The Great Outbreak of the Small Nation: The Forgotten Karabakh Movement (1988‒1990)

Abstract

In 1989, breakthrough events took place in Eastern European countries that changed the history of the region. The “round table” in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the “Velvet Revolution” in Czechoslovakia initiated the processes of liberalization and independence from the USSR. Over the time, these transformations were called “Eastern European Revolutions”. They contributed to the final collapse of the Soviet regime and caused the post-Soviet area to undergo significant social, political and economic transformations in the early 1990s.

A year before these events, a great democratic movement began in the smallest Republic of the Soviet Union ‒ Armenia, which undermined the imperial policy of the Soviet authorities. Over the time, it adopted the name of the Karabakh Movement. The rebellion of the Armenian society that broke out in 1988 expressed the need for democratization of the Soviet society and played a significant role in the freedom aspirations of the Armenian people. Despite this, little is known about this movement, which is commonly associated with ethnic antagonisms between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The Karabakh movement remained “unnoticed” in the Soviet era, because the regime media blocked information about the mass occurrences of Armenians. Today, the issue of the Karabakh Movement is uncomfortable for political reasons, especially when we talk about Armenian-Russian relations, because Russia attaches great importance to glorifying USSR history.

The main goal of the article is to reconstruct the activities of the Karabakh Movement in 1988–1990, as well as to attempt to understand its impact on the processes that contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the context of transformations in Eastern Europe.