Black Garden : Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War

menia—but not Azerbaijan. By using such a term we confirm the exis­
tence of such a country.”
5 
One is reminded of Golda Meir’s famous al­
leged remark about the Palestinians that “they never existed.” 
In response to this, Azerbaijani historians might usefully have fo­
cused their research on the rich history of the Safavid period, when 
Karabakh was part of a Turkic-speaking dynastic empire based in 
northern Iran. A thoroughly researched study of that epoch would re-
veal the fascinating and mixed history of Karabakh between the six­
teenth and nineteenth centuries. 
They did not take this approach. Perhaps because Soviet politicians 
wanted more literal examples of home-grown statehood to buttress the 
histories of the new Union Republics, Azerbaijani historians set off 
down a different route. The role of patriot-historian-in-chief fell to a 
very controversial figure. Zia Buniatov could at least lay claim to being 
a real warrior. He was one of those Red Army soldiers who crossed the 
whole of Europe, entered Germany, and helped plant the Soviet flag on 

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H U R E K AVA N K :  T H E   U N P R E D I C TA B L E   PA S T  
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the Reichstag in Berlin in 1945. For this he was subsequently made a 
Hero of the Soviet Union, a distinction that helped him make a success­
ful career as an academic historian of the Caucasus. Buniatov later went 
into politics. His strange career ended with his mysterious assassina­
tion in the doorway of his house in February 1997. 
One of Buniatov’s earliest historical observations was well made. 
He was among the first historians to point out that a good proportion of 
the Armenians in Armenia and Karabakh were descended from nine­
teenth-century immigrants. In 1828–1830, shortly after their conquest of 
the southwestern Caucasus, the Russians resettled 57,000 Armenians 
from Persia and Iran in Armenia and Nakhichevan. Smaller numbers 
also settled in Karabakh, where the villages of Melikjanlu, Tsakuri, and 
Maragha were founded by Persian Armenians. The historians do not 
seem to have clarified what proportion of the 19,000 Armenians who 
lived in Karabakh in the 1830s were settlers (a half, a quarter, a tenth?), 
but many clearly were. 
This interesting historical point makes a dent in the “unbroken lin­
eage” of the Karabakh Armenians. Azerbaijani polemicists, however, 
were not interested in dents but in knockout blows, which is why Rufa, 
the café owner in Samed Vurgun Park in Baku, told me that Alexander 
Griboyedov, the Russian poet who was Russia’s ambassador to Persia, 
brought “all the Armenians” into the Caucasus in the 1820s. 
In 2001, a joint Azerbaijani-Chechen newspaper published in Baku 
used the “Griboyedov argument” to express its support for Chechnya’s 
liberation struggle, without having to equate Chechen separatism from 
Russia with Armenian separatism from Azerbaijan. So to square this