Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

part of authorities in Baku: to settle Azerbaijanis in the population cen­
ters of Khojali and Shusha. Another factor was that Karabakh Armeni­
ans—mainly educated ones—were leaving. This again fits with the 
wider trends in the Caucasus and the Soviet Union as a whole. For the 
ambitious, all career opportunities were in the regional capital, in this 
case Baku; but the Karabakh Armenians, a minority, had fewer contacts 
and patrons and hence less chance of climbing the republican Party lad­
der. As a result, many Karabakh Armenians looked to Yerevan or Mos­
cow instead, and many parents chose to send their children to Stepana­
kert’s Russian schools. (Modern Karabakh is still as much Russian-
speaking as Armenian-speaking.) Communities of Karabakh exiles 
formed in such disparate places as Tashkent, Moscow, and Grozny. 
For this Karabakh Diaspora and for the intelligentsia in both Kara­
bakh and Armenia, this was a cultural dispute in the widest sense. The 
role they played turns on its head the assumption that the educated 
middle classes act as an enlightened brake on conflict. In Karabakh, the 
opposite was true: the Soviet middle classes were the first to break the 
bonds of friendship with their neighbors, while workers and farmers 
continued living in harmony. Asked what intercommunal relations 
were like in Soviet times, the former Karabakh Armenian Party official 
Sergei Shugarian replies: “At the upper levels [of society] there were 
never clashes [on ethnic grounds] because people were afraid of con­
frontation. In the middle there were constant tensions on national 
grounds. Down below they lived in friendship, there were no problems 
at all.”
26 

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D I V I S I O N S :   A   T W E N T I E T H - C E N T U RY  S TO RY 
141 
The Armenian intelligentsia had a long list of cultural complaints. 
For example, there was no Armenian-language television in Nagorny 
Karabakh; the history of Armenia was not taught in Armenian-lan­
guage schools; 24 April, Genocide Day, was not marked in Stepanakert; 
the director of the local museum, Shagen Mkrtchian, was sacked on or­
ders from Baku. One strongly felt grievance was that the dozens of Ar­
menian medieval churches in Karabakh were not only closed for wor­
ship but falling down for lack of upkeep. Karabakh Armenians con­
trasted their situation to that in Armenia, where national culture was 
undergoing its officially sanctioned revival. In other words, their com­
plaint was that Azerbaijan was suppressing their demands to have 
Nagorny Karabakh as a distinctively Armenian region. To Azerbaija­
nis, this was insupportable, for they had their own notions of Karabakh 
as a distinctively Azerbaijani region, with long cultural and historical 
traditions. 
There is another important twist to this tale: if the Karabakh Arme­
nians felt culturally and politically disadvantaged within Azerbaijan, 
the Karabakh Azerbaijanis felt disadvantaged inside Nagorny Kara­
bakh. They talk of discrimination by Armenians and tell stories about 
how they were made to feel uncomfortable in Stepanakert, an over­
whelmingly Armenian town. “The Armenians lived 100 times better 
than us,” said Elkhan Alekperov, a schoolmaster who served as head of 
Shusha’s Culture Department in the 1980s. He cites as an example a tiny 
Armenian village in his region that had a House of Culture, while a far 
larger Azerbaijani village had no cultural facilities at all. “They kept us 
down,” Alekperov says. “Once we went down to Stepanakert for a 
music competition. Our region was the strongest. But when we came 
out on stage, our number began and our group started performing, they 
switched off all the lights and the microphones.”
27 
FROM DIVISION TO BREAKUP 
The Soviet Union could be compared to a vast mansion with dozens of 
dark rooms and self-contained apartments. When in the 1980s the tired 
and ailing mansion owner—the Communist Party leadership—began 
to renegotiate the lease it had signed with its tenants, all of them made 
some unpleasant discoveries: The mansion had dry rot, the lease was 
badly drafted and full of contradictions, the spirit of “brotherhood” in 

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which their grandfathers had entered the mansion was a sham. The ten-
ants began to take matters into their own hands and quarreled with one 
another and the landlord. Even after the owner died, they were em-
broiled in angry disputes over who was entitled to what space. 
It was the Armenian and Azerbaijani tenants, quarreling over Na­
gorny Karabakh, who first exposed that the Soviet structure was a tot­
tering wreck. It seems that in the late 1980s three hitherto overlooked 
factors precipitated the situation here, as distinct from other places, 
from division into conflict. 
The first factor was that the Karabakh Armenians were able to mo­
bilize themselves by exploiting their dusty autonomous institutions. 
They used the Regional Soviet to vote for secession in February 1988, 
and deployed a few semiofficial weapons—a regional bureaucracy, a 
newspaper, a radio station—to continue their campaign. In this regard, 
Nagorny Karabakh was the first of several breakaway regions, includ­
ing Chechnya and Abkhazia, that used its Soviet-era autonomous sta­
tus as a springboard for secession. 
This factor was a necessary but not a sufficient factor to initiate con­
flict. After all, Crimea, which was transferred from Russia to Ukraine 
only in 1954, had strong local institutions, but the Crimean Russians 
stopped short of a violent movement to secede from Ukraine. A second, 
more crucial, factor in starting the conflict was the ease with which ha­
tred of the other could side be disseminated among the population. The 
Turkish historian Halil Berktay calls these mass expressions of fear and 
prejudice “hate narratives.” They were the dark side of the “renais­
sance” of the 1960s. And they were much harder to instigate, by way of 
contrast, between either republic and Georgia. Armenian and Azerbai­
jani academics had been denigrating the claims of rival scholars in the 
others’ republic for twenty years. In 1988, all that was needed was an in­
jection of politics—of full-strength “alcohol”—into the mixture. In a 
war of pamphlets, drawing on years of tendentious scholarship, sar­
casm, innuendo, and selective quotation incited ordinary people into 
hatred. 
Two of the most chauvinistic intellectual warriors shared the same 
initials, Z and B. Both Zori Balayan and Ziya Buniatov were Party mem­
bers who had done well out of the Soviet system. Buniatov had been 
writing anti-Armenian historical articles since the 1960s. When he be-
came head of the Academy of Sciences in Baku, he used that position to 
publish a stream of anti-Armenian material. 

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143 
In 1990, Buniatov’s academy reissued thirty thousand copies of a 
forgotten racist tract by the turn-of-the-century Russian polemicist Vasil 
Velichko. Velichko’s Caucasus of 1904 had argued that the Armenians’ 
short skulls, like those of the Jews, make them a politically unreliable 
race and praised the obedience of Azerbaijanis to the Tsarist regime: 
“Just as the Armenians and Jews, as a result of their racial instincts, are 
at core hostile to any statehood and especially to the idea of unrestricted 
monarchy, so the Azerbaijanis are naturally and organically in sympa­
thy with it—even the rebels, even the robbers.” Only Velichko’s hatred 
of Armenians seemed to have recommended his book to Buniatov for 
republication.
28 
Zori Balayan, a prominent Soviet journalist and writer, had pub­
lished Ochag (The hearth) in 1984, in which he related his travels around 
Armenian lands. Among Armenian landmarks he provocatively in­
cludes Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhichevan and the River Araxes, 
which runs along Azerbaijan’s southern border: “I met dawn on the 
bank of the Araxes. We conversed with the Armenian river in the Ar­
menian language.”
29 
Although it is still the pre-Gorbachev era, Balayan 
calls the Turks—and by extension the Azerbaijanis—the “enemy” of 
both Russia and Armenia. The book caused a storm of protest in Azer­
baijan—as no doubt he intended. It was almost as though both “ZBs” 
were picking up from where their fathers and grandfathers had left off 
in the 1920s. 
Yet this hatred might never have been allowed to spread beyond a 
few low-circulation publications but for the third precondition for con­
flict: the Politburo’s loss of control and the gradual collapse of Mos­
cow’s authority. In 1988, the center, without fully realizing it, began to 
give up its imperial mandate. It was beyond the Soviet Politburo to ini­
tiate an open dialogue, as a democratic leadership might have done, to 
reconcile the two sides. Its only powerful weapon was force, which it 
declined to use with any conviction. Gorbachev’s reforms revealed with 
frightening speed that the central doctrines that underpinned the Soviet 
Union were essentially bogus. In the words of Yury Slezkine, “The 
country’s leaders found it harder and harder to explain what the ‘so­
cialist content’ stood for and, when Gorbachev finally discarded the 
worn-out Marxist verbiage, the only language that remained was the 
well honed and long practiced language of nationalism.”
30 
The scholar of nationalism Ernest Gellner uses another metaphor, 
saying that nationalism rushed into a vacuum in which it had no 

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competition: “Ethnic nationalism . . . is naturally engendered by the 
conditions prevalent after seven decades of Soviet Jacobinism, and by 
its partial relaxation. It is favored by a double vacuum: there is no seri­
ous rival ideology, and there are no serious rival institutions.”
31 
As the double vacuum filled up, local leaders in Armenia and Azer­
baijan discovered with alarm that the “decorative nationalism” they 
had encouraged had real destructive power—and it destroyed most of 
them. Ordinary people responded with a mixture of fear and enthu­
siasm as the system they inhabited began to disappear from beneath 
their feet. 
To allow conflict to break out, the center needed only to do nothing. 
In the event, it did both more and less than that. In 1991, it gave a last 
poisoned chalice to the two sides: it handed over the Soviet army’s 
weaponry. By doing so, it enabled the two sides to turn a dispute waged 
with hunting rifles and pamphlets into a full-blown war of tanks and 
artillery. 

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