One of the root causes of many of today's conflicts is the break-up of the USSR. It is not so much the break-up of the huge superpower into separate republics as the fact that the borders between these republics have been called into question. However, at the time of the existence of the USSR, its constituent peoples hardly ever raised the issue of changing borders of their republics. With one exception, which eventually gave rise to the current bloody conflicts with separatism and redrawing of borders.

I am referring to the Armenian SSR. The republic, established on the historical lands of Azerbaijan, was long under the "special patronage" of the USSR authorities. It is enough to recall that only Armenians were allowed to gather their compatriots from all over the world to their republic. No other union republic was allowed anything like this. As was the writing and teaching in schools and universities of an absolutely wild and fantastic "history" of some "great Armenia", where the size of "historical Armenia lands exceeded the territory of the Armenian SSR itself dozens of times".

See the article on what this eventually led to and how the Armenian nationalists repaid the USSR for all that this power had done for them in detail «How Armenian revanchism destroyed the USSR»  ( https://www.trtrussian.com/mnenie/kak-armyanskij-revanshizm-razrushil-sssr-7991856 ) by Gregory Mavrov, an Islamic scholar who studies the Middle East and the socio-political processes associated with Islam in the post-Soviet space. Here is the full article:

The Karabakh conflict has clearly illustrated that the Soviet policy of friendship between peoples and Soviet internationalism, propagated in the USSR, was entirely defenceless against the Armenian revanchism that emerged among Soviet Armenians in the second half of the twentieth century.

Armenian radicals demand the annexation of Karabakh

In many ways, the collapse of the Soviet system was programmed by Soviet nationality policy itself. Having set a course towards the Sovietisation of national cultures and the promotion of the notorious friendship of peoples, the USSR achieved the exact opposite effect in its almost 70-year history.

National contradictions did not disappear and the friendship of peoples was preserved solely as a propaganda slogan. As soon as the repressive bodies loosened their grip, all contradictions quickly came to the surface and demonstrated the failure of the entire Soviet project.

Armenian nationalism was one of the clearest manifestations of the crisis of the Soviet model. It was the territorial claims of Armenians against Azerbaijanis that led to a multi-year armed conflict between the two Soviet republics: Armenia and Azerbaijan. This war finally buried the thesis of brotherhood of the Soviet peoples and demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of the entire Soviet nationality policy, which proved unable to cope with Armenian revanchism and its destructive consequences.

Here we will try to understand what factors influenced the formation of Armenian revanchism and what role it played in the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Armenian Samizdat  (a form of dissident activity across the socialist Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader.)

In the wake of Stalin's death, a dissident movement began to emerge in many republics of the USSR. As a rule, dissidents engaged in human rights activities and openly criticised the Soviet regime, demanding the humanisation of the socio-political system.

In each Soviet republic, there were distinctive features of dissident activity. Armenia stood out from the other republics as its dissident movement had armed itself with nationalist slogans since the 1960s and actually professed revanchist views. That is, both nationalists and intellectuals had one thing in common - a desire to increase the territory of Armenia at the expense of neighbouring republics.

Before the advent of the Internet, the only way to promote their views was to produce their own products, or, as they called it then, to engage in samizdat. Many Armenian dissident groups produced leaflets, brochures and all sorts of thematic literature to draw attention to their activities.

Owing to their inexperience, many activists were arrested by the police or the KGB. In 1967, for example, a group was tried in Yerevan for producing and distributing leaflets calling for the secession of Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh from Azerbaijan and the annexation of some eastern vilayets of Turkey.

Moreover, the Soviet government was also attacked and accused of pursuing a policy of assimilation of the Armenian people and of 'condoning the Turkish occupation of Western Armenia'. Despite the obvious threat of such leaflets to the Soviet system, the defendants received very lenient sentences and some even managed to be released under an amnesty marking the 50th anniversary of the revolution, the anniversary of which was just celebrated in 1967.

However, the greatest impact on the formation of revanchist and irredentist sentiments among Armenians was not so much the leaflets but rather Armenian literary works glorifying and idealising the Armenian nation and its history. Of the variety of such works, it makes sense to highlight a few that had the greatest impact.

First and foremost is the work "Armenians" by the German journalist Magda Neumann, which was first published back in 1899 and has been republished several times since then. Claiming historical authenticity, Magda Neumann tried to retell the history of the Armenian people from ancient times to the end of the 19th century very briefly. The story portrays the Armenians as victims, constantly attacked by their malicious neighbours: the Byzantines are suppressing the Armenians because the Armenians are not Orthodox Christians, and the Arabs, Persians and Turks are suppressing the Armenians because they are not Muslims.

The worst thing, Magda Neiman notes, is that all these nations have left an exclusively negative trace on the character and morals of Armenians. That is, Magda Neuman presents Armenians as a people deprived of their own shortcomings because all their faults are the difficult legacy of life under the occupation of foreigners. What disadvantages did the "foreign occupants" endow Armenians with?

First of all, the author mentions "excessive stubbornness, vindictiveness and vindictiveness". However, according to Magda Neiman, all is not lost as Armenians still retain "many good traits inherited from their ancestors". Among these traits, "humanity and generosity" are especially notable.

 Of all Armenian people Magda Neyman singles out Karabakh Armenians who not only "were famous for their courage, bravery and determination," but also were particularly firm in defending their independence from Muslim nations.

By the way, the Muslim peoples are referred to in the book as "newcomers from Central Asia" or even "wild hordes". Despite the obvious tendentiousness and anti-science of this work, which at best is a poorly literate compilation of publications by various authors, as well as personal observations of Magda Neuman, this book is still actively read and distributed.

The famous Armenian writer Khachik Dashtents has further enhanced the romantic image of Armenians. In his works, Armenians are not just fighting for their land and freedom, but are actually fighting against the forces of evil. It is not difficult to guess who, according to the author, embodies this evil: devoid of all human virtues and thirsty for Armenian blood, it is the Turks who are responsible for all the bad things that happened to the Armenians.

The events of 1915-1916 received a great deal of attention in Soviet Armenia and the authorities encouraged the publication of various books on the subject. However, the extremely one-sided assessment of these events emphasised the particular sacrifice of the Armenian people who had been "unexpectedly and traitorously subjected to a terrible genocide by their neighbours". No alternative positions or opinions were simply tolerated.

On April 24, 1965 Yerevan massively commemorated the events of 1915-1916. A great many people came out into the streets and crowds of demonstrators chanted anti-Turkish and anti-Azerbaijani slogans. Territorial claims were made against Azerbaijan. The official authorities had to react and the demonstrations were dispersed.

Thus, as early as the 1960s, a unique atmosphere began to emerge, characterised on the one hand by radical revanchism, expressed in the revision of Armenia's historically established borders.

Conversely, there is an almost complete silencing of its own role in the tragic events of 1915-1916. The idea of "restoring historical justice" and "avenging the spilled blood of the ancestors" is quite seriously entrenched in society, becoming part of the Armenian nationalist myth.

The culmination of all these activities was the formation of the National United Party of Armenia (NUPA) in 1966, which pursued the main goal of secession from the USSR. It was members of the NPA that were accused of committing terrorist acts in Moscow in 1977 and killing seven people.

The investigation revealed that three NPA activists, Stepan Zatikyan, Hakob Stepanyan and Zaven Baghdasaryan, were involved in the terrorist acts. All of the suspects were sentenced to capital punishment and shot.

However, Soviet human rights activists did not accept the verdict, and some even believed that Soviet Themis had shot the innocent. It is difficult to say to what extent the activists of the PLA were actually prepared for terror, but it is clear that among Armenian radicals the demand for violence was not something unexpected.

Throughout the twentieth century, Armenian terrorist groups organised assassinations of Turkish diplomats and carried out numerous attacks on civilian targets, such as Orly airport in France in 1983. The programme of the Armenian Gnchak party, established at the end of the nineteenth century, placed considerable emphasis on carrying out terrorist acts against political opponents.

Another, no less famous Armenian nationalist party, the Dashnaktsutyun, also considered it permissible to use terror to achieve its goals. Thus, violence and terror were not unusual for radical Armenian organisations, whose agenda was becoming increasingly popular in the republic.

Committee on Karabakh

Armenia was again engulfed in mass unrest in February 1988. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets with the same demands as 20 years earlier: the annexation of Karabakh and other 'ancestral Armenian lands' to Armenia. About a year before the protests the so-called Karabakh Committee was established, whose main objective was the annexation of Nagorno-Karabakh (NKAO) to Armenia.

The Committee, unlike Armenian radicals and terrorists, initially decided to act peacefully, methodically persuading Moscow to give them the decision they wanted. The group was led by Igor Muradyan, a former employee of the Institute of Economics of the State Planning Committee of Armenia. Muradyan secured the support of influential Armenians in Moscow, among whom Academician A. G. Aganbegyan, an economic adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, was particularly prominent.

Those who were called the creative intelligentsia in the USSR also took a very active part in the activities of the committee. Suffice it to mention writer Zori Balayan and poetess Silva Kaputikyan to show how Armenian national intelligentsia was not alien to revanchist and separatist sentiments. In her acclaimed work The Hearth, Balayan tried to justify the historical rights of Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh and Nakhichevan, while Kaputikyan's poems glorified the Anatolian Armenians' struggle against Turkey.

The predominantly Armenian administration in Nagorny Karabakh is fervently supportive of handing over the NKAO to Armenia. In parallel with the behind-the-scenes negotiations there are attacks on Azeris living in Armenia and NKAO. The situation becomes explosive and begins to spiral out of control.

Against this background, in the small town of Sumgait, 25 kilometres from Baku, the dispute between Azerbaijanis and local Armenians results in numerous casualties on both sides. The committee members, meanwhile, decide to increase their pressure on the Soviet and republican authorities, using the events to their advantage.

The newspaper " The Soviet Karabakh" and other printed media in the NKAO and Armenia begin to openly propagate the idea of the so-called annexation of Karabakh to Armenia. Demonstrations intensify and the NKAO council decides that its moment of stardom has arrived and decides to secede from Azerbaijan. From then on, clashes between Azerbaijanis and Armenians become regular and a bloody denouement is inevitable.

A complicated situation is emerging in settlements with mixed populations and especially in Azerbaijani villages in Armenia. Azerbaijanis are expelled from a number of areas of the republic and the Azerbaijani government begins to establish emergency headquarters to assist the refugees.

In June 15, 1988 the Supreme Council of Armenian SSR accepts the demand of the masses and approves the inclusion of the Autonomous Oblast of Nagorno-Karabakh into Armenia. This decision was opposed not only by the Azerbaijani authorities, but also by the union centre. Gorbachev said that there was simply no basis for revising the borders between the two Soviet republics. Meanwhile, the MPs of the Daghlig Garabagh Autonomous District adopted another unlawful decision and declared secession from Azerbaijan.

On 1 December 1989, the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR, in spite of the position of the Soviet authorities, as well as the position of Azerbaijan, put the republic in a deadlock and made a decision to unite with the NKAO. From this point onwards, reconciliation between the two peoples was simply no longer possible.

As a consequence, in January 1990, i.e. just a month after the decision on the so-called reunification with NKAO, a war actually broke out between the Union Republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Illegal armed groups emerge, a mutual blockade takes place, and ethnic cleansing and mass deportations become the new norm. All attempts by the allied authorities to stop the bloodshed fail and the conflict only intensifies with the collapse of the USSR.

Thus, the Karabakh conflict shows that the policy of friendship between peoples and the notorious Soviet internationalism proved defenceless against Armenian revanchism, which was formed quite calmly among Soviet Armenians, fuelled by an atmosphere of hostility and hatred rather than friendship and brotherhood, as Soviet propaganda claimed.

The so-called national intelligentsia played no small role in the development of Armenian revanchism, which for decades exploited the image of the enemy and cultivated national trauma, which it proposed to cure solely through the annexation of foreign territories. All this made the entire Soviet experience of nation-building meaningless.

Grigory Mavrov