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.