Shusha, the old regional capital of Nagorno-Karabakh during the first war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Karabakh Armenian quarter was annihilated by Azeri forces killing hundreds in 1920.
To Armenia, the region is known as “Artsakh” while Azerbaijan calls it “Dağlıq Qarabağ”. The international community prefer to call the region “Nagorny-Karabakh”, the Russian term given to the mountainous region in the Caucasus. Since September 27, one thousand people have been killed after war broke out again between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.
The twilight years of the Russian Empire are pivotal to understanding today’s conflict. Nagorno-Karabakh was at the crossroads of collapsing imperialism in 1905 as revolution shook Tsarist Russia to its foundations. Budding nationalist movements in the Caucasus saw an opportunity to remove the yolk of Russian imperialism as Azerbaijani and Armenian nationalist aspirations collided in Russian-controlled Baku. Hundreds of ethnic Azeris and Armenians perished in the pogrom which erupted after the murder of an Azeri schoolboy and shopkeepers by Armenians, a dispute that Tsarist officials failed to resolve.
For Karabakh Armenians and Azeris, who had lived together relatively peacefully and shared in the economic prosperity offered by Nagorno-Karabakh’s fertile lands, the Baku pogrom was a watershed moment. In the old regional capital, Shusha, 300 died in inter-communal bloodshed. In 1906, Luigi Villari, author of Fire and Sword in the Caucasus, who covered the ongoing violence, described Shusha as a city of ‘blazing ruins’ after Karabakh Azeri and Armenian militias incinerated homes, often with families inside. Violence spread from Shusha across the Caucasus as 10,000 people perished, a consequence of a ‘long period of misrule’ as described by The New York Times in June 1905. The pogroms were only halted after a brutal crackdown by Russian soldiers and Cossacks.
Worse was to come after the fall of Tsarist Russia. The Republic of Armenia, formed against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide during the First World War, and the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic went to war over competing national claims for Nagorno-Karabakh. The Karabakh Armenian quarter in Shusha was destroyed by Azerbaijan’s army in 1920 as the region became the epicentre of some of the war’s worst atrocities until Bolshevik Russia intervened to end the violence and illusion of an independent Azerbaijan and Armenia, effectively freezing the currents of nationalism in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The collapse of the Soviet Union, and a referendum held by Karabakh Armenians in 1991 to secede from Azerbaijan, reignited this dispute, leading to a second war which killed over 30,000 people and displaced one million more. Peace has remained elusive ever since.