azerbaijani territory, had evolved into a broad nationalist movement and became the core of the ANM. On 17 June, 1989, the foundation of the ANM was officially declared.[55]

In Georgia, nationalist sentiments were growing steadily after Stalin’s death. In 1956 and 1978, the Georgians protested against Moscow’s attempts to remove the dictator’s monuments in the republic and the Georgian’s status as a state language respectively.[56] During perestroika, the Georgians experienced a dramatic flourishing of their national self- consciousness. The secessionist tendencies in Abkhazia and South Osetia accelerated the emergence of a number of groups for independence. In contrast with the Baltics, Azerbaijan and Armenia, opposition in Georgia was from the very beginning diverse and it consisted of separate parties. Apart from the Georgian Popular Front (the Head - Natadze) which was created on 21 June, 1990,[57] there were many other influential organisations, such as the Helsinki Union of Georgia (Z.Gamsakhurdia), the St.Ilia the Righteous Society (Z.Gamsakhurdia), the Merab Kostava Society (V.Adamia), the National Democratic Party (G.Chanturia). It was not until the electoral campaign in autumn 1990 that the parties united into a bloc to successfully run the elections.

Although both in the Baltics and Transcaucasia the ecological protest was the bud of nationalism, the essence of the movements in the two regions were at first different. As long as the Baltics were free of territorial and inter-ethnic disputes, nationalism there had primordially been purported to regain independence of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Conversely, the popular movements in Georgia and Azerbaijan were created initially to deal with the threat to the territorial integrity of the republics rather than with the independence issues. The reason behind this difference lay in the fact that the conflicts in the Caucasus broke out before the popular movements emerged there. Perhaps, the ‘Karabakh’ Committee of the Armenians might serve as an exception to this point, since it was created prior to the first demonstrations in the NKAO and in order to mastermind them.

It took a while to amend the political agenda of the national oppositions with the independence issues. Disappointment of the Azeris, Armenians and Georgians with the position of the Kremlin, which provided neither of them with the anticipated support at the outset of the crises, caused a certain degree of public discontent in all the three republics. However, there still was a belief in the idea of a renewed federation. Even after the first use of force by Moscow and the introduction of the curfew in Baku in December, 1988, the major concern of the Azeris remained the Armenian claims to their territory rather than the relations with the Union. It were bloody operations of the Soviet Army in Georgia and Azerbaijan, namely the brutal dispersal of the peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi on 9 April, 1989, and the massacre of the civilians in Baku on 20 January, 1990, that removed the doubts of the Azeris and Georgians and made them regard their future within the Soviet Union impossible.

In Armenia, the transformation of the ‘Karabakh’ Committee into the ANM embodied the evolution of the ‘incorporation of Karabakh’ idea into a broad national movement toward the restoration of national sovereignty. This change occurred in Armenia more smoothly than in two other Transcaucasian republics, because the Centre did not repeat the Baku and Tbilisi scenarios in Yerevan. Historically, the Armenians had been the Russian ally. The very doctrine of the Armenian resettlement in the Caucasus from the early 19th century had the purpose to create a Christian advanced post in the region, a kind of the fifth column, to promote Russian penetration of Muslim Persia and Turkey. Russia backed Armenian nationalism in the Ottoman Empire and convinced them to revolt against the Ottoman government at the beginning of WWI. The Armenians were promised statehood if they fought the Turks together with the Russian army. At the wake of the Russian advance into Turkey in 1915, they rose up, and nearly 1.5m Turks and Kurds had been killed by the Armenian guerrillas.[58] The war-time unloyalty costed them a deportation from Eastern Anatolia to Syria, during which many of them lost their lives.[59] Many Armenians, however, found refuge in the Russian Caucasus.

Russian protection had been remembered by the Armenians with gratitude. Even the Soviet intervention of the first Armenian Republic was perceived differently. The Armenians believed that had they not been occupied in 1920 by the Bolsheviks, the nation would have been imminently absorbed by hostile Turkey. Therefore, the anti-Moscow sentiments in Armenia were not as radical as they were in the Baltics, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The evolution of the independence movement in Armenia was accompanied by the Dashnaktsutsiun party’s strong opposition to the secession from the USSR. Even after the Soviet break up, the Armenians preserved the traditional pro- Russian orientation, and the recent decision of Yerevan to join the Russo-Belarus Union illustrated this point.

The dispersal of the meetings in Tbilisi and Baku and the growing popularity of the ANM in Armenia mobilised the Transcaucasian peoples around the independence idea. By January 1990, the Baltic and Transcaucasian popular fronts developed well enough to successfully compete with the republican CPs on the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Moscow realised that the elections would won by the nationalists and that the secession of the two strategically important regions would inevitably follow. There was no way to prevent the popular fronts from coming to power, but the use of force. The hard-liners, who became dominant in Gorbachev’s team, insisted on the suppression of the fronts. Since Azerbaijan was the first in the USSR to held the elections, the APF had become the main target. The conservatives pushed Gorbachev to send the army to Baku to teach a lesson to the other nations.

After the failed visit to Lithuania, Gorbachev took the position of the hard-liners, and on 20 January he introduced the state of emergency in Baku. A week before, the KGB had provoked violent actions against the Armenians in order to create a pretext for the intervention.[60] On 18 January, the Board of the APF released the statement in which it condemned pogroms and noted the following: “The preliminary analysis of the facts shows that the crimes were initiated by certain people who had been immediately leaving the scenes of crimes. This suggests an idea of their preparedness. Which forces stand behind them, who is the organiser?”[61] The municipal police and the city garrison of 20,000 received the order from Moscow not to interfere into the violence. Nothing had been done by the authorities to stop pogroms. It was the APF that arranged the evacuation of the Armenians to the safer places. When on 20 January, five days after the end of the violence, the army entered Baku on the pretext of the Armenians’ protection, it followed however not to the Armenian areas but to the APF controlled offices and objects.[62]

The military operation in Baku costed 132 civilian lives. The state of emergency and the curfew were introduced in Baku for the second time over the last year and lasted up to the collapse of the USSR. The military regime banned the APF, dismantled the institutional structure of the front, and closed the opposition press. Several leaders were arrested,[63] others were driven into the underground, many were murdered.[64] The regime postponed the elections. As a result of the police action, the communist dictatorship was established in Azerbaijan and the popular movement was severely suppressed. Once the republic of advanced nationalism, Azerbaijan turned into a conservative stronghold and the proving ground of repression. The parliamentary elections were held on 30 September, 1990, under the conditions of the state of emergency, when the tanks were on the streets. Hence, the CP received 89% of the seats.

The suppression by Moscow of nationalism in Azerbaijan could not however stop the process of the Soviet disintegration. During the May elections in Armenia, the ANM celebrated a victory.[65] On 28 October, 1990, the first free multi-party elections in 70 years were held in Georgia, during which the Round Table - Free Georgia bloc of Gamsakhurdia received 62% of the seats.[66] The decisive victory of nationalist forces in the Baltics, the Ukraine and Moldova, showed that the Soviet peoples were abandoning a totally discredited communist regime. The vivid demonstration of the determination of the nations to regain independence were the refusal of Georgia, Armenia, Moldova and the Baltic republics to participate in the March 1991 referendum on the future of the Union and the Ukrainians’ vote for independence just before the coup d’état. The failed coup of August, 1991, marked the entry of the Soviet Union into the last stage of its collapse. Most of the republics declared their national independence, which made the country dissolved de facto. Finally, the historical summit in Belovezhskaya Puscha in December buried the 70 years old empire de jure.