One of our first videos on this channel covered the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the separatist republic of Artsakh, majority Armenian but within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. During the war, the “national humiliation” of 1994, where the smaller Armenia was able to protect its sister republic, was set in reverse, with Artsakh becoming a much smaller and less defensible state against further Azeri incursions. In late 2022, the Azeris implemented a full blockade of the region, starving its citizens in preparation for what most commentators have agreed will be a massive ethnic cleansing campaign. As of this writing late-September 2023, the Azeri army has launched an attack against Artsakh, violating its previously agreed to ceasefire and swiftly disarming the Artsakh armed forces. This was soon followed by a flood of ethnic Armenians from Artsakh to Armenia, over 100,000, at least 80% of the population of the enclave before the war. This time, Armenia, apparently powerless against their larger neighbor and with an indifferent “ally” in Russia, has said that the invasion, or “special military operation” is none of their business. The Artsakh Republic passed their last law, dissolving their government effective January 1, 2024. This is a very dark time for the Artsakhi people, and all Armenians. But the Armenian people have faced similarly dark times before, and survived. This time on Springtime of Nations, we cover Hayar, the Armenian Nation.

Armenia was well established as an independent state in antiquity, being the first one on earth to adopt Christianity as the official religion in 301 AD. Traditionally a buffer state between the great civilizations of Asia Minor and Persia, from the Romans vs the Parthians to the Ottomans vs Byzantines, the last independent state of Armenia was finally divided between the Ottoman Empire and the Persian Safavids with the fall of Constantiople. Armenians made up a large and influential section of Ottoman society, although as Christians they suffered a number of abuses such as confiscatory taxation and the kidnapping of their sons to become janissaries. For centuries the Armenians largely accepted their role in the empire with little resistance, but by the 19th century a new power came into the picture from the North: Russia. The Tsars had been watching the slow but obvious decline of the Ottoman empire with great interest and had taken many vassal states from the Turks since the 18th century. In 1828 they kicked the Persians out of their part of Armenia (as well as the land now known as Azerbaijan, populated mostly by Caucasian converts to Shia Islam) and had designs on the rest. For their part, the Armenians were being exposed to the kind of National liberation theories that were maturing in Europe, including those parts under Ottoman rule. Like the Greeks, Serbians and Romanians, Armenia was rediscovering the will to be free. 

The Russo-Turkish war of 1877 was another victory for Moscow against the Sublime Porte, gaining a chunk of Ottoman Armenia, and the Tsar made an explicit promise to “defend the rights of Armenians under Ottoman rule”. At first willing clients of Russian campaigns to weaken the Ottomans by supporting Armenians on the OTHER side of the border, Armenian nationalism grew to have an anti-Russian flavor after experiencing what it meant to live under an absolutist, anti-liberal military government, even if it was led by an Orthodox Christian (Most armenians follow their ancient, Oriental orthodox traditions, not Eastern Orthodox). Meanwhile, after a period of secret planning and organization in the 1880s, the Armenian national movement began to use violence to make their voices heard. After a series of scattered clashes between Armenian militia and the Turkish army in 1894, a huge wave of pogroms spread throughout the empire, killing hundreds of thousands of Armenian men women and children. After the turn of the Century, Armenians on both sides of the border dealt with the consequences of liberal constitutional revolutions, with Armenians and Azeris killing each other en masse during the 1905 revolt which led to a temporary breakdown in Russian rule in their homelands, followed in 1909 by a muslim pogrom in Adana, Turkey after a failed attempt to reinstate the recently abolished system of absolute monarchy.

World War One would be the death knell for both of these empires, but the Ottomans were far more nervous about their Armenian population than Russia, and after the declaration of war by the Sultan in 1915 Armenian rights were quickly curtailed. Many much better videos exist of what led to what is rightly called the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottomans, the first mass murder to earn that newly coined term in its aftermath, but the justification for it was ostensibly that the Armenians in the empire were a cutthroat 5th column waiting to help the Russian advance throughout eastern anatolia. While it’s true that many Armenians did favor the concept of Russian rule over Turkish, this was not by any means the consensus and certainly could not justify the murder of 1.5 million people. Those Armenians who survived fled overseas or back to the Armenian highlands where Russia maintained control. At least, maintained control until November 1917, when the Bolshevik revolution led to Armenia declaring itself an independent country in 1918, for the first time in the modern era. The Republic of Armenia was led by the social democratic Armenian Revolutionary Federation, who immediately had to deal with several impossible situations: First, the huge numbers of refugees created by the Ottoman Genocide, Second Ottoman (and later the new Republic of Turkey) attempts to snuff out the Republic in its crib, and finally territorial conflicts with their neighbors the Georgian and Azeri Republics who were formed at the same time. One of the most important disputes was over ownership of the Nagorno-Karabakh region, which was majority Armenian and had its own autonomous council which was unrecognized by the Azeris. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died during this period from war and famine, which finally ended with the Bolshevik conquest in late 1920. Given what the small nation faced, it is a wonder it lasted a month much less 2 years. 

Our first video covers the history of Armenia coming out of its long dormancy under the Soviet boot, beginning with the 1988 protest movement in the Nagorno Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, led by ethnic Armenians against what they saw as insufficient autonomy from the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. With the USSR in chaos at the time from internal decay and the disastrous war in Afghanistan, there was no brutal crackdown. Instead, the opposing ethnic militias of Armenians and Azeris took up arms, with the Azeris availing covert Turkish material support as well as the fanatical pan-Turanist grey wolves who crossed the border to kill enemies of the Turkic family. We also cover how a Ukrainian ex-Soviet General Anatoly Zinevich gave tiny Armenia a fighting chance against the larger Azerbaijan in its war to protect their cousins in the former Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

In his words: “I do not believe that the world will agree to simply give the Karabakh people the right to self-determination, to their statehood, although they deserved it with their lives, incredibly hard struggle…The Karabakh people have to demand what is rightfully theirs and what is quite real from a military point of view. Any attempts to resolve the Karabakh issue differently, in my opinion, and not only in my opinion, are absurd. There can be no two opinions. People who take up arms will not allow someone to decide their fate for them. The people, expressing their will to live independently, took up arms and learned to hold it firmly. Indeed, both the population and territory of Karabakh are not large compared to Azerbaijan. God willing, let them live with us. Who’s stopping them? Why don’t they let us live as we want? Who will ask for that permission? Those who took up arms? Let no one hope, we will not abandon our weapons”

 As the victors in 1994, the Armenians had the opportunity to do much more ethnic cleansing and massacres against Azeri civilians than the reverse, but both sides slaughtered thousands. Alas, there is no Anatoly Zinevich today, or else he is stuck in his homeland of Ukraine fighting for his own freedom. The Armenian President’s inaction in defense of his national brothers has been met with utter contempt by the Republic of Armenia’s populace, who see him as a traitor (along with Vladimir Putin and his inactive Collective Security Treaty Organization) and there may soon be a revolution in the country, peaceful or otherwise, to replace him with someone seen as more stalwart on the issue. The unfortunate truth is that there is likely very little that can be done to protect the people of Artsakh from a complete ethnic cleansing campaign, rubber stamped by Turkey and Russia and ignored by the United Nations. The Armenian people however have certainly survived worse, and their resilience is a testimony to the reality of nations and how state borders do NOT define them. Long Live Artsakh, long live Armenia and may 1000 flowers bloom!