The Artsakh Movement 1988, the blow that crumbled the USSR

The Artsakh Movement 1988, the blow that crumbled the USSR

Ignorance of Artsakh history has led to false assumptions that the uprising in 1988 was unprecedented or it was just based on territorial claims from “Azeris” by Armenians. The cunning move of calling the extension of the pan-Turkist Ottoman state after the northwest region of Iran and the transmutation of prowling and roaming Tatars of yesterday into “Azeris” did yield its albeit rotten fruit after all. Aiming to exploit the outcome of a given situation they either masquerade as a distinct “nation” or part of one Turkish “nation” with two states.

This confuses the third parties or in case of their awareness, helps them further the Turkic propaganda fabrication, by calling the issue a feud between two ancient autochthonous peoples of the Caucasus, equally justified in their claims.

Although since the Turkic infiltration of the region, along with all the civilizations west of the Caspian, the people of Artsakh have had to defend their home from the hordes of marauding Oghuz, Mongol, Tatar, Barsil, Kipchak, Kutugur, Gokturk, Ak Koyunlu, Kara Koyunlu and what not variants of the species of Turkistani nomads, the grotesquely discriminatory treachery of Kemal-Bolshevik banditry in splitting Armenia between themselves in 1921, the calculated continuation of the Armenian Genocide, can be seen as the ill birth of the current crisis.

Throughout the seventy years of brutal “Azeri” yoke the Armenians have constantly raised the issue, as illustrated in the Petition from the Armenians of Artsakh to Khrushchev example and have steadfastly demanded the rectification of the perfidious move through reuniting the province with motherland Armenia.

While every type of cunning was in place to systematically wipe Artsakh from its Armenian population, including the persistence of an atmosphere of fear and terror such as statesmen going to Baku for governmental meetings where half of the delegation would never come back having been murdered or sent to exile, the “Azeri” freeloaders who like leeches sucked all the resources of the region dry, would not contribute a thing to the economical, industrial, agricultural or cultural progress of Artsakh.

The Armenian historian Bagrat Ulubabian has remarked that up until the 1970s during five decades of “Azeri” rule, the state had not allocated any budget to build a single Armenian school, community, cultural or sports center nor to renovate public buildings and health institutions. There were no roads and along the unusable paths “Azeri” settlements were artificially created to obstruct communication between Armenian villages. According to “law”, renowned Armenian composers, poets, actors, intellectuals and artists were prohibited from visiting Artsakh, a ban that remained in force until 1988.

Even at the end of WWII, a war that should not have concerned the Armenians in the least yet where they had shown extraordinary bravery with proportionally as heavy casualties as any other nation involved, accounts of which are related in the “Armenians did not win, it was the Russians” lie, the sadistic mass murderer Stalin remained unshaken in his anti-Armenian resolve and rejected the demands of the Armenian SSR statesmen regarding the reunification with Artsakh.

The central government not only rejected every rightful appeal to correct the injustice, they diabolically served the pan-Turkist agenda by nibbling away what had remained of Armenia to the profit of the Turks. Making use of every improbable excuse they cut off villages from the Armenian SSR and Nagorno Karabakh “Autonomous” Oblast (NKAO) and annexed it to the eastern outpost of pan-Turkism, “Azerbaijan” SSR: an Armenian village in Hadrut was annexed to Fizuly with the pretext of its being not so close to Hadrut, in 1930s; another from Martuni was chopped off from NKAO and offered to Aghdam allegedly because the inhabitants did not have sufficient knowledge of the Armenian language; just like mountainous Artsakh itself, Artzvashen became an enclave through machinations by gnawing at the surrounding areas; all in all this thievery in broad daylight in the fairytale land of communist “equality” cost Armenian SSR proper about 505 square kilometers, reducing the tiniest of the “republics” of the USSR from 30,247 km2 to 29,742 km².

All this prejudice with the connivance of Moscow used up the patience of the Armenians who had already suffered nine centuries of Turkic tyranny and like one fist, people stood up for their rights in the land of red oppression. Hundreds of thousands of protesters raised their voices and shouted “union, union”, “Karabakh is ours” in Yerevan and in Stepanakert in February 1988.

To the decades due reasonable requests for fairness, the central authorities responded sneeringly, dismissing the cry for justice branding it nationalistic provocation. Gorbachev, under whose so-called perestroika atmosphere the wronged people had found an outlet, contemptuously retorted that it was unbecoming of “brotherly” peoples of the “Union” to busy themselves with such petty territorial concerns. His reforms were nothing but a last resort to save the decomposing carcass of an inhuman, corrupt, ideological, totalitarian monarchy and while the Solidarity movement in Poland gets all the credit thanks to the powerful western media for known reasons, we should not forget that Poland was not within the USSR whereas the Artsakh movement, even admitted by Gorbachev himself, was the hurricane that tumbled down the house of cards known as the Soviet Union.

Desperate last measures and tasteless propositions of reform for Artsakh and the Armenians of fake “Azerbaijan” could not have any real effects anymore. The barbaric yet meticulously calculated response of the “Azeri” Turks in Sumgait that revealed their incapability of becoming civilized even under the most “moralistic” of philosophies left no room for hope for the Armenians that they could survive, let alone lead a decent life, under sadistic Turco-Tatar oppression.

The refusal of initial calls for unification with Armenia and the savageries of the Tatar hordes forced the NKAO Council of Deputies, in accordance with the Soviet law regarding the right for self-determination for subjects of the national-state system of the USSR, to pass a resolution promulgating the withdrawal of NKAO from “Azerbaijan” SSR, on July 12, 1988.

The very next day the “Azeri” SSR rejected the motion on grounds of its contradiction with the interests of Armenian and “Azeri” peoples of the “Azeri” Soviet Socialist Republic, a blunder they corrected the following day by replacing the Armenian and “Azeri” peoples of AzSSR with that of the NKAO.

The former decree acknowledged that since after the adoption of the fake “Azeri” nationhood all the Muslim minorities had been assimilated with the Turks, though superficially, the only two main nations of the “Azeri” SSR were none other that Armenian and “Azeris”. By the “correction” of the muck up, they overlooked the rights of the Armenians of the AzSSR republic and heralded their ethnic “cleansing”, already started in Sumgait and which went on for the following three years. This blatant instigation of hostilities is completely ignored by certain western history falsifiers, who after smelling the oil, yowl the jarring tunes of the “Azeri” squealers accusing Armenia of aggression and occupation, unwilling to see the present situation is nothing but the consequence of violent Turkic actions.

The Armenian SSR Supreme Council responded to the earlier NKAO resolution (Feb. 20, 1988) with a decision to accept the request for the assignment of the Oblast from AzSSR to the ArmSSR on July 15, 1988, a legal move in full compliance with the USSR law. Predictably the pro-Turkish Bolshevik dictatorship had an excuse to deem this decree impossible on baseless grounds of inviolability of the borders of the union without the consent of one of the parties, having “forgotten” about the capricious changes of the borders of the Armenian SSR in favor of “Azerbaijan” SSR throughout the miserable existence of the Red Tyranny. This gave the Tatars free paws to carry out more acts in line with the Turkish instincts.

Mock resolutions were passed pretending to amend the existing grievances, but to no avail. They just inflamed the bloodthirsty wolves to commit more acts of barbarity. The May 6, 1989 decree of the bear to withdraw industrial enterprises of NKAO from AzSSR subordination was replied by the destruction of the statues of Armenian heroes in Shushi and imposition of a blockade on NKAO and the Armenian SSR; the opening of the ancient Gandzasar monastery for the first time in Soviet history was met with assaults and shootings of people in Stepanakert; the so-called status of special governance for NKAO was revoked in a session aiming at enlarging the powers of the same, end November 1989 when the Armenians of Gandzak were being liquidated; the adoption of the reunification of NKAO with ArmSSR on December 1, 1989 entailed the burning of the magnificent Kazanchetsots church in Shushi on the 20th of that month. Either way, the Armenians have had to pay dearly and any act of self-defense against the Turkish hyenas is viewed by the western Turkophile propaganda machine in whatever disguise as breach of “human” rights.

The largest monster on the planet could not bring itself to right the wrongs of its own doing for the tiny Artsakh and the only way out, the lesser evil was chosen. Artsakh was to become an independent state in the first stage of the new era of the saga, until one day humanity will have the grain of integrity to accept its reunification with motherland Armenia when it will once again become part of the land it has always belonged to for thousands of years.

The Lenin-Kemal treachery had paid off in the end when symbolized by Baku massacres in 1990 and the Ring Operation in 1991, the Armenians of southeast Caucasus were finally thrown out of their homes and the oil route from Baku was “cleaned” of the undesirable elements able to compete with the ravenous western plunderers.