ABSTRACT

Title of Document: WITHOUT A COUNTRY: STATELESS

ARMENIAN REFUGEES IN THE U.S.S.R AND

RUSSIA, 1987-2003

Sudaba Lezgiyeva, Master of Historical Studies,

2018

Directed By: Dr. Kate Brown, History Department

The focus of this thesis is the inter-ethnic conflict in Azerbaijan that led to the exile of

Armenian refugees and subsequently their struggle to gain citizenship rights in the newly

formed Russian Federation. The political tensions in the Nagorno-Karabakh region were

relatively calm until they exploded in late February 1988, leading to an inter-ethnic conflict

in Sumgait, Azerbaijan. Almost seven months later, in November 1988, the vigorous unrest

intensified in the town of Kirovabad, leading again to the massacre of Armenian minorities.

As a result, the pogroms coincided with increased anti-Armenian feelings in the capitol of

Azerbaijan, Baku. On January 20th, 1990, pogroms broke out in Baku and continued for seven days, during which the majority of the ethnic Armenian population in Azerbaijan was beaten, tortured, or murdered. Some Armenians managed to flee before the pogroms took place, but many were trapped in the city until Soviet authorities evacuated them.

Seeking refuge, many Armenians fled to the capitol of the Soviet Union, Moscow, where they remained in temporary accommodations in hotels and dormitories. In 1991, when the

Soviet Union, as an internationalist state, suddenly broke up into smaller national

formations, the legal status of internal refugees like the Armenians was left in doubt. The

research looks at a significant trend of refugees who fled directly to the capital of the Soviet

Union, Moscow as a means for understanding why, while trapped in social and economic

circumstances, they were deemed ineligible for citizenship of the newly formed Russian

Republic. Armenian refugees in Moscow fell into a legal gap and became effectively

stateless, hence, they were not recognized as citizens of any country. The intent of this

thesis is to emphasize the fact that deprived of citizenship and human dignity, Armenia

refugees in Moscow were persecuted because of a growing nationalism, xenophobia and racism in Russia. While focusing on ethnicity policy during the Soviet era and the Russian

Federation, I will emphasize the fact that the Soviet government used citizenship to maintain power, whereas officials of the new Russia privileged ethnicity in a new way. In the new Russia, ethnicity was essentialized and became the defining factor for citizenship.

WITHOUT A COUNTRY: STATELESS ARMENIAN REFUGEES IN THE U.S.S.R

AND RUSSIA, 1987-2003

By Sudaba Lezgiyeva

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of

Maryland, Baltimore Country, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

2018

©Copyright by

Sudaba Lezgiyeva

2018

DEDICATION

This thesis is dedicated to my mother and sister Margarita and Aygyun Lezgiyeva, whose passion for history helped me to complete this research. And to the many individuals who

supported me during the difficult times. A special dedication is to my sweet and loving

child, Aylar Damavandi who was always next to me.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank my thesis advisor Dr. Kate Brown of the History Department at the

University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Brown inspired me to write about a historical event, that has a personal connection to me. She consistently worked with me and was available to my quick chats about the process of my research.

I would like to thank also Dr. Nolan and Dr. Boehling to being my supplemental readers.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgement iii

Table of Contents iv

Introduction 1

Azerbaijan and Armenia Before and During the Soviet Era 4

Literature Review 6

Methodology 12

Chapter 1: The Anti-Armenian Pogroms in Sumgait, Ganja and Baku 18

Chapter 2: The Soviet Paradox: Playing the National and Ethnic Cards 43

Chapter 3: Moscow Free From Refugees 61

Chapter 4: Welcomed 78

Conclusion: 93

Bibliography 99

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INTRODUCTION

The focus of this thesis is the inter-ethnic conflict in Azerbaijan that led to the exile of

Armenian refugees and subsequently their struggle to gain citizenship rights in the newly formed

Russian Federation. Between 1987 and 1990 approximately 44,433 ethnic Armenians were registered in Russia as refugees.1 In 1987 Armenian leaders began sending a series of petitions to Moscow protesting the Azerbaijani restrictions on the Karabakh Armenian cultural and economic influence the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The political tensions in the region, located in the southeastern part of Caucasus Minor, were relatively calm until they exploded in late February

1988. At that time, an inter-ethnic conflict took place in Sumgait, Azerbaijan, a Soviet Republic until August, 1991. During the conflict, Azerbaijanis singled out, attacked and murdered a segment of the Armenian population. Almost seven months later, in November 1988, the vigorous unrest intensified in the town of Kirovabad, leading to the massacre of Armenian minorities. As a result, the pogroms coincided with increased anti-Armenian feelings in the capitol of Azerbaijan, Baku.

On January 20th, 1990, pogroms broke out in Baku and continued for seven days, during which the majority of the ethnic Armenian population in Azerbaijan was beaten, tortured, or murdered.

Some Armenians managed to flee before the pogroms took place, but many were trapped in the city until Soviet authorities evacuated them. Seeking refuge, many Armenians fled to the capitol of the Soviet Union, Moscow, where they remained in temporary accommodations in hotels and dormitories.

1 Bill Frelick, “Faultlines of Nationality Conflict: Refugees and Displaced Persons from Armenia and Azerbaijan,” U.S. Committee For Refugees, March 1994, 32.

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A year later in 1991, when the U.S.S.R., as an internationalist state, suddenly broke up into

smaller national formations, the legal status of internal refugees like the Armenians was left in

doubt. A significant trend of refugees fled directly to the capital of the U.S.S.R. The reasons they

sought refuge in Moscow were various. The first reason was that the International Committee of

the Red Cross was only located in Moscow. The Red Cross granted people refugee status. Second, the majority of ethnic Armenians spoke only Russian, therefore, it was difficult for them to

integrate into Armenian society. Due to a devastating earthquake in 1988 and socio-economic

instability, Armenia could not adequately accommodate refugees from Azerbaijan. The third and

the most significant reason was that there were many mixed marriages among the refugees. Thus,

Azerbaijanis would be discriminated in Armenia. Trapped in social and economic circumstances,

refugees were stranded in Moscow at the collapse of the U.S.S.R.

As a result of the absence of refugee legislation, in 1991 the Moscow Committee of Labor

and Employment began to register and provide refugees with temporary registrations, which

indicated that they were forcibly displaced individuals from Azerbaijan. The registrations clearly

stated that it was a refugee ID card and required an annual renewal with the presence of a Soviet

passport. According to article 13 of the 1991 citizenship law, all former Soviet citizens should be

recognized as Russian citizens. Russian authorities did not apply the law to the Armenian refugees

because they were deemed ineligible for citizenship of the newly formed Russian Republic.

Armenians in Moscow fell into a legal gap and became effectively stateless. Hence, they were not

recognized as citizens of any country.

Most Armenian refugees in Moscow were stateless for over one decade. In 1993, the mayor

of Moscow institutionalized their refugee status when he implemented the propiska system, a

formal registration system necessary to live and work in the city. The propiska was instigated for

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economic and law enforcement purposes. Without this document, refugees and other residents

could not work legally in Moscow or receive social assistance. The evidence that will be presented

in my thesis will show the reasons for Armenian refugees in Moscow being stateless for almost

fifteen years and help readers to understand the ethnic limits of citizenship in the late

U.S.S.R/Russian Federation. In this thesis, I argue that deprived of citizenship and human dignity,

Armenian refugees in Moscow were persecuted because of a growing nationalism, xenophobia and racism in Russia. While focusing on ethnicity policy during the Soviet era and the Russian

Federation, I will emphasize the fact that the Soviet government used citizenship to maintain power, whereas officials of the new Russia privileged ethnicity in a new way. In the new Russia, ethnicity was essentialized and became the defining factor for citizenship.

For this project, I will investigate questions related to the resentment between Azerbaijanis and Armenians: Were the pogroms carefully planned or impulsively undertaken by the Azerbaijani radical nationalists? While analyzing the anti-Armenian pogroms, it is important to analyze and understand why Community Party leaders failed to prevent the bloodshed and protect Armenians in Sumgait, Kirovobad, and Baku. How did the Soviet nationality and ethnicity policies affect the rights of Armenian refugees if they were Soviet citizens? Importantly for understanding the attitudes of the Muscovite citizens toward non-Slavic citizens, I will focus on how xenophobic practices and ethnic prejudices continued to shape nationality policy in the newly formed Russian

Federation.

I will answer closely related questions to understand the citizenship limits of the Armenian refugees: Why did the newly formed Russian government refuse to provide citizenship to them as per Article 13 of the 1991 citizenship law that recognized other former Soviet subjects residing in

Russia as citizens of the Russian Federation? How and why, in effect, did this group of Soviet

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citizens become stateless? As the citizens of a former Soviet Socialist Republic, Azerbaijan implemented a Soviet passport system, as such, was the government of Russian Federation responsible for providing permanent residence and places to accommodate them?

Azerbaijan and Armenia Before and During the Soviet Era

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire was composed of a large number

of diverse people, but due to its vast size and discriminatory rules, the tsarist empire could not deal with the challenges of nationalism. Rather than creating a multi-ethnic nation, the tsarist regime prevented national minorities from gaining social equality. A resulting sense of nationalism evolved. For many ethnic violence was a way to achieve empowerment.2

The Revolution of 1905 had a profound effect on non-Russian nationalities. Politicized

Russians denounced certain ethnic minorities such as Jews, Poles, and Armenians as they were

considered disloyal in the eyes of empire. Historian Ronald Grigor Suny, while focusing on

Muslims as disruptive group, concludes that “for the Russian Right ‘Muslim’ was not merely a

religious identification but also an ethnic marker and eventually a dangerous political threat.”3 In

1907, discrimination against non-Russians was institutionalized, leading to the exclusion of certain

ethnic people and social resentment. Factors like ethnicity, religion, and cross-border were

connected to social resentments. Similar trends occurred in the Ottoman Empire across the border.

In 1915 the Young Turks, nationalist reformers, took extreme measures to homogenize the

Ottoman Empire, calling for annihilation of Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. The

Young Turks’ sense of nationalism and fear of uncertain future escalated into hatred and later mass

2 Ronald Grigor Suny,” Ethnicity and Nationality in Imperial Russia,” The Russian Review 59, No.4 (Oct., 2000):490-491, url: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2679274?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. 3 Suny, Ethnicity, 491.

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killing of Armenians. The Armenian community felt vulnerable and faced uncertainty in other regions of the tsarist empire where Turkic people lived.

The Soviet Union inherited the previous ethnic conflicts from the Russian and Ottoman empires; one of the them was the antagonism between Azerbaijan and Armenia. In this paper, I define the concepts of nation as a community of people who share a common culture, descent, and language. The state is an organized entity within defined territorial boundaries under a distinct political system. In the case of Soviet era, Azerbaijan and Armenia were nations within the territorial of the state of Soviet Union. Azerbaijani and Armenian were their nationality and their citizenship was Soviet. It is important to note that during the Soviet era, nationality and citizenship were two different concepts. Thus, Azerbaijani or Armenian were terms used to define their ethnic nation. Soviet internal passports included the nationality or ethnic nation of the holder. Parents often chose their children’s nationality for passport records. Soviet citizenship was based on the birth of the territory of the state, therefore, any individual born was automatically a Soviet citizen.

In 1923, the Bolsheviks announced the establishment of the Nagorno-Karabakh

Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) and surprisingly for Armenians, they placed it under Azerbaijan’s

jurisdiction. The decision was based on the Bolsheviks’ divide-and-rule policy and was aimed at

resettling more Azerbaijanis in the region.4 Historian Alexei Zverev points out that the formation

of the Nagorno-Karabakh satisfied neither side because the autonomous district with 80%

Armenians was subordinate to Azerbaijan.5 In regard to the rise of the nationalism and sense of

cultural uniqueness in both nations, Zverev concludes that “the Azerbaijanis objected to the carving

4 Wayne Nafziger, Francis Stewart, Raimo Vayrynen, “Case Studies,” in War, Hunger, Displacement: The Origins of Humanitarian Emergencies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 406. 5 Alexei Zverev, “Ethnic Conflicts in the Caucasus 1988-1994,” in Contested Boarders in the Caucasus (Brussel: VUB University Press, 1996, http://poli.vub.ac.be/publi/ContBorders/eng/.

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out from Azerbaijan of a separate entity with ethnic Armenian administration and administrative borders where before there had been none. But as long as Communist rule held the U.S.S.R, so did the uneasy but peaceful relationship between the two peoples of Nagorno-Karabakh.”6

Throughout the Soviet period, Armenians remained disappointed with the 1923 decision.

Literature Review

While much has been written about the root causes of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, there are few studies that explore the citizenship status of refugees who settled in Moscow. The

Armenian refugees were not allowed to obtain citizenship in the newly formed Russian Federation.

As result, they held a refugee status for almost fifteen years until the U.S. Committee for Refugees opened a program to invite stateless Armenian refugees in Russia to live in the U.S. This is the first scholarly exploration of this topic.

There are several authors who investigated aspects of this topic and used different types of approaches to understand the rights of citizenship and migratory policies that governed the ethnic

Armenians’ case. While Alexander Salenko, Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, and Eleonora

Asatryan investigated the topic using legal approach, Kate Brown, Stuart J. Kaufman, Eric Lohr,

Zbigniew Wojnowski, Terry Martin, and David Shearer emphasize the significance of ethnicity and nationality during the Soviet era.

Several scholars focus on the legal aspects of Soviet and Russian citizenship laws. A legal approach to this topic was addressed in Country Report: Russia by Alexander Salenko and published by European University Institute in 2012. Salenko’s study focuses largely on a change

6 Alexei Zverev, “Ethnic Conflicts.”

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in Russian citizenship legislation after 1991. He argues that due to various legal issues regarding

the integration of former Soviet citizens, many residents from former Soviet republics were

considered foreigners. While reviewing various laws on the citizenship of the Russian Federation,

he came to the conclusion that unstable political ideas after 1991 led to the “lack of a facilitated procedure for acquiring Russian citizenship.”7 Since the legal framework of the Russian citizenship was shaped during the Soviet era, it is necessary to include the fact that the process of naturalization was “very informal and definitely had a class character.”8 According to the 1938

Soviet Citizenship law, all non-Soviet persons residing on the territory of the Soviet Union, who did not have foreign citizenship, were regarded as stateless individuals. In the context of the

Armenian refugees, who held Soviet passports, the Citizenship Law of 1978 established the principle that “the person who is a citizen of the Soviet Union cannot be regarded as a foreign citizen.”9 Therefore, according to the Salenko’s study, Armenian refugees in Moscow had full legal

rights to automatically acquire citizenship, since the Russian Federation had declared itself to be a

direct legal successor of the Soviet Union. Salenko’s investigation of legal documents leads to the

conclusion that the rights for citizenship provided by a certain republic were largely symbolic.10

Finally, the author highlights the fact that in 2011 the Constitutional Court of Russia announced

that the nationality factor did not have any legal significance during the naturalization process, but

in practice, it was a major factor.

7 Alexander Salenko, “Report on Russia,” EUDO Citizenship Observatory (European University Institute: Florence, 2012), 1. 8 Alexander Salenko, “Report on Russia,” 4. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Ibid., 5.

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While Salenko focuses on the Soviet and Russian legislations, Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail

Aghajanyan, and Eleonora Asatryan analyze the forceful displacement of refugees as a result of

the Nagorno-Karabakh war. The authors claim that refugees from both, Azerbaijan and Armenia

were citizens of the Soviet Union. As such, the state guaranteed the freedoms and protection held

be very Soviet citizen. Given the circumstances of Armenian refugees in Moscow, while the

U.S.S.R. still existed, they were subjects of the state. Thus, the central authorities had no right to

restrict the rights and freedoms of refugees after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. Minasyan,

Aghajanyan, and Asatryan argue “people were aware of one fact only. They were migrating within

the state of their habitual residence and citizenship and their exodus is compelled by the

impossibility of staying in any political-legal relation with Azerbaijan SSR.”11 These scholars’

legal approach shows that ethnic Armenian refugees did not cross outside the borders of their

citizenship. According to Article 13.1 Russian Federation Law of 1991, they had full rights to

automatically acquire Russian citizenship.

Historian Eric Lohr, published Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union in 2012,

which provides a fresh re-examination of the history of the Russian citizenship law and its actual

practices. He focuses on the standard questions of citizenship studies, such as emigration,

immigration, membership in a state, naturalization, denaturalization, and border policies.12 Lohr

provides a similar view to Salenko arguing that the first revolutionary decrees on citizenship were

given entirely to all residents within its territory, stating “the membership of a man in our socialist

11 Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, Eleonora Asatryan, “The Categories of Refugees and Forced Migrants in the Legal Context of the Consequences of the Karabakh Conflict,” in The Karabakh Conflict: Refugees, Territories, Security (Total Quality Management Assistance: Armenia, 2005), 33. 12 Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 2.

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system and it is immaterial to us what language he speaks, where he lives, where he was born.”13

Lohr, however, took one step further, seeking to answer why the Soviet authorities, while being generally open to non-Russians, were careful about giving citizenship to refugees and deportees

from other countries.

As a result of the mass deportations of World War I, he argues, the Bolsheviks became

suspicious of unregulated mass movement, which led to the deprivation of the rights of

citizenship.14 With this approach, the Soviet government agreed to allow Soviet republics,

primarily the Ukrainian and the Belarusian Republics to naturalize residents and refugees, with

one big caveat; only working class people had full rights to opt for Russian Republic (RSFSR)

citizenship. Both Salenko and Lohr conclude that despite the fact that the de facto Soviet approach

to domestic citizenship included a provision of full and equal rights, the differentiation and

categorization of the rights of citizenship were based on class, nationality, and other economic

criteria.15

Furthermore, while Salenko’s research focuses on the legal tradition and its practical

consequences without explanting motives for the restrictions, Lohr introduces a new historical

angle on mass denaturalization. The author places blame for denaturalization on the Soviet secret

services, which had motives to restrict citizenship. Those motives include, “xenophobia, security-

mania, ideological zeal, and an all-consuming desire to prevent the loss of hard currency, precious metals, and other valuables through illicit export.”16 Thus, the studies done by Salenko and Lohr

13 Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 132. 14 Ibid., 149-150. 15 Ibid., 151. 16 Ibid., 170.

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point out that Soviet citizenship was a practice in which rights on some occasions were not

fulfilled.

In order to understand the relation between Russian government and non-Slavic ethnic

groups in the 1990s, it is necessary to focus on the structure of ethnic administration during the

Soviet era. Yuri Slezkine’s article, “The U.S.S.R as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist

State Promoted Ethnic Particularism” examines the key components of Soviet nationality policy.

Slezkine argues that since Soviet republics were not equal in size and development, ethnicity was

a key marker to a republic’s success. Although Bolshevik ideology was meant to eradicate

nationalism, the ethnic hierarchy granted privileges to some ethnic groups over others.

Terry Martin’s rich book, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the

Soviet Union, 1923-1939 investigates the evolution of the Soviet Union’s approach to the multi-

ethnic question. In particular, the chapter, “The Piedmont Principle and Soviet Border Disputes”

helps to understand the tactics that Soviet leaders used in dealing with national minorities.

Facilitation and the rise of nationalism were not accepted, instead, the interests of non-Russian republics were expected to coincide with those of Moscow. Martin illustrates Russian sentiments through the example of Ukraine. He concludes that every time the Soviet officials made territorial

changes, Soviet policy became hostile to assimilation. Martin defined the “Piedmont Principle of

“no assimilation” because the ethnic groups that were residing in borders could attract other

nationals living in other republics. Thus, Ukrainian nationalism was an ultimate threat to Soviet

unity, as Martin writes, “Ukraine’s aggressive behavior was interpreted as evidence of pro-western

and anti-Russian sentiment.”17 It can be concluded that both Salenko and Martin agree that

17 Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923- 1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2001), 307.

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nationality is a key element for understanding the ethnic limitations during the Soviet era that had a profound influence on the citizenship laws.

In Zbigniew Wojnowski’s article, “The Soviet People: National and Supranational

Identities in the USSR after 1945,” the author examines the rights of Soviet citizenship by analyzing the social and cultural attitudes of Soviet leaders toward non-Russian communities.

While focusing on Soviet identities in Eastern Europe and reviewing the ethnic policy and interethnic relations in Western Ukraine between the mid-1930s and the end of the Thaw era,

Wojnowski concludes that the notions of ethnic identity and “Sovietness” divided Soviet society and created ethnic prejudices.18 The members of non-Slavic ethnic groups encountered xenophobic policies by the Soviet leadership. These policies made it difficult to claim the rights for citizenship. By looking at the differences of ethnic groups and their importance during the

Brezhnev’ regime, Wojnowski agrees that durable ethnic identities of the republics that had a strong connection with Moscow helped promote loyalty to the Soviet state making it easier for them to obtain citizenship.

While Salenko Minasyan, Aghajanyan, and Asatryan analyze how and who could claim the rights for citizenship from the legal perspective, Brown, Kaufman, Lohr, Wojnowski, Martin, and Shearer look at more subjective features that point to the fact that ethnicity was a key marker for making a Soviet identity. In order to explore the meanings of Soviet citizenship, the authors draw attention to the understanding of “otherness” among Slavs. The notion of cultural superiority took place when the Bolsheviks, throughout the Soviet Civil War, began to exploit minority nationalism. Lenin’s nationalism itself required a conciliatory attitude toward the non-Russian

18 Zbigniew Wojnowski, “The Soviet People: National and Supranational Identities in the USSR after 1945,” Nationalities Papers, 43, No. 1 (2015): 5.

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subjects, because Soviet power depended on all republics in order to build a federal economy and

to avoid an economic struggle. The authors analyze and identify the origins, frontiers, and nature

of citizenship in the Soviet hierarchy.

Although the legal approach could greatly help to provide an explanation of the struggle of

Armenian refugees in Moscow, Wojnowski’s article that emphasizes the notion of “otherness” can in part contribute to this study. However, none of the perspectives addressed the legal and social status of Soviet refugees or migrants between the periods of 1987-1991. A new angle, such as

political climate and its attitude toward non-Slavic residents should be investigated in order to identify the reasons why the Armenian refugees in Moscow were stateless for almost fifteen years.

Methodology

The archival recourses for this paper are limited for several reasons. The event is relatively

recent. The majority of U.S. official documents concerning discussions about the refugees are still

not published. I relied heavily on the work of historians who focused on the Soviet era and similar

topics. Although it is extremely difficult to find Russian or U.S. government materials, there are a

number of non-governmental organizations that have crucial sources of information regarding the

violation of civil rights and humanitarian needs. The materials I obtained from the U.S. Committee

for Refugees reveal that while the Soviet Union was still intact, a great number of Armenian

refugees purposely fled to Moscow, hoping to find shelter, which was offered by United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Committee of Red Cross, Red

Crescent Societies, and the International Federation of Red Cross located in the capitol.

I contacted the Moscow Library via email hoping to obtain unofficial documents, however,

the librarian informed me that the policy of the library does not allow disclosure of any archives

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to any seeker outside of Russia. For this thesis, I obtained a full transcript of the Politburo of the

Communist Party of the Soviet Union conference that took place on February 28, 1988, which provides a full discussion of the General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev and other members reflecting on the details of conflicts. This particular source will be used in the first chapter with

the purpose of disclosing the general feeling of the Politburo about Armenian resettlement in

Russia.

A collection of Russian and American contemporary newspaper accounts such as Izvestia,

Komsomoskaya Pravda, Pravda, the Komitet za Prava, the New York Times, and the Washington

Post to get an image of the treatment of refugees by local Moscow authorities. Despite the fact that

newspaper accounts do not address the legal solution to this situation, they show the Armenian

struggle in Moscow.

Oral history is a core of this project. I will recreate refugees’ interference with the

Soviet/Russian government on a daily basis. It will include interviews with former refugees,

including my mother, who are now living in the United States and citizens of the United States.

During a thorough research process, I came across other valuable primary sources related to this

study. A book, Nowhere: A Story of Exile by Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte is based on the author’s

memoirs reveals a heart-wrenching story of the organized terror in Azerbaijan and her life as a

refugee. Though Turcotte’s account primarily portrays the pogroms, she depicts a story of herself

as an outsider surviving in Moscow and facing daily discrimination. As a survivor of an ethnic

cleansing before the collapse of the USSR, her documentary account shows an overall treatment

of other ethnic non-Slavic groups within the country.19

19 Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, Nowhere: A Story of Exile (Lexington: Hybooksonline.com, 2012), prologue.

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Though the result of the research will not be accurately balanced, I intend to cross-reference

the set of primary sources, secondary sources, and interviews in hopes of accessing the past. And,

I am certain that it is necessary to provide credibility to the stories told by the former refugees, as

I am limited in accessing Russian legal documentation.

The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter examines the eruption of the conflict that led to the massive and bloody pogroms in the cities of Sumgait, Ganja, and the capitol of Azerbaijan, Baku. To create a micro view of what caused turmoil and what was the reaction of

Soviet officials, I will focus on Mikhail Gorbachev’s reaction to the pogroms and his fear that ethnic violence in Azerbaijan could hurt new Soviet reforms. While examining whether the violence was carefully planned or spontaneously undertaken by the Azerbaijani authorities, I will focus on the role of the Soviet leadership to understand why they failed to act and protect

Armenian residents in these cities. The role of Alexander Lebed, the commander of the Soviet parachute division, will be discussed to point to the fact that Soviet troops were sent to Azerbaijan not to protect the Armenian minority, but to prevent the Azerbaijani Popular front movement from taking the control of the Republic.

In the second chapter, I explore how and why Soviet nationality policy used ethnicity as a factor to create an ethnic hierarchy that subdivided Soviet citizens into categories. I will discuss the notion of “oppressed” and “oppressor nations” to understand the rights, opportunities, and limitations of each ethnic group. By using the terms “oppressed” and “oppressor nations” I intend to emphasize that there were “privileged” and “disadvantaged” republics. The Soviet political hierarchy was complex, for that, the goal of the nationality experiment will be discussed to show how the Bolsheviks dealt with national distrust. While promoting group rights, the Soviet policy did not allow nationalities to blossom. In practice, Soviet policy makers, while trying to eradicate

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nationalism, granted privileges to some and disadvantages to others. The nationality question will

be discussed to point to the fact that the Soviet Union used ethnicity as the political tool to

implement the nationality policy. The consequences of the Soviet nationality and ethnicity policies

led to the deportation of non-Russian ethnic groups. The cases of Polish, Jewish, and Chechen

persecutions will prove that some ethnic groups were considered less loyal than others. I will

examine the Soviet leaders, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev’s formulation of the Soviet

nation to show that the persistence of the nationality question continued even in the 1970s. Social changes in the 1980s led to the growth of nationalism among ethnic groups and as consequences,

Moscow’s vertical control over republics ended when the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced new reforms.

The third chapter will deal with laws, regulations, existing legislation, and vacuum of laws in the Soviet era and the Russian Federation. For the purpose of understanding why some refugees fled to Moscow, I will provide reasons why Moscow was a natural choice to seek refuge. By focusing on the Soviet naturalization process, I intend to examine why political xenophobia was a part of the passportization system and how it echoed in the newly formed Russia. The historical

background of the Soviet citizenship will be discussed to show how passportization process

evolved into policing tool in order to identify and eradicate dangerous ethnic groups. The chapter will also tackle the issue of the restrictive propiska system and its consequences. The Belovezha

Accords signed on December 8, 1991 will be discussed to point out that Armenian refugees had all rights to seek protection and shelter, but more importantly, automatically obtain Russian citizenship.

In the final chapter I will discuss on the Armenian refugees’ identity and their sense of belonging in Moscow. After the fact that refugees were not authorized to work in certain areas of

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the city, they had to move to the outskirts of Moscow. Because they had been living in temporary housing, sanatoria, and pioneers’ camps, it reportedly caused anti-Armenian resentment among

Muscovites. In 1993, Moscow implemented the propiska system to keep “unwanted” residents from the city, which soon caused a deterioration of the refugees’ status in Moscow. Interviews will point out the fact that Moscow officials were reluctant to integrate refugees, but more importantly, they will describe Russian citizens’ xenophobic and racist treatment of ethnic Caucasians and other minorities. Due to a socio-economic instability in Russia, the rise of crime rates in Moscow was blamed on Caucasian refugees and migrants. As a result, public opinion about the refugees grew increasingly negative.

My project will help explain why the Armenian refugees were “others” in their own capital.

They became stateless not because they wanted to, but for structural and legal reasons that led to an organized ethnic cleansing in Azerbaijan, which forced them to flee their own birthplace.

Consequently, they arrived in the capital of the Soviet Union, seeking shelter and safety, but instead, they were not welcomed as Soviet citizens. Beginning in 1987, they fought against the existing legislation and non-Slavic prejudice until 2003, when the Reagan administration drafted a proposal to admit the remaining stateless Armenian refugees to the United States as refugees.

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CHAPTER 1

The Anti-Armenian Pogroms in Sumgait, Ganja and Baku

Some ethnic conflicts demand urgent attention; others stay unresolved. International attention is drawn only when the threat of violence emerges and is unfortunately imminent. The world has not yet heard of or has little knowledge of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the ongoing crisis, which has yet to be resolved. This chapter focuses on the eruption of the conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region in 1988 that led to the massive and bloody pogroms in the cities of Sumgait, Kirovabad/Ganja, and the capitol of Azerbaijan, Baku. I will examine whether the violence was carefully planned or spontaneously encouraged by the Azerbaijani authorities. A major actor of this drama was the Soviet leadership. I seek to understand why the Soviet officials in Moscow failed to act and protect Armenian residents in these cities. I will include oral history at the center of the project because the interviews and memoirs reflect a collective memory of what happened.

It is necessary to first provide the history of this ongoing conflict to set the stage for the modern dispute over what caused the eruption of violence in the Azerbaijani cities of Sumgait,

Ganja, and Baku. There are two major perspectives on when and why the conflict began. In 1872,

Azerbaijan became Russia’s major oil producing region, which attracted British, Swiss, American,

German, French, and Swedish investors. As a result, the government of Azerbaijan developed a sense of inferiority, which coalesced into anti-Armenian sentiments.20 An American scholar, A.V.

20 Ronald G. Suny, “Roots of A Conflict; How the Struggle Over Karabakh Began,” Armenian International Magazine Archive (July 31, 1990), http://armenianinternationalmagazine.com/1990/07/roots-of-a- conflict-how-the-struggle-over-karabagh-began/.

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Williams Jackson provides a sense of Baku’s oil boom in his 1911 work, From Constantinople to

the Home of Omar Khayyam:

Baku is a city founded upon oil, for to its inexhaustible founts in naphtha it

owes its very existence, its maintenance, its prosperity…At present Baku

produces one-fifth of the oil that is used in the world, and the immense

output in crude petroleum from this single city far surpasses that in any other

district where oil is found…Oil is in the air one breathes, in one’s nostrils,

in the water of the morning bath, in one’s starched linen, everywhere.21

Another perspective on this issue is that it began when the Bolsheviks occupied the

Caucasus region. In April 1920, the Soviets established power in the region. They declared that the Karabakh territory must be under Armenian rule. However, three years later, in 1923, the

Soviet authorities made drastic changes to the policy. For economic and logistical reasons, they announced that the territory must become an autonomous region. They established the Nagorno-

Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) populated predominantly by ethnic Armenians under

Azerbaijani control. Located in the region of the southern Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan, the

territory borders Armenia to the southwest off the Caspian Sea. And inside the NKAO, for nearly

65 years, the Armenian population lived in tension among the majority Azerbaijanis, who grew in population due to the rapid resettlement of Azerbaijani people to Karabakh. This fact led to uneasy relations and periodical protests by the Armenian Republic until 1988, when both republics

21 Abraham Valentine William Jackson, From Constantinople to the Home of Omar Khayyam (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1911), 25, https://archive.org/stream/fromconstantino00jackgoog#page/n10/mode/2up.

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developed massive nationalist movements.22 Perestroika and glasnost introduced by the Soviet

Communist Party leaders motivated governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia to propose

revolutionary changes to the decisions on territorial jurisdiction made in the early 1920s over the

AONK region.

Armenians staged protests between 1985 and 1987 demanding independence for the

NKAO. The number of protests dramatically increased due to perestroika and glasnost. The

General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, reconstructed

a faltering Soviet system and introduced economic and political reforms. Gorbachev’s regime

recognized public opinion and unleashed voices backing long-suppressed national movements

within the Soviet Union. The defenders of the old policies advised Gorbachev that glasnost could

highlight the limitations and weaknesses of the order. The explosion of the nuclear reactor in

Chernobyl, Ukraine, in 1986, pushed further Gorbachev’s commitment to glasnost.23 There is a

clear link between the notable rise of Armenian demonstrations in the capitol, Yerevan and

glasnost. For instance, an Armenian journalist, Zori Balayan, reflected on Gorbachev’s support for

public expression in Armenia stating that, “we understand that all the demonstrations were a result

of glasnost and perestroika.”24

22 Ronald G. Suny, “Roots of A Conflict; How the Struggle Over Karabakh Began,” Armenian International Magazine Archive (July 31 1990), http://armenianinternationalmagazine.com/1990/07/roots-of-a- conflict-how-the-struggle-over-karabagh-began/. 23 Niall M. Fraiser, Keith W. Hipel, John Jaworksy, and Ralph Zuljan, “A Conflict Analysis of the Armenian- Azerbaijani Dispute,” The Journal of Conflict Resolution 34, No.4 (December 1990): 657, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022002790034004004. 24 Bill Keller, “Armenians and Glasnost; Soviet Press Debate on Regional Discord Underlines Party Split on Democratization,” New York Times, March, 1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/03/28/world/armenians-glasnost-soviet-press-debate-regional-discord- underlines-party-split.html.

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At the heart of the protests was a territorial dispute that dated from the 1930s. Since the

majority of the population of the Nagorno-Karabakh were Armenians, the Bolsheviks after

establishing its regime in the Transcaucasus in 1920, decided to place the region under Armenian

administration. However, a year later, the decision was reversed and management of the region

was placed under Azerbaijan’s control. The Karabakh Armenians felt discontent after they found

out that Azerbaijani authorities deliberately separated the geographical ties between the NAKO

and Armenia in a strong effort to pursue a de-Armenization policy, oriented toward changing the culture of the region. Because the region was highly restricted, it led to the deterioration of the socio-economic situation and change in Azerbaijan’s cultural policy toward Armenians.

In response, Moscow authorities were silent and had no reaction, and equally shocking, the central press in Moscow refused to address the struggle of Nagorno-Armenians. The Soviet press often stated that the change in jurisdiction was motivated by economic stability in the region. The

Armenian government sent an appeal in 1930s but it was not reconsidered. Since then, Armenians periodically attempted to file various petitions and appeals to the Soviet officials challenging the decision in the 1960s and 1970s. Every attempt from Armenia to change the status of the region was in favor of Azerbaijan. Azerbaijani authorities were outraged by the efforts of the Armenian republic to secure the region.25

The political conflict erupted, due to a riot in Karabakh on February 27, 1988 in the city of

Sumgait, approximately 25 kilometers from Baku. Sumgait was a Baku industrial suburb where a

large Armenian minority held leadership positions. The same day, the Azerbaijani radio announced

that Armenians killed two Azeri youths in Sumgait. Azerbaijanis retaliated against Armenians in

25 Alexei Zverev, “Ethnic Conflicts in the Caucasus 1988-1994,” Contested Boarders in the Caucasus, ed. Bruno Coppieters (VUB: University Press, 1996), http://poli.vub.ac.be/publi/ContBorders/eng/ch0101.htm.

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the whole of Azerbaijan. Former Armenian refugee, Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, 13 years old at the time recalls what her uncle told her happened in Sumgait:

Uncle Tolik is an engineer in a highly industrialized city in Azerbaijan,

Sumgait…when he goes back to Sumgait to work, he sees something that changes

his life forever. The streets are full of rubble with the remnants of things laying

everywhere, like piles of furniture and clothes. He arrives right after the lynching

of Armenian residents of the city…It could not be happening to us, here, in this day

and age!26

Turcotte continues writing that during one of the nights in February of 1988, when

Armenians were hiding in their homes, a teenage Armenian girl was thrown off a balcony after being repeatedly raped. While people were watching from the windows, the Azerbaijani mob continued beating her while she was still breathing and laying on the street. The atrocity did not

end there; her naked and broken body was set on fire.27

According to a historian, Svante E. Cornell, the official figures show that between February

27-29, 1988, 32 residents were killed during the riots, out of whom 26 were Armenians and six

were Azerbaijanis.28 Cornell points out that Armenian sources indicate that the numbers of

Armenian casualties were much higher. Also, it is important to note that this first incident already

shows the unwillingness of the Soviet troops to intervene to stop the violence. 29 Cornell analyzes

26 Anna A. Turcotte, Nowhere: A Story of Exile (MA: hybooksonline.com, 2012), 17. 27 Turcotte, Nowhere, 17. 28 Svante E. Cornell, “Undeclared War: The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict Reconsidered,” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, XX, No. 4 (1997): 5, http://isdp.eu/content/uploads/images/stories/isdp-main-pdf/1997_cornell_undeclared-war.pdf. 29 Cornell, “Undeclared War,” 5.

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this fact, maintaining that the Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict was initiated by the authorities in

Moscow, whose policy was to ‘divide and rule.”30 Cornell states that:

The fact that the Soviet army and Interior Ministry troops were in

the area did not change anything; in fact the army stood by and watched the pogrom

take place, and may even have initiated it, as is persistently argued by Igor Nolyain

in his thought-provoking article…The Soviet forces did not stay at neglecting to

prevent the bloodshed, but deliberately sought to create a conflict between the two

communities, both in Armenia and Azerbaijan.31

Because Azerbaijan’s oil production was under threat, this presented a problem for Moscow.

Soviet officials aimed to destabilize the region by creating inter-communal conflict, which would allow Moscow to reestablish even stronger control over the area. But was it possible to avoid a future war between the two republics? Cornell states that it went wrong in the sense that the Soviet authorities did not expect to see the ‘monster’ they created. Instead, just as people lose control of campfires, the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict slipped out of the Soviet leadership’s hands.32

Turcotte’s diary also reflects similar feelings about the reluctance of the Soviet authorities

to help the Armenians in Sumgait and reestablish order in the city. Turcotte writes that her uncle

admitted that “after the mobs are brought under control, from his office in the Kremlin, Mikhail

Gorbachev lies to the people of his nation and says that the troops were two hours late getting to

Sumgait when in fact they were the silent witnesses to the atrocities.”33

30 Ibid., 6. 31 Ibid., 5-6. 32 Ibid., 6-7. 33 Anna A. Turcotte, Nowhere: A Story of Exile (MA: hybooksonline.com, 2012), 17.

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During the same time, outside of Azerbaijan, people in the Armenian Republic became

aware of the first-ever mass violence in Sumgait, and as a result hundreds of thousands of

demonstrators marched on the streets in the capitol of Armenia, Yerevan. The Armenian political

scientist, Alik Iskandarian was one of the demonstrators. In his analysis, he used the term “frozen

potential,” emphasizing the fact that the Soviet leaders throughout the Soviet era froze the

Karabakh factor. At first, the people rallied for peaceful non-political reasons, but a few days later,

almost a million residents took to the streets of Yerevan, walking for hours and chanting one word

“Karabakh.”34 Ashot Manucharian, a schoolteacher related his memories to Thomas De Waal. He

described the rally as a “magnetic field”; “people began to feel something new, that it was possible

to speak, it was possible to gather, talk about the fate of Karabakh.”35 Despite the fact that the

rallies were peaceful, the organizers of the event had little idea where this movement was going.

Rafael Gazarian was a member of the newly formed Karabakh Committee. He felt confident that

Gorbachev would resolve the ongoing clashes within a week.36 However, the local Armenian

Communist leaders were informed that there would be no changes in orders from Moscow.

Thomas De Waal agrees with Cornell that the official message from the Soviet leadership

was very clear: the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh region would not be changed. When two envoys from the Politburo, Anatoly Lukyanov and Vladimir Dolgikh, arrived in Yerevan, the

Armenian people realized that they came to deliver a tough message: “Soviet borders were inviolable.”37 When Dolgikh asked to speak with the crowd, but Armenian officials told him that

34 Thomas De Wall, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 23. 35 De Waal, Black Garden, 24. 36 Ibid., 25. 37 Ibid., 26.

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he had to get permission first. This incident illustrates that Soviet power began rapidly vanishing

in Armenia. But what was the reaction of Azerbaijanis to these extraordinary events? Were the

citizens in disbelief?

At the time, Azerbaijan had a very diverse population that counted seven million more

people than Armenia, with a far greater ethnic mix than any other Soviet republic. The reaction was surprisingly different than in Armenia. Several young students, workers, and even intellectuals gathered to march from the Academy of Sciences to the Supreme Soviet parliament carrying signs that stated that the region of Nagorno-Karabakh had always belonged to Azerbaijan. Compared to the rallies in Yerevan, the demonstrators were not organized into a political movement. Many intellectuals among the crowd believed that Armenians ignited the Karabakh issue in the attempt to threaten Azerbaijani’s national identity.38

Since Baku was the largest city in the Caucasus and home to a rich ethnic mix, inter- communal strains simmered below the surface. On February 27, 1988, according to eyewitnesses, a group of Azerbaijani men appeared on Lenin Square in front of the Town Committee Council building, and it seemed that they were well prepared for a demonstration. No Armenians were

attacked during the rally. The violence began that evening in a cinema and the market square. As

before, the local police did not interfere while Azerbaijanis were attacking and beating Armenians.

The silence of the police was a necessary condition for the beginning of ethnic violence.39

The next day, the mob was in control of the streets. Nataevan Tagiyeva, an Azerbaijani

resident, recalls the horrifying day, stating that, “when I saw the crowd I realized that the syndrome

of the crowd really does exist and you look at their eyes and you see that they are absolutely

38 Ibid. 34. 39 Ibid., 34-35.

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switched off from everything, like zombies.”40 Like Tagiyeva, the Armenian residents and victims

can still recall the three-day massacre that destroyed their lives in Sumgait. With the help of

Azerbaijani neighbors, Armenians were hiding in their houses until they could flee the city.

The question remains whether the attacks were planned or did they evolve as a result of the

protests in Armenia? According to De Waal, the attackers came in separate waves: the first group simply shouting and smashing everything around them; the second group were looters, who broke into the Armenian apartments and houses stealing goods; and the third group were vandals, also called pogromshchiki, in the Russian language. It means those who conduct pogroms. This group consisted of young rural folk mainly with beards ranging in age from fourteen to their early thirties.

Rafik Khacharian was able to flee his apartment, but when he came back, all his family’s possessions were overturned and smashed. There was not even a single glass left to drink water.

Thus, while none of the three groups were well armed, they relied on numbers. According to

Armenian eyewitness accounts, the attackers were carrying improvised weapons, such as pipes from factories and sharpened pieces of metal, which suggest that the violence was planned.41

Some of the attackers hoped to occupy houses that belonged to the Armenians. Lyudmila

M. Lay was one of the victims who were left for dead on the floor after being raped. She recalls

the conversation among the men in her apartment:

One talked about his daughter, saying there was no children’s footwear in our

apartment that he could take for his daughter. Another said that he liked the

apartment-recently we had done a really good job fixing everything up and that he

would live there after everything was all over. They started to argue. A third one

40 Ibid., 36. 41 Ibid., 37.

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says “How come you get it? I have four children and there are three rooms here,

that is just what I need. All these years I have been living in god-awful places.”

Another one said “neither of you get it. We will set fire to it and leave.42

Besides the fact that it was clearly planned and prepared, this quote tells the reader another

important factor: they were not afraid of the police presence or the Soviet authorities. The

aftermath of Sumgait massacres was catastrophic for all Armenians, and even for horrified and

confused Azerbaijanis, as they struggled to understand why the Soviet army did not stop the

brutality and the unexpected events. Instead, all week Soviet news broadcasted reports of riots in

Israel, South Africa, and Panama, avoiding coverage in Sumgait. The Soviet leadership ordered to call the slaughter of the Armenians an “act of hooliganism” instead.43

On February 29, 1988, two weeks later, Gorbachev sat down with the Plenum of the Central

Committee of the Communist Party to discuss the violence in Sumgait and the destabilization of

the Nagorno-Karabakh region. First, Gorbachev addressed the Armenian protest stating that it was

a peaceful demonstration, whereas the reaction in Azerbaijan was unspeakable. He highlights the

fact that “the most important fact that except some groups that were marching, the masses were

marching with our socialist signs, including the portraits of the members of Politburo. Only a few

Armenian extremists raised posters with slogans advocating independence of NKAO.”44

Shockingly, he then changed the conversation to blame the Armenian population. He stated

that there were two factors that played a huge role in the development of the Nagorno-Karabakh

42 Ibid., 36. 43 Ibid., 37. 44 “About Additional Measures Regarding Events in Azerbaijani and Armenian Republics,” in The Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 29, 1988, Rodina, 1994. tran. Sudaba Lezgiyeva, http://sumgait.info/sumgait/politburo-meeting-29-february-1988.html, 82.

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conflict. The first, the history of the Armenian diaspora as a having “difficult history,” in which

“they were spread all over the world a long time ago.”45 The second issue was that due to the emotions amidst this diaspora, Armenians could not deal with the issues of the region. He added,

“everything that historically happened to this nation, it sits down deep, and because of that, they

react this way.”46 This quote suggests that Gorbachev was aware that Armenia felt oppressed since

the formation of the U.S.S.R.

After reviewing additional documents and speaking with other members, Gorbachev

authorized a plan to immediately notify the authorities in Sumgait that the perpetrators were

arrested. With a hope to calm the situation down, one of the members, Alexander Yakovlev,

proposed that the Sumgait newspapers immediately inform the public that all “extremists” were

detained. It is unclear whether they were arrested or not. During the closing discussion, the Marshal

of the Soviet Union, Dmitry Yazov, offered to impose a curfew on the city of Sumgait. Due to the

reports of minor incidents involving anti-Armenian clashes, Yazov believed that the tensions could spread to the city of Kirovobad. Concluding the session, however, Gorbachev was reluctant to deploy security forces. He emphasized the importance of democracy stating that, “when people do not break the civil order, it is necessary to work with them in a political manner, not to purge them using army forces.”47 This decision changed the course of the dispute over the region.

The tension continued in May when the attacks on Azerbaijani vehicles carrying supplies

escalated into larger clashes. At first, the participation of Azerbaijanis had a mostly unprepared

character, until the leaders of planned Azerbaijani movement appeared during the Kirovobad

45 About Additional Measures,” 82. 46 Ibid., 83. 47 Ibid., 89.

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pogrom in 1988. The New York Times reported that an Azerbaijani Popular Front, which organized and sponsored the riots, “has lost control of the hostility against Armenians.”48 The agenda of the

nationalist party, which was founded in November 1988 in the midst of the freedoms of

perestroika, included culture, politics, human rights and other issues, which were published

weekly in Azerbaijan.49

The conflict intensified and pogroms spread to the town of Kirovobad. On November 22,

six months later, the Armenians were again attacked and driven from their homes, beaten, tortured,

and slaughtered on the streets of Kirovabad. After the massacres in Sumgait, the international

community was closely monitoring the tension between two republics and the involvement of the

Soviet troops. Moscow tried to avoid international attention and as a result, a small group of Soviet

troops were deployed to Kirovabad.50 According to a Los Angeles Times’ article, “Soviet soldiers blocked dozens of Azerbaijani attempts to massacre Armenians in their homes in the continuing communal violence in the southern Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, a senior military commander there said Saturday.”51 On November 23, Gorbachev declared martial law in the city, allowing

troops to respond to the anti-Armenian crowd with rifle fire. Due to the clashes between the Soviet forces and the aggressive mob during the first two days, three Soviet soldiers were killed and sixty-

48 Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatred: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), 29. 49 Kaufman, Modern Hatred, 29. 50 Ibid., 29. 51 Michael Parks, “Soviet Tells of Blocking Slaughter of Armenians: General Reports His Soldiers Have Suppressed Dozens Massacre Attempts by Azerbaijanis,” Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1988, accessed May 1, 2017, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-11-27/news/mn-1060_1_soviet-soldiers.

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seven Armenian citizens were wounded. By November 24, the number of fatalities had risen to

forty.52

Before I can analyze the events in Baku, I will investigate what sparked the second round

of turmoil. In December 1989, the Supreme Soviets of the Armenian SSR and Nagorno-Karabakh

declared that the Armenian government must govern the Nagorno-Karabakh region. Azerbaijani

radical nationalists and the anti-communist Azerbaijani Popular Front grew outraged by this

decision. Officials in Moscow decided to send the Russian second secretary, Viktor Polyanichko

to take over the Azerbaijani government, because the “extremists” were fully in charge of the

Popular Front. In the last week of the year, several people from the Popular Front were frequently

given airtime on Azerbaijani television, spreading anti-Armenian sentiments.53

The violence broke out on December 29, when the Azerbaijani nationalists from the

Popular Front seized local Communist Party offices in the city of Jalilabad. Because of the attack, the Baku Council suspended the date for elections. The Soviet leadership responded with anger because crowds physically dismantled the frontier fences with Iran and burned watchtowers.

Media accounts claimed that the Azerbaijanis wanted to break away from the Soviet Union and embrace Islamic fundamentalism. As De Waal points out, “thousands raced across the border, and there were ecstatic scenes as Azerbaijanis met their ethnic cousins from Iran for the first time in years.”54 While the Soviet leadership in Moscow was preparing to take necessary steps to prevent

52 Thomas De Wall, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 90. 53 De Wall, Black Garden, 90. 54 Ibid., 90.

29

the loss of power over Azerbaijan, on January 9th, the Armenian parliament rushed to include the

Karabakh region within its borders.

News from Jalilabad exacerbated the situation in Baku. From January 6-7, 1990, the members of the Popular Front disagreed on many issues, including anti-Armenian sentiments. The party spilt apart: a small group of intellectuals led by Leila Yunusova and Zardusht Alizade decided to form the Social Democratic Party, whereas the remainder of the Front divided into two camps and held rallies on Lenin Square. Following growing tensions in Baku, top officials in

Moscow sent in thousands of troops and soldiers. On January 9, the Armenian parliament elected

to include the region of Nagorno-Karabakh within Armenian borders. Because of the reminder of

the decision, five days later, on January 11, a large group of radicals representing the Popular Front

stormed the Communist Party building and effectively took power in the town of Lenkoran in

Azerbaijan.55 According to an Azerbaijani journalist from the Bakinsky Rabochy newspaper,

Soviet power was overthrown that night:

I had agreed to meet the First Secretary of the Town Committee Ya Rzaev and went

to the Regional Committee building. But there were armed young men standing in

the doorway. They did not let me in and one of them came up and said: “The

Regional Committee does not exist any more. No one works here. You cannot come

in.”56

Murderous anti-Armenian violence on the streets of Baku broke out on January 2, 1991

after two leaders from the Popular Front appeared on television, proclaiming to the audience that

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 90-91.

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while Baku was full of homeless refugees, thousands of Armenians were living in comfort. They

called for the defense of Azerbaijani’s sovereignty. According to an article in the Komsomolskaya

Pravda, forty-six Armenians were killed on the streets and Azerbaijanis, eight of whom died from

injuries, took forty-three to hospitals.57 The eyewitnesses remember that mutilated and burned

bodies were laying on the streets of Baku for days. Elderly people were the main target of

Azerbaijani extremists because days earlier, many young couples left the city with their kids and

asked their parents to watch over their apartments and belongings.58

The situation in hospitals was unspeakable. Azerbaijani extremists surrounded local

hospitals. Dzhangir Aliyevich, one of the Azerbaijani doctors, recalls the atmosphere in his

hospital, stating that, “While we were walking down the hallway, the smell made me sick, the

corridors reminded me of a sort of barracks. At all corners and on dark shaded corridors of the

hospitals were patrolled by soldiers and extremist from the Popular Front, wearing masks and blue-

red-green strips on their arms.”59 The hospital personnel also recall that they were afraid to hide

Armenians. Instead, they pointed out to other Armenians that there was an army base by a stadium,

where Azerbaijanis were hiding Armenians. Unfortunately, often, it was dangerous for Armenians

to move from one place to another.

Thousands of terrified Armenians took shelter in airports, tents that were in stadiums, and

even in police stations. From there, they were moved by the Soviet troops to the windy docks by the port, put on ferries, and transported to the other sides of the Caspian Sea. While thousands of frightened and beaten refugees were arriving at the ports of Krasnovodsk in Turkmenistan, others

57 “Leonid Nikitinsky, “The State of Emergency,” Komsomolskaya Pravda, January 30, 1990, trans., by Sudaba Lezgiyeva., 2. 58 Nikitinsky, “The State of Emergency,” 2. 59 Ibid.

31

were evacuated by Soviet helicopters. Those who were trapped in Baku faced continuous fear.

According to Komsomolskaya Pravda’s article, on January 20th, around 4 a.m., an Azeri sniper

appeared across from the stadium where refugees were hiding and began shooting at the wounded

Armenians.60

There were non-Armenian casualties among the injured and killed civilians. For instance,

while Farman Mamedov, an Azerbaijani civilian, and his daughter were on the bus traveling back

home, Azeri extremists stopped them. The gunmen opened fire, immediately killing the fourteen-

year-old daughter. Mr. Mamedov did not realize that his daughter was dead. While he was carrying

her out of the bus, he was shot in the legs, after which, he fell unconscious to the ground.61 In

another instance, Alexei Lysih, a witness of the pogrom, tells the Komsomolskaya Pravda, “We

are not going to know whose bullet killed a seventeen years old Vera Bessantinu, when she in her

apartment, under the barrack, together with her mother and brother were laying on the floor. She

just for a second lifted her head up.”62 While crying, Mr. Lysih also stated that he saw a body of

a beautiful seventeen-year-old woman in the morgue, who happened to be standing, “like

thousands of Azerbajanis, “by a window, when she got shot in the stomach.63 There are no reports

of why and who killed these people. The only known fact is that nationalist activists ruled the

streets of Baku.

60 Boris Vishnevski, Andrei Krayniy, Dmitri Muratov, and Gennadiy Sapronov, “Baku. What Happened?” Komsomolskaya Pravda, February 10, 1990, tran. Sudaba Lezgiyeva, 2. 61 Vishnevski, Krainiy, Muratov, and Sapronov, “Baku. What Happened?,” 2. 62 Ibid., 2. 63 Ibid.

32

While some Azerbaijanis were hiding their Armenian neighbors in their houses, Soviet

troops were firing shots at armed Azerbaijani extremists in airports and army bases. The situation

was relatively calm on January 15th, but not for long. During the seven-day pogroms, over one

hundred demonstrators and assailants were killed. According to the Armenian Research Center,

dozens of civilians were crushed under Soviet tanks and hundreds were seriously injured.

Subsequently, Azerbaijani extremists killed more than two dozen Soviet troops.64 The Soviet

officials used the anti-Armenian massacres as an excuse to send troops with the goal to destroy the

authority-seeking Popular Front party. According to Komsomolskaya Pravda, special correspondents, Boris Vishnevski, Andrei Krayniy, Dmitri Muratov, and Gennadiy Sapronov, the situation in Baku “had no longer a national marking and has no relation to a scope of inter-national relations.”65 Instead, they wrote, “the problems of Karabakh had moved to the back stage and the

central government’s problems to restrain Karabakh had moved to the fore.”66

On January 19th, Soviet troops, led by Alexander Lebed, the colonel and commander of

the Parachute division of the Airborne Troops of the USSR, reached the Baku airport and began a

destructive operation. Lebed oversaw three regiments of elite paratroopers from Kostroma,

Ryazan, and Tula. Historian, Robert V. Barylski writes:

The first barricade they encountered consisted of about 100 people; they moved

them aside without injury or shooting. But the next twelve barricades offered some

64 “Black January: Armenian Massacres in Baku -1990,” ANI Armenian Research Center, January 16, 2016, http://www.aniarc.am/2016/01/13/black-january-armenian-massacres-in-baku-1990/. 65 Boris Vishnevski, Andrei Krayniy, Dmitri Muratov, and Gennadiy Sapronov, “Baku. What Happened?” Komsomolskaya Pravda, February 10, 1990, tran. Sudaba Lezgiyeva, 2. 66 Vishnevski, Krainiy, Muratov, and Sapronov, “Baku. What Happened?,” 2.

33

armed resistance. Soldiers were upset to be facing their fellow Soviet citizens in the

heart of a major Soviet city. They hesitated and asked for advice.67

Though his troops were not used to such events and hesitated to use military force against fellow

Soviet citizens, Lebed decided to keep moving. When Lebed’s unit reached the sea port’s main terminal on the Caspian shore, the 150-200 Soviet fighters were nowhere to be found.

Nevertheless, military-political missions in Baku and other Azeri towns successfully completed the operations. According to Baryalski, several days later, Lebed admitted that he and his unit were sent not to protect the Armenian population, but to prevent the Popular Front from seizing power from the Communists.68

Similar to the pogroms between 1988-1991, during the Azerbaijani-Armenian clashes that erupted in February 1905, the tsarist troops refused to protect Armenians once again. During the four-day riot, there were casualties from both sides because the Russian soldiers stood aside from helping and protecting innocent people. Mammad Said Ordubadi’s History of the Armenian-

Muslim Clashes in the Caucasus, 1905-1906 focuses on the events and causes of the violent

attacks. Ordubadi argues that the violence was connected to Armenian prosperity and economic

success in Azerbaijan.69 While the Azerbaijani population remained excluded from a general imperial progress, most Armenians enjoyed high paid jobs and privileges. The author concludes that “the Bolshevik forces were determined to cultivate and deepen the ethnic conflict, in order to

67 Robert V. Baylski, “The Military, Domestic, Political Violence, and the Gorbachev-Yeltsin Rivalry,” in The Soldier in Russian Politics 1988-1996: Duty, Dictatorship, and Democracy Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin (New Jersey: New Brunswick, 1998), 73. 68 Robert V. Baylski, “The Military, Domestic, Political Violence, and the Gorbachev-Yeltsin Rivalry,” 73. 69 Mammad Said Ordubadi, years of Blood: A History of the Armenian-Muslim Clashes in the Caucasus, 1905-1906 (The United Kingdom: Ithaca Press, 2011), 145.

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take advantage of it when the time would come.”70 Hence, the Russian authorities were silent

because it was easy to police a divided multi-ethnic nation.

Tatul Hakobyan’s book, Karabakh Diary: Green and Black: Neither War nor Peace presents an interpretation of what happened during the seven-day pogrom in Baku, 1990. The author argues that during an interview with Russian journalist Andrei Karaulov in September 1990,

Heydar Aliyev, the later-president of the newly formed Azerbaijan Republic, expressed his opinion about the January events, stating that, “All conflict begun between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis had ceased a few days before that tragic evening and no Armenians were left in the city. The question arises: Who were the forces protecting and against what?”71 Ohannes Geukjial, a

professor of the Political Science, also raises similar concerns, arguing that the Soviet-planned

operations led to the restoration of Soviet power of the Communist Party. The aim of the Soviet

military intervention was to re-establish a pro-Soviet government with reliable links to Moscow.72

For Gorbachev, it had to be done because it would strengthen the process of perestroika and spread

the democratization process in the southern Caucasus and keep the U.S.S.R. intact.73

De Waal also contributes to the discussion of Soviet power and its struggle to manage the

bloodshed during the seven-day pogrom. De Waal emphasizes an important detail: even though

high officials in Moscow had immediately sent thousands of Soviet Interior Ministry troops to

70 Ordubadi, Years of Blood, 147. 71 “Black January: Armenian Massacres in Baku -1990,” ANI Armenian Research Center, January 16, 2016, http://www.aniarc.am/2016/01/13/black-january-armenian-massacres-in-baku-1990/. 72 Ohannes Geukjian, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the Southern Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy (New York: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 178. 73 Perestroika also known as Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of economic, political, and social restructures. Its goal was to reduce the direct involvement of the Communist party leadership in the country’s governance.

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Azerbaijan, the intervention only began six days later.74 The Azerbaijani human rights activist,

Arzu Abdullayeva, recalls a conversation, during which, she asked a policeman to go and save a

desperate Armenian citizen from being beaten by a mob. In response, an Azerbaijani policeman

advised her that, “We have orders not to intervene.”75 In another instance, the Azerbaijani writer

Yusif Samedoglu called the Central Committee, begging to stop the slaughter. The answer was to

“let them slaughter.”76

It is necessary to examine the unusual cooperation of Viktor Polyanichko, Soviet officials sent from Moscow, with the radical leaders of the Popular Front. De Waal suggests that the

nationalist radicals did not want to lose an opportunity to demonstrate their ideology and take up

arms legally. And when they appeared on television with hopes of ending the tension among the

population, the conflict escalated instead. But the question is why did Polyanichko allow them to

appear on Azerbaijani television? De Waal suggests that Polyanichko’s plan was to allow the

leaders of the Popular Front to provoke violence, so that the Soviet authority would later discredit

the whole party and its ideology. In the other words, the violence “served the pretext for a

crackdown.”77

After the Armenian population was violently expelled from Baku, Yevgeny Primakov led

a Politburo delegation to Baku to take control of the situation. Primakov was a close political ally

to Gorbachev, who personally sent Primakov to warn the Popular Front leadership that Moscow

would not stand still while Azerbaijan seceded from the Soviet Union. Though the stakes were

74 Thomas De Wall, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 91. 75 De Wall, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, 91. 76 Ibid., 91. 77 Ibid., 92.

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high and Primakov had to make a quick decision, he allegedly tried to persuade Gorbachev not to

allow the Soviet army to enter Baku. If Azerbaijan was one step away from independence, why

did Soviet leadership wait until the nights of January 19th and 20th? De Waal answers:

The failure to declare a State of emergency to halt the Armenian pogroms, only to

do so when all the Armenians had left, suggested deep cynicism or incompetence,

or both. The confused and then brutal response to the Popular Front’s challenge

revealed that the Soviet Union had several different centers of power, each with its

own priorities, and that Gorbachev wavered between them.78

Though the Communist Party re-established its control over Baku on January 20th,

Moscow essentially lost the loyalty of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Thousands of people who

belonged to the Communist Party burned their Party cards, including the chairwoman of the

Supreme Soviet, Elmira Kafarova, condemning both the nationalist radicals and the Soviet troops

as “army criminals.”79 The whole population of Baku attended mass funerals for the Baku victims.

A few days later, Soviet troops arrested dozens of members of the Popular Front, including the

members of the National Defense Council.

The profound effects of the pogroms, in Sumgait, Kirovobad, and Baku went far beyond

Baku. For instance, An Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union by Jacques

Derrida, Isaiah Berlin, Alain Finkielkraut, Richard Rorty, and Adrian Lyttelton, et al. is a document that was prepared by the Helsinki Treaty Watchdog Committee of France and intellectuals from the College International de Philosophie in Paris to express a profound anger

78 Ibid., 94. 79 Ibid.

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over the violence in Azerbaijan. The document makes it clear that the pogroms in three cities

repeatedly followed the same pattern. According to the circumstances surrounding the facts, the

authors believe that “these tragic events were not accidental or spontaneous eruptions of

violence.”80 The authors also claim that the periodic massacres of the Armenians became a consistent practice in Soviet Azerbaijan. Knowing that Moscow regained power over Azerbaijan,

they demanded “Soviet authorities as well as the international community condemn unequivocally

these anti-Armenian pogroms and that they denounce especially the racist ideology which has been

used by the perpetrators of these crimes as justification.”81

On February 17th, 2012, U.S. Senator Gary C. Peters offered a moving remembrance of the

massacres and the barbaric acts against the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan stating that, “more

than two decades ago today, innocent Armenian men, women, and children living in Sumgait were

subjected to heinous, organized brutality that sought to force them from their homes in

Azerbaijan.”82 Peters claims that because the communist ideology and economy could not keep

both Soviet republics and their diverse ethnic groups, the Soviet leadership failed to prevent,

protect, and ensure the safety and rights of the ethnic Armenian minority. Peters continues to state

that according to credible sources, hundreds of Armenians died, while Soviet officials denied this

number, acknowledging that only 30 Armenians were killed. However, the letters sent by several

80 Jacques Derrida, Isaiah Berlin, Alain Finkielkraut, Richard Rorty, and Adrian Lyttelton, et al, “An Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union,” The New York Review of Books, September 27, 1990, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1990/09/27/an-open-letter-on-anti-armenian-pogroms-in-the- sov/. 81 Derrida, Berlin, Finkielkraut, Rorty, and Lyttelton, et al, “An Open Letter on Anti-Armenian Pogroms in the Soviet Union.” 82 Gary C. Peters, “Remembering the Armenian Victims of the Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku Pogroms,” Extensions of Remarks, February 17, 2012(statement of Gary C. Peters, The House of Representatives), https://www.congress.gov/crec/2012/02/17/CREC-2012-02-17-pt1-PgE225-3.pdf.

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U.S. Senators at the time to the government of the Soviet Union, urging it to discontinue a series

of violations of human rights, did not change the Soviet Union’s rhetoric.83 Both instances

illustrate and strengthen the argument that Soviet leaders in Moscow were reluctant to stop the

massacres of the Armenian minority for primarily political reasons.

To conclude, the Sumgait pogroms in February of 1988 marked a major escalation in the

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. During the rampage, Armenian apartments and houses were ravaged

and occupied by the perpetrators. As a result, thousands of refugees fled Sumgait, seeking shelter

in Armenia and other parts of the Soviet Union. Top officials in Moscow, including Gorbachev,

had their own interpretation: hooligans organized a political strategy. During a Soviet Politburo

session, Gorbachev’s senior cabinet members proposed sending Soviet troops to stop the riots,

however, the reaction was initially slow because Gorbachev voiced his opposition, fearing that this

conflict could hurt the reputation of glasnost. Finally, a curfew was imposed on February 29, 1988

from 8 pm to 7am, during which, Soviet troops rescued Armenians left hiding in Azerbaijanis

neighbors’ apartments. Even though 400 men were arrested in connection with the massacres, civil

anarchy again exploded in Kirovabad in November 1988.84

During the pogroms in Kirovobad, 1988 Armenians were again driven from their homes

and forced to seek safe places in the territories of Armenia or elsewhere. This time, Moscow moved

quickly, declaring martial law on November 23. Unfortunately, the Azerbaijani extremists in Baku

once again employed ethnic violence in 1990. The protestors demanded that the Nakogrno-

Karabakh Autonomous Oblast lose its independent status and come under the rules of Azerbaijani

83 C. Peters, “Remembering the Armenian Victims of the Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku Pogroms.” 84 Thomas De Wall, Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 76.

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administration. Rallies organized by the Popular Front nationalists, advocating for increasingly radical measure to solve the dispute led to a growing inter-communal fury. During the seven-day pogroms, dozens of thousands of Armenians lost their homes, belongings, and family members, and were deported from the country.

The fact that the Azerbaijani police were hesitant to stop the bloodshed and rescue the victims tells us that this was not a spontaneous event. The analyses of all three events suggest that the radical nationalists from the Popular Front party planned to deport all Armenians from

Azerbaijan long before the Sumgait massacres. Given the nature of the violence, the members of the Popular Front organized a local two or three-day violent eruption in order to spread the message to the Armenians about their place as a minority. Using the Armenian pretext, this message was also directed at Moscow to send a message that Azerbaijan sought to separate from the Soviet

Union. Though at first, Soviet Union was losing its control over Azerbaijan, after a military curfew was imposed on January 19th, 1990 the Soviet authorities in Baku regained power over the city and the whole country. After thousands of Armenians fled Sumgait, Kirovabad, and Baku, they were followed by tens of thousands of departing Russians and Jews, who, due to a fear of another ethnic cleansing explosion in Azerbaijan, left. The significant part of Armenian refugees fled for other regions of the former Soviet Union, but mainly for its capitol, Moscow.

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CHAPTER 2: The Soviet Paradox: Playing the National and Ethnic Cards

The anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku were among of the most violent acts of ethnic

cleansing of the Armenian inhabitants in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between

1987-1991. In 1987, a quarter of a million people of Armenian ethnicity lived in Baku. By the end

of January 1990, the only remaining Armenians were mixed Azerbaijani-Armenian families.85

One of them was my family. In 1988, we were fortunate enough to be able to catch a train, as did

many other thousands, to escape under the cover of night. Unfortunately, my father was not

allowed to leave the city, because Baku’s airport had been shut down. My mother had to travel

alone with two toddlers to Moscow, where she waited for my father’s arrival for almost a year. As

we pulled into the Moscow Train Station, my mother found out that refugees were told not to leave

the station, as the Moscow officials were not prepared to accommodate them. Uprooted from their

country by radical nationalists, Armenian refugees, lacking documents to travel to a safer and more

prosperous country, ended up staying in the Moscow airports and train stations for approximately

a year before they were transferred to dormitories and motels. Mixed families from Baku were

suddenly unwelcomed in the antagonistic republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia. As Gari B.

Kafiyev, one of the several passengers flying in 1990 to Moscow, states, “My wife is Azerbaijani,

and I am Armenian, I cannot live in Baku, and she cannot live in Yerevan.”86 Nor could these

families find housing in Moscow. According to the New York Times, “visiting officials from the

85 Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, Eleonora Asatryan, “The Categories of Refugees and Forced Migrants in the Legal Context of the Consequences of the Karabakh Conflict,” in The Karabakh Conflict: Refugees, Territories, Security (Total Quality Management Assistance: Armenia, 2005), 31. 86 Bill Keller, “Upheaval in the East: Armenians; Armenians Refuse to Leave a Plane,” The New York Times, January 20, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/20/world/upheaval-in-the-east-armenians- armenians-refuse-to-leave-a-plane.html.

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State Labor Committee have so far been unwilling to promise permanent housing, citing a citywide apartment shortage that has tens of thousands of Moscow families on waiting lists.”87

The Soviet Union did not dissolve until December 26, 1991. As such, for almost three years before the formation of the new Russia, ethnic Armenian refugees from Baku remained in a precarious and stateless situation. Since they possessed only a so-called “so-journ registration”, they could not manage to move to privately rented apartments. The Soviet Council of Ministers avoided the use of the word “refugee,” addressing the refugees as “Internally Displaced Persons”

(IDP). Only in 1991, did the Moscow Committee of Labor and Employment begin registering refugees and providing certificates attesting that they had been forced to leave Azerbaijan.

However, the Soviet authorities refused to issue an identity document to go with this certificate, because they had no rights to apply for citizenship. Instead, refugees were instructed to carry the internal Soviet passport jointly with the registration card. In order to find a job or register children at a school, it was necessary to have an identity documentation. Therefore, all refugees were required to verify credentials by the end of November each year.88

This cumbersome red tape shows how reluctant Moscow officials were to integrate the

Armenian refugees into Russian society. I argue that the officials of the Moscow Department of

Interior were unwilling to pursue the local integration of ethnic Armenians from Baku because they were non-Russian refugees. I will draw a special attention to the fact while the Soviet leadership used ethnicity as a political tool to maintain power, Russia privileged ethnicity in a new way. Essentializing nationality, it became the defining factor for citizenship. In other words,

87 Keller, “Upheaval in the East,”4. 88 Ibid., 4.

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ethnicity was the goal for the new Russia. To understand the relationship between Russian politics

and non-Slavic ethnic groups, I will analyze the artificial ethnic structure of the Soviet Union after

the Bolshevik Revolution. Paradoxically, Russia, is like most countries, a multi-ethnic society, but

ethnic identity and nationality were the main factors for obtaining citizenship.

The formation of the U.S.S.R was divisive, inconsistent, and troubled with conflicts.

Bolshevism introduced new ideas about how ordinary people comprehended ethnicity through an

existing understanding of reality. Even though there was disagreement about the origins of each

nation, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin promoted and institutionalized ethno-territorial

federalism. For these two leaders, the Soviet Union was what historian Yuri Slezkine called a

“communal apartment,” in which each Soviet republic represented a separate room.89 Even more

surprising, bounded by a united past, people were encouraged to celebrate separateness along with

communalism. Historian, Kate Brown refers to this paradox as “a peculiar experiment.”90 The

national borders consisted of hybrid populations mixed with different ethnic groups and mutated

perceptions of ethnic identity. People practiced different religions and spoke various dialects. To

support ethnic groups, both Lenin and Stalin encouraged Soviet rights for almost all nations and

minority groups within national borders. In Marksizm i natsionalniy vopros, (Marxism and the

Nationality Question) Stalin states:

A nation can organize its life as it sees fit. It has the right to organize its life on the

basis of autonomy. It has the right to enter into federal relations with other nations.

89 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 415. 90 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 20.

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It has the right to complete secession. Nations are sovereign and all nations are

equal.91

Yuri Slezkine, who examined the formation of Soviet nationality policy, disagrees. He argues that

Soviet nations were not equal in size and development. In fact, Soviet ethnographers distinguished

between “backward” and “civilized” nations.92 Equally importantly, economic status in each

nation varied. There were “oppressor nations” and “oppressed nations.” In the eyes of Lenin,

despite the fact that all nations were not equal, they were given the same rights. This contradiction

became a central problem of Soviet nationality policy.

The goal of the nationality experiment was the homogeneity and unification of all Soviet

citizens throughout the state. Anatoly M. Khazanov argues that the cultural autonomy of a nation

was linked to ethnicity by means of language and territory. The state’s administrators used a

political hierarchy among ethnic groups to artificially subdivide all Soviets into categories. First,

there were the most developed nations with united citizens. Second were natsionalosti, national

groups, which included underdeveloped ethnic nations. And the third category was narodnosti,

ethnic groups. This last was the lowest group in the hierarchy. In the Soviet context, ethnicity

played a great role in securing the U.S.S.R., uniting and legitimizing nationalities.93 By vigorously

promoting group rights, setting up ethno-territorial autonomies, and celebrating ethnic diversity, it

91 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 416. 92 Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, 416. 93 Anatoly M. Khazanov, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Interethnic Relations in Former Soviet Union,” The National Council For Soviet and East European Research (April 6, 1993), 2. https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1993-807-05-Khazanov.pdf.

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was relatively easy for the Bolsheviks to “overcome national distrust and reach a national

audience.”94

Both Lenin and Stalin drew a line between the concepts of oppressor-nation and oppressed-

nation nationalism. The oppressor-nation, as nationalism dominated only due to the size of territory

with its great chauvinism. For instance, Georgia oppressed Ossetians and Abkhazians, Uzbekistan

ignored the rights of Turkmenistan, and in the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict,

Azerbaijan oppressed Armenia. Oppressed-nation nationalism was weaker not because of the lack

of national unity, but because the nation was not allowed to use its native language during the

tsarist period. According to Lenin’s paradox, if a national minority was given more rights and

opportunities, the more trust it would have in the oppressor nation. Defending the abolition of

national distrust, Lenin writes,

Having transformed capitalism into socialism, the proletarian will create an

opportunity for the total elimination of national oppression; this opportunity will

become a reality “only”-“only”-after a total democratization of all spheres,

including the establishment of state borders according to the “sympathies” of the

population, and including complete freedom of secession. This, in turn, will lead in

practice to a total abolition of all national tensions and all national distrust, to an

accelerated drawing together and merger of nations which will result in the

withering away of the state.95

94 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 420. 95 Lenin,”Itogi diskussii o samoopredelenii” (1916), in Voprosy, 129. In Yuri, Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 430.

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This was the theory, but “in practice,” the Soviet policy makers did not allow nationalities

to blossom. In fact, Lenin’s desire for creating national autonomous regions and national languages

was seen by many Bolsheviks to be unrealistic. In the eyes of many, all nations could not be equal

because each nation consisted of different classes. It was a natural process for underdeveloped

ethnic groups to grow nationalist appetites and as a result, ethnicity was an essential component to

its success. This ethnicity component would prevail over class in non-Russian areas.96

The study done by Ronald Grigor Suny and David D. Laitin adds to this conversation. They

argue that the creation of an autonomous region as a political unit was based on the idea that

“ethnicity was matched to territory, generally imperfectly, but nevertheless a strong sense

developed that each nationality ought to have its own territory, even its own polity.”97 Hence, in

the context of the Nagorno-Karabakh, ethnic Armenian minorities in Karabakh were subordinated

to the dominant nationality of the republic, in this case, Azerbaijan. The irony of the Soviet

nationality policy was that it meant to eradicate nationalism and meld to infuse ethnicities into

“Soviet People.” Instead, ethnicity became an important factor in Soviet politics, which granted

privileges to some and disadvantages to others. In 1923, for economic and political reasons, the

Soviet authorities placed the control of the Karabakh Autonomous Region within the wealthier

Azerbaijan SSR. Therefore, according to Lenin’s formulation, Azerbaijan was an “oppressor

nation.”98

96 Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 420. 97 David D. Laitin and Ronald Grigor Suny, “Armenia and Azerbaijan: Thinking a Way Out of Karabakh,” in Middle East Policy Council VII, No. 1, (1999), 149, http://www.mepc.org/journal/armenia-and- azerbaijan-thinking-way-out-karabakh. 98 Laitin and Suny, “Armenia and Azerbaijan,” 149.

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But what constituted “nationality” and what role did it play in the making of new ethnic

territorial units? For Brown, the creation of nations in the oppressed republics had a different goal.

She suggests that,” the census and the map, created in order to provide progressive services in

appropriate languages to the “backward,” illiterate, and poor populations of the borderlands,

eventually served as taxonomies of control.”99 In other words, nation as a term, served different

purposes. It was a formula to replace and change the older patterns of backward places. Since all

Orthodox Russians were Christians and the rest were “aliens,” the nationality question was pushed

farther politically. Professional ethnographers were called by the Commission for the Study of

Tribal Composition to “hunt” and uncover primeval ethnicities and determine where it they

belonged on the Russian ladder. Although for non-Russians, nationality meant a close community,

certainly for the Bolsheviks, it was “the legitimation of ethnicity as a concession to ethnic

grievances and developmental constraints.”100 This policy resulted in a collection of ethnic

nesting dolls, in which all strong non-Russian “nationals” had rights to demand their own territorial

unit, but other national minorities within were not entitled to their own autonomy.

For historian, Terry Dean Martin, the Bolshevik leadership in the 1920s regarded the

nationality question with extreme care. Martin suggests that despite the fact that the Bolsheviks

wanted to celebrate the variety of national territories, ethnic diversity, and native languages, the

institutions that put this diversity in practice were established for a different reason. His study

suggests that by playing the nationality and ethnicity card, the state was engaged in “surveillance

over the implementation of nationalities policy and, when necessary, to take measures to prevent

99 Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 229. 100 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 431.

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the intended development of national self-consciousness from evolving into an undesired growth of separatist nationalities or a national revolution.101

In the 1930s, the national policy took a different turn. Although the communists granted the minorities’ linguistic autonomy and constitutional recognition, ethnicity as a marker became more territorial. During the late 1930s, the communists persecuted national minorities and authorized the deportation from one area to another of non-Russian Soviet ethnic groups, such as

Jews, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Kharbintsy, Chinese, Romanians,

Germans, Koreans and Gypsies.

The deportations brought a shift from class-based terror to terror of an entire nation. During the 1933 Ukrainian terror, the Soviet regime targeted and arrested Polish émigrés in Ukraine, accusing them of sabotage and espionage against the state. The Soviet Poles were arrested

“exclusively due to their national identity.”102 By October 29, 1937, almost 172, 000 Koreans had been deported to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. It was the first ethnic cleansing of an entire non-

Russian group from one area within a state.103 Based on the formulation of the Soviet nationality policy, all Koreans were potential spies and traitors, because they were ‘Koreans.’104

Stalin did not express solidarity with all Jews. In fact, he authorized a purge of Jewish activists from the Communist Party. In the eyes of the communists, they viewed Jewishness in the same way as nationalism. Between 1936-38, all the members of the leadership of the Jewish

101 Terry Martin, Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 2001), 550, Kindle.

102Terry, Affirmative Action Empire, 352. 103 Ibid., 349. 104 Ibid., 350.

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Autonomous Region and those who were active in the Party’s Jewish Section (the Yevsektsiia)

were arrested and executed.105 Jewish cultural activities and institutions were suppressed. In 1953,

the Soviet press began promoting anti-Jewish sentiments and inciting a widespread suspicion of

Jewish doctors.

Suspicions reached new heights. After World War II, almost 450,000 Chechens were

evicted from the mountain regions allegedly as a reprisal for their resistance to collectivization and

Sovietization policies between 1930-1939 and their ‘assumed’ collaboration with German units.

There were many instances when resistance was met with slaughter. For instance, in March of

1944, in the town of Khaibakh, in the mountainous part of Chechnya, soldiers from the People’s

Commissariat for Internal Affairs locked up approximately 700 people and burned them to

death.106 The NKVD was formed to undertake mass extrajudicial executions and unmask enemies

of the state. The NKVD oversaw and supervised the ethnic cleansing and mass arrest of national

ethnic groups.

By pointing to instances of Polish, Jewish, and Chechen persecutions, I point to the fact

that numerous ethnic groups suffered catastrophic consequences, because some ethnic groups seen

to be inherently less loyal then others. Also to note, popular ethnic hostility played an important

role. National minorities were seen as disloyal to the state were easily subjected to ethnic cleansing.

Martin, focusing on Russian nationalist rhetoric, concludes, that, “diaspora nationalities have often

been seen as disloyal and so as an impediment to nation-building, and therefore have been subject

105 Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2014), 73. 106 Moshe Gammer, The Lone Wolf and the Bear: Three Centuries of Chechen Defiance of Russian Rule (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2006), 170.

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to ethnic cleansing.”107 Given the Soviet Union’s geography, the cross-border ethnic minorities

were non-Russians. The state’s growing fear of non-Russian nationalism and disloyalty led to mass

deportation and execution of national minorities.

In the 1950s, the identification of a “Soviet people” resulted in the violent resistance against

the state in the newly annexed western borderlands. Zbihniew Wojnowski suggests that after the

World War II, the state’s national narratives changed due to the incorporation of new western

territories. Although the Soviet Union promised to protect ethnic groups, Wojnowski highlights

the contrary, suggesting that the incorporation of new territories “helped to turn ethnicity into a

key marker of belonging in the imagined Soviet community.”108

Xenophobic practices and ethnic prejudices continued to shape nationality policy even

during the Cold War. In this vein, Brown points out that only Slavs were considered trustworthy

enough to work at a plutonium plant making nuclear weapons. The non-Russians were alienated

from the Soviet community. While documenting riots, she argues that in cases of alcoholism, the

NKVD considered ethnic minorities “incorrigible.” Brown concludes that in the Soviet context

only Slavs could be viewed Soviet workers with full rights.109

The persistence and change in the Soviet policies toward ethnicity continued to change

even after Stalin’s death. In 1953, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union announced that Nikita

Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union. During his relatively liberal reforms, he denounced

107 Martin, Terry. Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 8730 (Kindle) 108 Zbigniew Wojnowski, “The Soviet People: National and Supranational Identities in the USSR after 1945,” Nationalities Papers 43, No. 1 (2015), 2. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00905992.2014.953467?needAccess=true. 109 Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, And the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 85.

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Stalin’s repressive era. In his opening speech on January 27th at the 21st at Party Congress,

Khrushchev reiterated the importance of nation building and clearly defined the concept of a Soviet

nation. Calling the Soviet nation, a Soviet mother-land, he “lambasted ethnic nationalism and

chauvinism” and repeated that the nation has political not ethnic leadership.110

According to Khrushchev’s formulation of the Soviet nation, sovetskii narod (Soviet

people) was a type political nationalism that united an ethnically, linguistically and religiously

diverse population. Khrushchev led the Soviet Union into a period of de-Stalinization, a political

rehabilitation during which a huge influx of Gulag prisoners were returning from the camps. Soviet

pride was elevated above all ethnic groups. While the radio stations played patriotic songs and

reinforced a sense of heroism, a new generation was learning about the repression that had been

taking place thousands of kilometers away. Ludmilla Alexeyeva reflects on the post-Stalin era,

stating:

In his uneven and boorish way, Khrushchev was one of the greatest leaders Russia

ever had. He released millions of political prisoners; personally allowed the

publication of some very fine literature, including One day in the Life of Ivan

Denisovich; initiated an open dialogue about the future of the Soviet economy;

increased pensions for retirees; ended the Korean War; improved relations with the

United States and Yugoslavia; and even made an attempt to curtail central planning

in light industry.111

110 Sener Akturk, Regimes of ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 205. 111 Ludmilla Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990), 105.

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The post-Stalin generation admired Khrushchev for his attempt to catch up with America and the

rest of the Western world. Soviet nationhood celebrated a national pride in the Central Asian

republics; Soviet leadership also stressed the importance of the Russian language as a unifier.

While the Soviet leadership was in a revisionist mode, Khrushchev took the risk of

declaring that there are “no more Ukrainians, Chechens, Armenians, but just Soviets.”112 Sener

Akturk, a scholar of comparative politics, highlights the fact that “there was also opposition from

some ethnic Russians, who thought that their status as the leading ethnicity (vedushchaia natsiia)

would be imperiled if Russian and non-Russians alike would be registered as Soviets.” Akturk’s

study helps to understand that a new nationality policy had created hostility toward non-ethnic

Slavs because during the cultural thaw, non-Russians began expressing pride in their cultures. For

instance, William Fierman and Jala Garibova point out that “Azerbaijani and Central Asian

intellectuals began re-examining and depicting their national histories and cultures in a fashion

that claimed a glorious national past and less gratitude to Russia.”113 Many members in the

Communist Party opposed such reforms fearing that a growing mass of non-Russian nationalism

could produce detachment from a Soviet identity. Shortly after ten years in 1964, Leonid Iilyich

Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev with conservatism and caution. Unfortunately, some ethnic groups

once again continued to enjoy more rights and privileges, such as education, international travel

or healthcare than others.

112 Sener Akturk, Regimes of Ethnicity and Nationhood in Germany, Russia, and Turkey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 211. 113 William Fierman and Jala Garibova, “Central Asia and Azerbaijan,” in Handbook of Languages and Ethnic Identity: Disciplinary and Regional Perspectives, edited by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia Garcia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 437.

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In 1971, Brezhnev confidently declared that the Soviet people were moving in the right

direction and the inter-ethnic relations problem was indeed solved. Brezhnev was not as committed

to Soviet identity as Khrushchev. However, the persistence of the nationality question continued.

Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone concludes “the impact of modernization and the resulting social

changes proved to be of major importance in the growth of national self-assertion of the non-

Russians.”114 Harmstone argues that with the establishment of mass education, each republic

formed its own indigenous elites. It resulted in the emergence of ethnic politics. Each ethnic

community experienced an increase, as Harmstone called this phenomenon, in “in-systematic

nationalism.”115 During the Brezhnev’ era, ethnic groups were transformed into national

movements, which resulted in the development of separatism. In the 1970s and early 1980s, for

the first time after the Stalin’s death, ethnic minorities called for political independence. For

instance, in the early 1980s, protestors made ethno-cultural demands in the Baltic states, western

Ukraine, and Georgia.

When in 1983, Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev, he realized that the growing fear of

“self-defense” among ethnic groups was on the rise. During his brief leadership, for the first time,

social scientists were mobilized to understand and implement national policies that would protect

minorities. In regards to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, it is important to note here that it was

then, after almost fifty years of silence, that Armenians expressed the fear of losing traditionally

Armenian land, Karabakh. Stuart J. Kaufman focuses on the necessary conditions for ethnic war

and concludes that Armenians expressed the importance of their territorial question because the

114 Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost: A Perspective on Soviet Ethnic Relations”, Journal of International Affairs 45, No.2 ( 1992), 530. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24357368. 115 Harmstone, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost”, 531.

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region had become “the symbol for the political, cultural, spiritual and economic revival of our

nation.”116 As a result, the Karabakh Committee was established and led by Armenian nationalist

movement. I am including this factor to argue that the Soviet leadership, including Andropov,

knew that tensions were growing in this region, however, they failed to take a cautious approach.

It was just a matter of time before ethnic consciousness and nationalism of Soviet groups would

unleash their long-silenced disagreement with Moscow.

If Lenin designed his national policy with the purpose of integrating all Soviet socialist

republics, why then over time did this policy promote nationalism? Harmstone argues that both,

“the perception of being oppressed by an imperial power (in this case the Russians) and the impact

of modernization and interaction with the outside world, which offered models and opportunities

for comparisons” gave a rise to ethnic nationalism in each nation.117 I am including this quote to

point out that in practice, the evolution of ethnic policy had the opposite from intended effect.

The Soviet state, promoting and giving nationalism as a right to every republic, provided

dangerous instruments for oppressor nations. The oppressor republic nations began to reveal long-

historic antagonism toward weaker minorities. The sense of national pride affected ethnic relations

on the social level. Relations between ethnic and indigenous communities, among the republics

and immigrants, and social groups in the diverse work-place were worsened and maintained by a

rigid vertical control.

116 Stuart J. Kaufman, Ethnic Fears and Ethnic War in Karabakh (University of Kentucky, 1998), 17, https://csis-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs- public/legacy_files/files/media/csis/pubs/ruseur_wp_008.pdf. 117 Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost: A Perspective on Soviet Ethnic Relations”, in Journal of International Affairs Vol. 45, No.2 (winter, 1992), 533-534, url: http://www.jstor.org/stable/24357368.

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I also want to point out that the Soviet Union intentionally ignored the ethnic composition

of the territories, especially in the case of the Karabakh region. The situation was aggravated by

periodic changes in ethnic composition. Many Armenian refugees believed that the Soviet

leadership could have prevented the brewing conflict. Svetlana Dadashiva, for instance, states that,

“the government is to blame for not preventing the conflict, so the government has an obligation

to us.”118 Moscow maintained vertical control over republics and “as long as it remained within

manageable bounds, the ethnic conflict was actually helpful” because it would be easier to control

the region.119

During the later 1970s and the early 1980s, Russian nationalism took root in response to

the demands of the minorities. Especially Russians living in Moscow and other big cities began to

feel the threat to their biological/genetic survival from surrounding republics. It is important here

to include Harmstone’s argument that, “the Russians developed a resentment of the sacrifices they

felt they had made in fulfilling their role as an elder brother for which they were repaid with

ingratitude.”120

When the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power,

interethnic relations remained underdeveloped in terms of the ethnic structure of the state.

Nationalism was on the rise in the Baltics, Transcaucasia, the North Caucasia, Ukraine, Moldovia,

and the Middle Volga region. Gorbachev faced ethnic competition in the various parts of the

118 Bill Keller, “Upheaval in the East: Armenians; Armenians Refuse to Leave a Plane,” The New York Times, January 20, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/20/world/upheaval-in-the-east-armenians- armenians-refuse-to-leave-a-plane.html. 119 Teresa Rakowska-Harmstone, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost: A Perspective on Soviet Ethnic Relations”, Journal of International Affairs 45, No.2 (1992), 534, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24357368. 120 Harmstone, “Chickens Coming Home to Roost”, 540.

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U.S.S.R.121 As I stated above, Gorbachev’s glasnost’ (state’s openness) and perestroika

(economic, political, and social reforms) had a profound effect on the attitudes of the Soviet

republics and other ethnic nationalities, including the Russians. Glasnost’ allowed an open

discussion and criticism of and by the long-oppressed minorities. As a result, nationalist

movements advocated for their independence. Gorbachev’s attempts to reduce tensions in ethnic

conflicts (in the case of Sumgait, 1987) failed, due to an inconsistent national policy.

To conclude, Russian nationalism was also on the rise, as a result, during the perestroika

period, just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a result, the Moscow officials re-introduced

the propsika system (inscription), which was first used in the Russian Empire. Propiska was

implemented primarily as a tool to limit the flux of migrant workers in big cities like Moscow and

St. Petersburg. No employer was allowed to give jobs to a person without a local propiska. Those

who arrived in Moscow, including Armenian refugees, could not use welfare services or obtain

coupons for food.

By the end of the 1990s, newly formed Russia was not concerned with ethnic minorities in

Moscow because Russian nationalism was, according to Anatoly M. Khazanov, “mainly

represented by people pursuing far-right and chauvinistic positions.”122 Failed Soviet nationality

policy, the collapse of the Soviet Union, rapid migration of ethnic minorities, and economic

instability in Russia led to the rise of xenophobia. “Distrustful” Armenian refugees were thrown

“into the hated category of individual of Caucasian nationality.”123 Muscovites feared dark-

121 Anatoly M. Khazanov, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Interethnic Relations in the former Soviet Union,” The National Council for Soviet and East European Research (April 6, 1993), 4, https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1993-807-05-Khazanov.pdf. 122 Khazanov, “Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Interethnic Relations in the former Soviet Union,” 4. 123 “The Rise of Xenophobia in Russia,” Human Rights Watch, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports98/russia/srusstest-03.htm#P118_19150.

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skinned non-Slav minorities. For instance, one Caucasian woman in Moscow stated: “They say

we are lazy, that we steal, that we are parasites on the back of Moscow, and for forty-five years I

slaved for this country and now, because I am from the Caucasus, I am treated like a human being

of the lowest sort.”124 Armenian refugees were denied their rights as Soviets, because they were

viewed as foreigners, who were blamed for socio-economic problems.

The communist experiment of nationality and ethnicity was a legacy, which lasted until

Gorbachev finally discarded the practice of micro nationalism. In a positive sense, for both Lenin

and Stalin nations were sovereign and equal, no matter how “backward” each nation was. The

revolution and the Civil War demanded the need for local allies in the form of ethnic minorities.

As a result, the Bolsheviks pledged to respect and trust beliefs, customs, and institutions of each

nation. Theoretically, although all nations were equal, in practice, some autonomic regions were

more autonomous then others. As a result, nationality policy was only an overture. People were

not Soviets on paper. On the contrary, every Soviet citizen was born into a certain nationality and

he/she had to carry it to their grave. The Soviet regime established both an ethnic hierarchy and

“ethnophilia,” which privileged stronger ethnic groups over others.125 Giving more power to

“oppressor nations,” Lenin and Stalin created a competition between them and “deprived the

various nations of the right to political independence.”126 In the Soviet conditions, non-Slavs were

considered “aliens,” in spite of the fact that in the Soviet communal apartment there were many

rooms, where in principal each nation had equal right to a room.

124 “The Rise of Xenophobia in Russia.” 125 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review 53, No. 2 (Summer, 1994), 415. 126 Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment,” 451.

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The Soviet regime created a competition and maintained cultural differences in a heterogeneous society for the purpose of keeping every ethnic group in a locked cell. With a similar approach, Moscow officials in the late 1980s viewed Baku Armenian refugees as “aliens.” The logical conclusion to that scenario is one where Moscow, as a room, closed its doors and used windows to communicate with its neighbors. But in this case, these refugees came from a nominally “equal republic” and were Soviets as were other citizens who ended up living in the newly formed Russia.

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CHAPTER 3: Moscow Free From Refugees

Before the U.S.S.R collapsed, the last status refugees held was that of a citizen of the former

Azerbaijani SSR. More precisely, through it they obtained the Soviet passports with which they arrived in Moscow. I want to point out that the exodus of Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan to

Moscow and its suburbs was an instance of searching for political asylum where basic survival was the only concern. However, in 1991, after the collapse of the U.S.S.R, the newly formed

Russian Federation passed a new law on Russian Federation citizenship that clearly denied legal status for this group of people. In this chapter, I argue that Armenian refugees arrived in Moscow because of ethnic persecution that Soviet authorities failed to address in Azerbaijan, that they were

Soviet citizens, who held passports in hand, had full rights and privileges and should have been able obtain an automatic Russian citizenship and all available social assistances. Yet arrival in the capital of their country, they learned that they had no legal rights because they were considered displaced people. But in reality, they were asylum seeking regional refugees who had only one fact in mind; they were migrating within the state of their homeland.

For approximately fifteen years, while living in Moscow, they continuously requested that city officials recognize their citizenship. However, the lack of political will demonstrated by central authorities resulted in the total denial of their inherent rights and significant limitations on their daily socio-economic freedoms. Because they were forced to escape their homes because of

“the impossibility of staying in any political-legal relation with Azerbaijani SSR, “the Russian

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Federation, as the legal successor of the Soviet Union had an obligation by law to provide them

with shelter and Russian citizenship.127

I will first examine why Baku Armenian refugees directly fled to Moscow, and not

somewhere else. For them, the most important concern was protection of their loved ones and basic

survival. Vadim Khachaturyan, an Armenian refugee from Azerbaijan, reflected that, “it was the

capital of the Soviet Union, the seat of law, and we thought we would be protected here.”128 “Yet

today,” he continues in 1993, “just 10 months after Russia formally agreed to abide by the United

Nations Refugee Convention and Protocol, Moscow is trying to close its doors to non-

Russians.”129 Lada Mnatsakanova, who also fled Baku in 1988 and eventually could settle in the

United States, remembers that her parents insisted on fleeing to Moscow because the American

Red Cross was only located in the capital of the Soviet Union.130 Therefore, for Vadim and Lada,

and many others, the choice was natural, because they were born in the Soviet Union, specifically

in Baku and spent entire lives in the soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, and most importantly, they

spoke only Russian. A great number of Russian-speaking Armenians were married to ethnic

Azerbaijanis who refused to move to Armenia due to a fear of similar persecutions from the

Armenian government. This is the primary reason why my family could not move anywhere except

127 Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, Eleonora Asatryan, “The Categories of Refugees and Forced Migrants in the Legal Context of the Consequences of the Karabakh Conflict,” in The Karabakh Conflict: Refugees, Territories, Security (Total Quality Management Assistance: Armenia, 2005), 33. 128 Judith Ingram, “No Welcome For Refugees in Moscow,” Deseret News, December 25, 1993, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/327784/NO-WELCOME-FOR-REFUGEES-IN-MOSCOW.html. 129 Ingram, “No Welcome For Refugees in Moscow.” 130 Lada Mnatsakanova, “Life as A Refugee,” interview by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, March 2, 2017, audio, 01:04:10.

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Moscow; my father was an Azeri and my mom is ethnically Armenian, who were born in

Azerbaijan.

In addition to the above-mentioned reasons, it is necessary to emphasize that Armenian

refugees fled to Moscow and other parts of the Russian Federation due to socio-economic

instability in the Republic of Armenia. In December 1988, Armenia experienced a devastating

earthquake, which led to changes in the process of accepting Armenian migrants from Azerbaijan.

Given the difficult socio-economic situation, the Republic could not continue to adequately accept

refugees and provide citizenship. As a result, they were not willing to return to Azerbaijan, where

their civil, socio-economic, and freedom rights had a limited chance of realization.131 The lack of

knowledge of the Armenian language could limit their opportunities for obtaining proper education

and employment. Due to Armenia’s small territory, it already experienced a shortage of

employment for people, who were mainly engaged in the agricultural sector.

In contrast, the Russian Federation was the legal successor state of the former Soviet Union

and its capital could provide more opportunities to the former Azerbaijani SSR citizens. Historians

Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, and Eleonora Asatryan recalled the legal position of the

refugees arguing:

These people are willing to connect their destinies with the state that has provided

them with a shelter, especially if compared with other former Soviet republics in

question. However, in the case of the Russian Federation there is a lack of political

131 Sergey Minasyan, Mikhail Aghajanyan, Eleonora Asatryan, “The Categories of Refugees and Forced Migrants in the Legal Context of the Consequences of the Karabakh Conflict,” in The Karabakh Conflict: Refugees, Territories, Security. Total Quality Management Assistance: Armenia, 2005, 41.

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will to be demonstrated both by central authorities and more specifically by

regional authorities and those of separate subjects of the Federation.132

The authors highlight the fact that a lack of political will to provide civil rights and freedoms for

refugees within the borders of the U.S.S.R had a significant impact on their socio-economic

stability and individual rights. Armenian stateless refugees had to stay in the capital of the Soviet

Union primarily for economic reasons. In this context, residents with passports moved to their own

capital, Moscow, yet became stateless. How did this paradox happen? Why were Moscow officials

reluctant to recognize refugees as the citizens of Russia Federation and deny individual rights?

Before answering this question, I will provide historical background to the genesis of

Soviet citizenship in order to understand the basic legal aspects of citizenship in modern Russia.

On November 7th, 1917, Vladimir Lenin in his Proclamation, ‘To the Citizens of Russia!’ officially

defined and established the term, ‘a citizen of the Russian Republic,’ which no longer had a class

character. In theory, in 1918, Soviet citizenship was codified in the Constitution of the Russian

Soviet Federation Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which brought changes to the naturalization

process and to the legal status of foreign citizens residing in Russia. Historian Eric Lohr

emphasizes the importance of the relative openness of the Bolsheviks in accepting foreigners.133

According to the Bolshevik principle, foreigners who had ideologically supported Soviet

rule could travel to the homeland of the socialist revolution and obtain Soviet citizenship. Also,

Bolsheviks, considering themselves as the vanguard of the working-class, allowed the arrivees to

exercise the rights of citizenship without becoming naturalized. If a Soviet person was a member

132 Minasyan, Aghajanyan, Asatryan, “The Categories of Refugees,” 33. 133 Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 132. (Kindle)

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of a working or peasant class, he/she could apply for citizenship by providing proof of identity and submitting a two-page application. Therefore, according to the Article 20 of the Soviet

Constitution of 1918, naturalization was an easy process for workers, peasants, oppressed religious groups, and especially socialist activists “without any baffling formalities.”134 But in practice, naturalization policies failed the test. During the Russia Civil War, between 1918-1920, because of famine, unemployment, hyperinflation, and economic chaos, few workers or peasants had no reason to migrate to the Russian Republic (RSFSR).

Despite the fact that the Bolshevik Government allowed foreigners to stay in the country, they were not exempt from persecution by the NKVD. Many of them lost traditional protections under international law, but the regime did not stop there. The government had the power to limit the civil rights of foreigners, such as travel, profession, business and personal property activities.

The climax of new laws had a profound effect on foreigners.135 A decree of 1921 allowed the All-

Russian Extraordinary Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and the Soviet Secret Service

(Cheka) to expel individuals “who in their way of life, activities and conduct are recognized as not corresponding to the principles and ways of life of the worker-peasant state.”136 Expulsion could occur “even if they had previously received permission to live in the republic.”137

The Bolsheviks were not firmly clear on the establishment of legal principles that would allow naturalization of the working class as citizens of the RSFSR. Lohr points out that belonging to the working class was an essential “factor in the decision making of the Bolshevik authorities

134 Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 132. 135 Ibid., 134. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid.

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in charge of the approval process.”138 However, in the case of émigrés, they had no means of obtaining an automatic acceptance of citizenship. In the course of the Revolution and Civil War many Russian citizens fled abroad. Within the context of human rights, the polar explorer, Fridtjof

Nansen addressed the League of Nations and the Soviet Union to encourage the return of these refugees. Some refugees refused to return and some chose to migrate back to the Soviet Union.

Soviet officials created many barriers for individuals who wanted to be reunited with their families.

Thus, the Bolsheviks’ naturalization policies were restrictive and cautious toward class enemies,

émigrés, refugees, and “any individuals who were suspected of potential disloyalty.”139

One important instance of zero-interest to potential immigrants was the case of Armenian refugees from Greece, Syria, and the territories of the Ottoman Empire. After the Armenian genocide in 1915 and the failed Greek war with the Ottomans in 1922, refugees asked to create their own Armenian homeland in the U.S.S.R. The combined persistent efforts of Nansen and the

League of Nations to settle hundreds of thousands Armenian refugees were unsuccessful. The refugees asked to settle in Armenia, but the leadership of the Soviet Union refused to assist and fund them. Even more bizarre, using the naturalization policy as a marker, the majority of the refugees was not allowed to enter Soviet Armenia. Lohr examines the reason and argues,

Of course the other side of the story was the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to

provide funds to the Armenia SSR to prepare land and housing for the resettlement

of Armenians. This example shows that there were definite limits to the willingness

of the Soviet Union to act as a magnet for national homelands within its borders.140

138 Ibid., 141. 139 Ibid., 148. 140 Ibid., 161.

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I include this quote as evidence to point out that when the Armenian refugees fled from Azerbaijani to Moscow, the Soviet officials, continuing the same policy, were not willing to accommodate them for economic reasons. This event was an early precedent that shows the Soviet discrimination against Armenian refugees. Even though they accepted other foreigners, these were individuals choosing to be part of this socialist experiment not ethnic refugees fleeing ethnic persecution.

The Bolsheviks’ naturalization system left rural inhabitants nomadic without passports.

The residents of rural areas and border zones were not allowed to move from one part of the

U.S.S.R. to another without permission. As a result, inhabitants of rural areas could not obtain an internal passport. Moreover, they were banned from free movement. Lenin and later Stalin had liberal concepts about citizenship, allowing Soviet naturalization to any individual, especially if he/she belonged to the working class. However, in practice, the emigration and naturalization processes were conducted on a case-by-case basis and suspicion of disloyalty left thousands without documentation.

During the 1930s, Stalin used passport laws, as tool of governance, to limit, an influx of migrants to large cities. Historian, David Shearer argues that the Stalinist passport system was designed to discriminate against peasants. The author emphasizes the fact that the naturalization process reflected state visions arguing:

Inaugurated to stop in-migration to large cities, passport laws soon outgrew

this function and evolved into a complex set of policing tools to protect or

colonize internal spaces, to quell social disorder and criminality, and to

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identify and then contain or eradicate dangerous social and ethnic

groups.141

This quote suggests that for Stalin certain social and ethnic groups presented a threat that had to

be protected from within. The threat of territorial and borderlands wars posed an imminent danger

for Stalin. The protection of territories of the multi-national state shaped Stalin’s evolution of the

Soviet passportization.142 Passportization was a process used by the Soviet authorities to accept

individuals as citizens. Naturalization processes were designed to control mass migration and crack

down on foreigners as potential suspects. By categorizing nationalities and residency laws, police

could quickly identify and repress “a large number of populations considered socially or ethnically

dangerous.”143 It soon became apparent that under Stalin passports were used as surveillance and

social instruments because a passport contained an individual’s occupation and ethnicity.

The Soviet attitude toward certain ethnic groups, such as Poles, Germans, and Finns,

hardened; Stalin and those around him deliberately kept these ‘socially dangerous’ groups separate

from the rest of society by placing them in labor camps.144 Residency restrictions that continue

to this day affected different ethnic groups and complicated social structure even more. Soviet

political xenophobic policies, selective discrimination, and the hierarchy of ethnic identity were

the main tools the Soviet regime used to eliminate political threats to the existence of the socialist

state.

141 David Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932-1952,” The Journal of Modern History 76, No. 4 (December 2004): 840. 142 Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien,” 842. 143 Ibid., 844. 144 Ibid., 859.

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Not until 1976 did rural residents receive passports. Even then, however, the movement

restrictions continued. Especially the propiska system, a registration that entitles a person to reside

in a particular city, continued to limit the settlement in big cities, like Moscow and Leningrad. In

regard to foreigners and stateless populations, according to Article 15 of the 1978 Citizenship Law,

“foreign citizens and stateless persons may, upon their application, be admitted to the citizenship

of the U.S.S.R pursuant to the present Law irrespective to race and nationality, sex, education,

language, and place of residence.”145 The Ministry of Internal Affairs had control over the

restrictive propiska system, which had a profound effect upon the Russian population.

The last changes to the Constitution of the U.S.S.R were adopted on October 7th, 1977

during the Brezhnev era. The long and meticulously detailed regulations marked the last stage of

the implementation of Soviet citizenship legislation.146 In Article 13 of the 1977 Constitution

Brezhnev echoed the Bolsheviks’ long-existing framework of Soviet citizenship, stating once

again “every citizen of a Union Republic is a citizen of the U.S.S.R.”147 Alexander Salenko points

to the fact that, surprisingly, this fresh or recent legislation set a new principle: “all citizens of the

U.S.S.R that were abroad enjoy the protection and assistance of the Soviet state.”148 In regard to

Armenian refugees, they were by birth citizens of the Soviet Union, and secondly, even if they did

arrive from independent Azerbaijan in 1991, they would still “enjoy the protection and assistance

145 George Ginsburg, The Citizenship Law of the U.S.S.R (Massachusetts: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983), 215. 146 Alexander Salenko, “Report on Russia,” EUDO Citizenship Observatory (European University Institute: Florence, 2012), 6, http://eudo-citizenship.eu/admin/?p=file&appl=countryProfiles&f=Russia.pdf. 147 Salenko, “Report on Russia,”6. 148 Ibid., 6.

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of the Soviet State.”149 The “Brezhnev constitution” proves that when refugees arrived, as citizens, they had all privileges and advantages to seek social assistance and automatic citizenship from the Russian Federation. The 1977 Constitution was adopted on December 1st, 1978 and remained applicable until the collapse of the Soviet Union on December 31st, 1991. The newly formed Russia continued to practice old Soviet laws.

In 1990, after the initiation of glasnost and perestroika, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev understood that his reforms could affect Soviet legislation. The Soviet Citizenship Law of 1990 was modified and without doubt presented a higher level of democratic relations between the state and its citizens. Yet, some provisions remained the same. The Soviet Union continued to deny the right of dual citizenship and “always preserved some means of citizenship deprivation.”150 The

People’s Deputies of the RSFSR continued to elaborate and modernize the new citizenship law for almost the entire year of 1991. It looked promising for both the state and its citizens. As Soviet citizens, Armenian refugees expected to obtain a propiska and acquire new Russian citizenship along with applicable social assistance. The Soviet Union planned to sign a new Union Treaty in

August 1991. However, the August coup against Gorbachev took the union to a new unknown direction. The Vice President Gennadiy Yanayev announced that Gorbachev, due to illness, was unable to perform his duties and had been forced to resign. On December 8, 1991, the leaders of

Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, Boris Yeltzin, Stanislav Shushkevich, and Leonid Kravchuk, secretly met in a hunting lodge in the Belovezha Forest, located on the border between Poland and

149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 8.

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Belarus, to resolve the crisis. I pay special attention to this event to show how the new leaders believed a new sovereignty state should look.

An excerpt from the autobiography of the former Belarus leader, Stanislav Shushkevich describes a detailed account of the events that took place during the signing of the Belovezha

Accords. It also reflects the thinking of the sitting leaders and the morality behind their actions.

But most importantly, it simultaneously echoes the decisions that led to the dissolution of the

U.S.S.R. According to the memoir, all three leaders were eager to sign the agreement, which declared that the Soviet Union was dissolved and immediately called the Commonwealth of

Independent States. Yeltsin, while giving a speech, stated:

We have a good skeleton, you understand, but we have to put the meat on it. But

we have to take care of it, but we have to take care of everything, leaving nothing

uncovered…We should show, you understand, that there is a way to remain united

without hypocrisy and the violation of rights and freedoms along national or any

other distinction. We had enough of the U.S.S.R, the CPSU and now the SSG, the

Commonwealth of Sovereign States.151

I include this note to point out that Yeltsin clearly realized that the Russian Federation would become a legal successor to the Soviet Union, taking every responsibility that comes with this decision. Then what happened to the Transcaucasus Federation and its people? It was not discussed and “abolished without creating a legal successor.”152 Subsequently, Shuchkevich himself admitted that “ there was good reason to assume that we were creating a Union of Slavic

151 Stanislav Shushkevich, My Life: The Collapse and Resurrection of the USSR, 325, http://www2.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/demokratizatsiya%20archive/GWASHU_DEMO_21_3/T4 3W21215152W574/T43W21215152W574.pdf. 152 Shushkevich, My Life, 325.

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Republics.”153 I want to point out that this is an important quote in the context of this paper because Armenian refugees were not of Slavic descent. I want to mention the fact that non-Slavic republic leaders were not invited to Belovezha. This was a new Union that by its nature was created to include only Slavs. Thus, it explains the treatment non-Slavs received upon arrival in Moscow.

In the early 1990s, the Slavic nations, Ukraine and Belorussia along with the Russians defended

Russian/Slavic national interests and distinctiveness from the people from Caucasus, Jews, and other non-Russians, whom they blamed for creating turmoil in the social and economic lives of

Russian people.

According to the Belovezha Accord, Article 2, the Russian Federation guarantees an equal protection to all citizens, “regardless of their nationality or other differences, equal rights and freedoms.”154 Also, it guarantees “the expression, preservation, and development of the ethnic, cultural, language, and religious identity of the national minorities living on their territories, and the resulting unique ethno-cultural regions, take them into their protection.155 Therefore,

Armenian refugees, who arrived before the dissolution and resided on the territory during the creation of the Russian Federation, had all rights to seek protection and humanitarian assistance from the successor state. In theory, the law was simplified allowing former Soviet citizens to obtain the citizenship of the newly established state. However, in fact, it was more restrictive in practice.

In the early 1990s Russia did not have a legislature laws that could deal with refugees and asylum seekers, as a result, new democratic movements to Russia, especially to Moscow created a threat to a national defense. While Armenian refugees were the first refugees that fled ethnic

153 Ibid., 326. 154 Ibid., 330. 155 Ibid.

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cleansing during the Soviet era, there were some students from Third World nations. According to

the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), by 1994, approximately 28,000

foreign refugees, who refused to return to their birth countries for economic reasons decided to

stay in Moscow.156 Because of the Tajikistan war, almost 300,000 of the 375,000 ethnic Russians

moved to Russia, but the number of migrants increased by 1994, when a large number of Russians

from Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Chechnya moved to the capitol.157 During a difficult economic

transition, Russian nationalists took the opportunity to inflame resentment toward all migrants and

refugees. In the case of Armenian refugees, they were Soviets and spoke Russian, but local

authorities continued to limit their mobility.

In the 1990s, the democratization process was on the rise but it did not eradicate

nationalism. While Armenian refugees struggled to assimilate in Moscow, the Civic Assistance

Committee, so founded by Svetlana Gannushkina in 1990, provided free legal, humanitarian, and

educational assistance. The organization was initially established after the pogroms in Sumgait in

1988. Gannushkina’s committee continuously fought in Russian courts and the European Court of

Human Rights in Strasbourg to amend the law on refugees so that they could be granted Russian

citizenship.158 The Committee allowed a possibility to represent and protect refugees who had no

propiska, registration, or citizenship. In an interview to Radio Echo of Moscow, she states that she

knew that the conflict would continue for many years and she had to act quickly because Moscow

officials were trying to get rid of Armenian refugees in Russia. While discussing the role of the

Soviet administration in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, she reflects:

156 “Migration,” Country Studies, http://countrystudies.us/russia/30.htm. 157 “Migration.” 158 “Svetlana Ganushkina, ”The Right Livelihood Award,” http://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/svetlana-gannushkina/.

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Nothing was happening. The only thing is that the Soviet Ministry issued a decree,

in which it stated that all the refugees had to be removed from the Moscow regions

and Leningrad regions, but no one said where. Moscow had to be freed-Moscow,

Moscow region, Leningrad, Leningrad regions had to be freed from refugees. It was

absolutely, I do not know, almost in a fascist command. It was like Warsaw

Judenfrei-free from refugees, free from Jews.159

This quote is very important; it shows that a relatively small organization like the Civic Assistance

Committee was more democratic and humane in comparison with Federal and Moscow authorities.

In many ways, as Soviet citizens, refugees received discrimination and prejudice from their own

government. According to the Article of the 1951 Geneva Convention, a stateless individual could

become a refugee if one was “outside of the country of his nationality.”160 That is to say, “a

refugee cannot be a citizen of a country in which he or she is seeking refuge.”161 In the context of

the Armenian refugees from Baku, it is crucial to highlight the fact that although Soviet citizenship

vanished and the Russian Federation proclaimed itself a successor state, these groups of people

already resided on the territory of their birth before the collapse of the Soviet Union. In other

words, Armenian refugees, having Soviet passports, had all the rights to reside in the territory of

new Russia and obtain all necessary documentation in order to live safely in Moscow, including

the right to acquire Russian citizenship. If they had those rights to morph from Soviet to Russian

citizens, then they could not also be classified as refugees from another country.

159 Andrei Ezhov and Stanislav Kryuchkov, “Svetlana Gannushkina,” Radio Echo of Moscow, trans. Sudaba Lezgiyeva, September 18, 2017, https://echo.msk.ru/programs/razbor_poleta/2055406-echo/. 160 Oxana Shevel, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Post-Communist Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 31. 161 Shevel, Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Post-Communist Europe, 31.

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In many ways, Moscow officials continued to practice similar restrictive practices of

naturalization as in the Soviet era. In the mid-1990s, there was a significant shift from the

Belovezha Accord, which announced that Russia was the legal successor to the Soviet Union. Lohr

argues that the Citizenship Law of 2002 made naturalization difficult for some desiring populations

due to an ethnic and national component:

The 2002 law was quite openly directed toward limiting the number of non-

Russians, who could acquire Russian citizenship; proponents of the law

were especially concerned about preventing the naturalization of a large

number of Tajiks and others from Central Asia and the Caucasus working

as temporary laborers in the Russian Federation.162

By quoting Lohr, I emphasize the fact that the restrictions that were practiced during the Soviet

era, continued to shape the nationality question in new Russia.163 The drift of the new laws made

it difficult for stateless Armenian refugees to obtain registration documents or acquire citizenship.

Without these legal forms of belonging, they also had no access to medical, social, legal, or other

sorts of humanitarian help.

To sum up, in fleeing to the capital of their own country, Armenian refugees were

optimistic that federal and Moscow officials would accept and understand the fact that they were

running from knives and persecution. However, unfortunately, the treatment they received was

contradictory and complex. There were strong reasons why many moved directly to Moscow.

Intermarried families were afraid to resettle in Armenia, as fathers or mothers were Azerbaijani.

162 Eric Lohr, Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 3881, Kindle. 163 Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 3881.

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A great number of refugees were born in Baku and went to Russian schools and did not speak the

Armenian language. But the most important factor is that during the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was experiencing great socio-economic instability. Therefore, in order to receive adequate assistance, Armenian refugees fled to the International Committee of the Red Cross located in

Moscow.

The legacy of Soviet citizenship and the naturalization process was inconsistent and created many obstacles for citizens. The Bolshevik ideology did not have a clear view of the naturalization process: class, ethnicity, and nationality were markers in obtaining Soviet citizenship. The implementation of the propiska system was deliberately re-introduced, borrowed from the tsarist period to control and limit the settlement of migrants. Stalin’s approach was not debatable. The use of the naturalization process helped Stalin to categorize unorganized ethnic populations, but more importantly, certain ethnic groups were considered the carriers of social contamination and element of social danger. The Brezhnev’s new legislature promised citizenship to all citizens of the U.S.S.R., including those who were abroad. In practice, however, things remained the same.

By taking a close look at the Belovezha Accord, I present evidence that the new Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, enthusiastically signed the agreement in which the Russian Federation took responsibility for the Soviet Union and its citizens. Shushkevich’s statement regarding the thoughts of the creation of Slav Union, explains the unwillingness of federal and Moscow authorities to accommodate non-Slav refugees. I accept Ganushkina’s view that nationalism in Moscow dominated over the promised democratization process led by Yeltsin. Consequently, Armenian refugees were denied citizenship, as well as social, and humanitarian assistance. In the minds of

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Moscow officials, “Moscow had to be freed from refugees.”164 Until 2003 Armenian refugees

encountered a zealous nationalism and terrifying treatment from Moscow authorities.

164 “Svetlana Ganushkina,” The Right Livelihood Award,” http://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/svetlana-gannushkina/.

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CHAPTER 4: Welcomed

Economic hardship and ethnic tensions in former Soviet republics were the primary

motivations for refugees and immigrants to migrate to Russia. Armenian refugees from Azerbaijan

were among them, but their story is different. When the pogroms in Sumgait, Kirovobad, and Baku

took place, the Soviet Union was still intact so some Armenian refugees made a natural choice by

fleeing directly to Moscow. However, the capital had little to offer. The Russian immigration

agencies were not equipped to accommodate refugees. In 1992, the Federal Migration Service was

established to implement the new state’s migration policy. In April 1990, the USSR Council of

Ministers had issued a decree, Resolution 329, which provided assistance and financial compensation to Soviet citizens, who were forced to leave Azerbaijan. According to Resolution

329, Armenian refugees who settled in the outskirts of Moscow were given housing assistance and

permission to work in designated areas. However, there was a hitch. Almost 41,000 evacuated

Armenian refugees out of total of who fled directly to Moscow were not allowed to work.165

It was an incongruous crisis for refugees, which Moscow officials were unwilling to

resolve. According to U.S. Committee for Refugees, in 1992, approximately “44,433 Armenian

refugees were registered in Russia, about 14 percent of the total of registered refugees.”166 In this

chapter, I argue that while Armenian refugees in Moscow were fighting for citizenship, proper

legal documentations, housing and social assistance, the right to work, a growing Russian

nationalism caused Muscovites to hate refugees. During the same time, Moscow officials blamed

165 Bill Frelick,“Faultlines of Nationality Conflict: Refugees and Displaced Persons from Armenia and Azerbaijan,” U.S. Committee For Refugees, March 1994, 32. 166 Frelick,“Faultlines of Nationality Conflict,” 32.

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an increasingly high rate of criminal activity and failed businesses on outsiders, especially on

Caucasians because the notion of “Russianness” was a key to promote pan-Slav civilization. Pan-

Slavism emphasizes the cultural significance of the Slavic people of eastern Europe. For Armenian refugees living in the capital was dangerous and unpredictable until 2002, when the U.S. government reopened a resettlement program for the remaining Armenian refugees. For many

Armenian refugees, it was a light at the end of a tunnel and a turning point in their lives.

In 1992, the Federal Migration Service in Russia authorized permanent accommodation to refugees in the various regions of the country. However, Armenian refugees in Moscow remained in temporary hostels and in a precarious situation. While some Armenian refugees were forced to move to hotels, others were given temporary rooms in private summer bungalows. According to

the New York Times, the central government agencies notified refugees who had settled on the

miserable outskirts of Moscow, to move to more distant areas to other summer bungalows without

any assistance.167 Elvira Shakhramanova, one of the refugees, admits that she was still waiting

for assistance from the government. She said, “we feel we are people without a country” and “no

one’s helping us.”168 The fact that Muscovites themselves waited for almost a decade to receive

an apartment provoked Armenian refugees to fear they would never receive one. Some refugees

had to sleep in the waiting room of Moscow’s railroad and airline terminals. Refugees had nothing

to eat because they only had time to pack their suitcases while fleeing Azerbaijan. It was

embarrassing to move from one railroad station to another because they were Soviet citizens, not

beggars. The Komskomolskaya Pravda reported that some Armenian refugees did not want to stay

167 Francis X. Clines, “Evolution in Europe; Russians Denied Refuge in Own Land,” The New York Times, April 24, 1990, http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/24/world/evolution-in-europe-russians-denied- refuge-in-own-land.html. 168 X. Clines, “Evolution.”

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in Moscow. They waited at the Federal Migration Service office to be sent to other cities, such as

Tula and Kalinin.169 It was uncertainty in the eyes of adults as well as children. L. Ovchinnikova

describes a pregnant woman waiting with her husband who had a choice to either move to the city

of Kursk or Luhovitsy.170 But it was obvious that they did not want to move far from Moscow.

While observing children, Ovchinnikova described the atmosphere of uncertainty:

Only after seeing these refugees, browsing in a sad waiting line, one can understand

what happened in our lives. Thousands went through this line. I looked at these

people and thought how little we know about them, while glasnost was

outside…We discuss a lot about socialism with a human face, but just in point-

blank we do not see tragedies of these thousands of suffering and exhausted people.

Our lives in a lifeless way circles around islands of grief and tears.171

I include this quote to emphasize the feeling that Moscow officials were not willing to integrate refugees and allow them to stay in the capital of their country. Refugees felt discarded and their problem seemed invisible to others. Moreover, for Armenian refugees, the absence of citizenship resulted in denial of social assistance and of the protection of rights, which explains why many

refugees lived in poverty and dependency. They had no choice but to accept to be sent away far

from Moscow.

Those who stayed in Moscow were settled in privatized hotels, such as, Yaroslavskaya

Yuzhnaya, Ostankino, Altai, and Zolotoi Kolos. While most refugees lived in communal

apartments, where four or five families shared one kitchen, they could not legally get on a waiting

169 L. Ovchinnikova, “Refugees…What is ahead?,” trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, Komsomolskaya Pravda, March 2, 1990, 4. 170 Ovchinnikova, “Refugees,” 4. 171 Ibid., 4.

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list to receive separate apartments. In order to receive any type of social assistance, refugees had

to have permanent registration, but the Federal Migration Services in Moscow continuously denied

their applications. For instance, in 1998, an Armenian refugee, Izabella Arminokovna Balaian,

while living in Moscow for more than 10 years and routinely renewing her documents, applied for

permanent registration.172 Passport Services at the Department of Internal Affairs ‘Horoshevsky”

denied her petition, arguing that she had to first acquire the citizenship of the Russian Federation.

Yet Armenian refugees were not allowed to receive Russian citizenship. It was a vicious circle, in

which refugees annually got pushed from one bureaucratic institution to another. And how about

financial aid? Had refugees ever received any funding or financial assistance from the Federal

Migration Services?

There was not a single budget in Russia that proposed to assist Armenian refugees with their basic needs. In fact, the directors of the hotels, where they were staying, paid for refugees’ apartment expenses. The director of the hotel “Yuzhnaya,” Valentina Sergeeva, remembered that the hotel was privatized in 1994, but the administration did not know what to do with the resident refugees. She admits to the newspaper “Izvestia” that “there was no compensation of any kind received from city or federal services.” Armenian refugees made monthly payments for hotel expenses, including electricity bills. There were many questions about what happened to the compensation and financial assistance that was supposed to help refugees to resettle in Moscow.

According to Izvestia, in 1996, city officials proposed the decree of January 21, 1996, which stated

172 Svetlana Alekseevna Gannushkina, “Refugees from Azerbaijan,” trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, http://refugee.memo.ru/For_ALL/RUPOR.NSF/14d68a9822966ffdc3256a5300679f6c/e5b1ad97d3e9b19 3c3256a0d0073f8f9!OpenDocument.

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the names and agencies that were supposed to assist refugees.173 Izvestia conducted its own

investigation and learned:

The department within the Central Fund of Internal Affairs in Moscow, which was

in charge of collecting money and private donations since 1996, was moved to the

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the department itself was no longer

active. There are no official records of the money that was transferred to the

accounts, it disappeared…and while “welcoming” bureaucrats and businessmen in

Moscow try to deal with the problem, refugees without citizenship and registration

are on the road to work and back home. They continue to pay “bribes” to traffic

cops.174

This quote suggests that welfare agencies did not implement laws, and more importantly, monetary

assistance on the books was fictitious. One of the refugees, Lada Mnatsakanova also reflected on

the absence of funding:

The humanitarian help was never paid in the form of money. I remember that the

first year in Moscow, the city officials gave us some sort of paper with which we

could go and get coats. We did not even have money to buy clothes because all the

money went toward paying rent in hotel.175

Moreover, Ms. Mnatsakanova adds that the humanitarian food boxes, which they received once,

were sent to Armenia after the Spitaki earthquake. My mother, Margarita Lezgiyeva, was aware

of the fact that there were private donations for refugees, but “because of deep corruption, as a

173 Boris Yustugov, “Aliens” According to the Laws of Privatization,” trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, Izvestia, February 2, 2003, https://iz.ru/news/272496. 174 Yustugov, “Aliens.” 175 Lada Mnatsakanova, “Life as A Refugee,” interview by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, March 2, 2017, audio, 03:37.

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cancer, Moscow bureaucracy never gave a ruble to these people.”176 These testimonies show that

Moscow officials and the Federal Migration Center not just failed to accommodate and assist with

living needs, but some apparently stole money that was collected and donated to the refugees.

The absence of citizenship, civic rights, and financial assistance was only half of the crisis

for refugees. Armenian refugees, like many other foreigners, suffered from predatory policing in

Moscow. Between the 1990s and 2003, many Armenian refugees experienced police violence,

corruption, and uncontrolled misconduct. Hostile to any foreigners, especially new incomers from

the Caucasian republics, the Moscow police used illegal force to detain Armenian refugees for

failure to provide permanent registration. For instance, my mother, Margarita Lezgiyeva, recalls a

winter day when she took the trash out, that unexpectedly a police car pulled up, asking for her

registration. She remembered, “I was wearing light slippers, because I thought that it would not

take more than a minute, but the police did not care that I had my papers in my flat. They simply

took me to the station.”177 While she was in the cell waiting to be released, the officers did not allow her to call her relatives. I, as her, a fourteen years old daughter, called to the “Solntsevo”

Police Station to report her missing, but the person on the phone advised that she was detained

because she was not carrying her documents with her. It was an absurd situation. My grandmother

and I went to the station to pay the penalty fine for her unlawful arrest. It was not a ticket. We were

told that she was detained for having “black hair.”178 With my mother still wearing a bathrobe

and slippers, we took a cab back home.

176 Margarita Lezgiyeva “Life in Moscow,” interview by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, January 20, 2018, audio, 14:25. 177 Lezgiyeva, “Life in Moscow.” 178 Ibid.

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In another instance, while my mother and I were riding on the Moscow subway, a group

of white nationalists “skinheads” approached a Caucasian young man with black hair in his

twenties, who was sitting next to us. At first, I did not understand that they wanted to assault this

man. My mother took my hand and stepped to the side, but at the same moment, the leader of the

group knocked him down with his heavy industrial boot. While they were beating him, my mother

was hiding me and praying for the train to stop. My mother was scared to death that they would

turn and start beating us too. As we were walking out of the train, my mother heard an old woman

applaud those guys encouraging them to “Beat his black ass. There is no place for them here.”179

When police arrived, they politely asked the skinheads to leave, while laughing at the bleeding

guy. It is an extraordinary phenomenon: before the collapse of the U.S.S.R., all Soviet citizens

lived under one communist regime, but after the creation of a predominant Slavic nation, the

Russian Federation, the treatment of ethnic Caucasians and other ethnic minorities like Kazakhs,

Tajiks, and Uzbeks, became xenophobic and racist. The Russian police to this day continue to

practice a ‘predatory policing.’

In the case of police harassment of refugees, I need to add that police racially profiled and persecuted all Caucasians. Scholars Theodore P. Gerber and Sarah E. Mendelson focus on

predatory policing in Russia and argue that “public experiences of police violence and corruption

represent only one aspect of a complex phenomenon” and thus, “the Russian police are not so

much protectors of the public or of the state as they are predators on society.”180 The Russian

179 Ibid. 180 Theodore P. Gerber and Sara E. Mendelson, “Public Experiences of Police Violence and Corruption in Contemporary Russia: A Case of Predatory Policing?,” Law and Society Review 42, No. 1 (March, 2008): 4. http://eds.b.ebscohost.com.proxy- bc.researchport.umd.edu/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=c09859f7-4630-4e2d-96a5- 4c7e123e583c%40pdc-v-sessmgr01.

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police misconduct became normalized and set a negative example for Russian nationalists.

Moreover, Russians surprisingly accepted police injustice toward Caucasians and all other

foreigners. It is not hard to notice similarities in ‘predatory policing’ during the Soviet and Russian

eras. It is significant to point out the fact that the Soviet law enforcement agencies like the People’s

Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) and the Committee for State Security (KGB) evolved

into the Russian militsia (civic police) and continued to use similar tools, such as brute force

repression against the state’s potential enemies. As professor of Law and Society Louise I. Shelley

puts it, “the Soviet legal system operated on the assumption that it was better to convict ten

innocent men than let one guilty man go free.”181 Gerber, Mendelson, and Shelley suggest that

both the Soviet and the Russian security apparatus were ineffective and corrupt, but more

importantly, were designed to use excessive force in order to keep the state secure. Such practices

delivered more harm to the public, especially to ethnic groups from Caucasus.

By the early 2000s, the stress on patriotism and the sense of Russian collective nationalism

made it difficult for Armenian refugees to safely reside in Moscow. For pro-Slav white

supremacists, nationalism represents a bright future for Russia. And for Russian society as whole,

nationalism was a public discourse, which increasingly focused on ethnic outsiders. However, in

order to achieve Russian ethnic homogeneity, the state officials practice a widespread

“migrantophbia.”182 Historian Pal Kolsto commenting on the development of Russian nationalism and its trajectory, argues:

181 Louise I. Shelley, Policing Soviet Society: The Evolution of State Control (New York: Routledge, 2005), 160. 182 Pal Kolsto, “The Ethnification of Russian Nationalism,” in The New Russian Nationalism: Imperialism, Ethnicity and Authoritarianism 2000-2015, ed. by Pal Kolsto and Helge Blakkisrud (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 2.

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Russian nationalist discourse often does not distinguish between labor (im)

migrants from the near and the inner abroad, but lumps them together as one group

of ‘aliens’ who allegedly threaten to dilute the (ethnic) Russian character of their

neighborhoods. It is paradoxical, since most Russian cities, including Moscow, are

remarkably homogeneous in ethnic terms, indeed more so than most West

European metropolises.183

It is necessary to mention that ethno-centrism, patriotism, and xenophobic sentiments are successful tools that the Russian regime uses to promote an imperial nationalism.

But what are the reasons why Muscovites are hostile toward migrants and refugees?

Russian nationalist rhetoric and racial slurs have been successfully and effectively used in the creation of an ethnic Russian culture. As long as migration to Russia continues, negative perceptions of Caucasians and other minorities will prevail. Given the situation in Russia, predatory policing has been effective and is popular because in the eyes of Russians, migration allegedly increases the crime rate. Luckily for some Armenian refugees, who lived in the central parts of Moscow, city officials in 1992 decided to move them to the southwestern part of the city, the Vostryakovo village. Unfortunately, relocation was yet again temporary.

The Vostryakovo was surrounded by thirteen apartment buildings and bordered by the

Moscow outer loop highway. While living without proper documentation, refugees continued to pay utility bills. But that again was not enough to obtain a residency permit, or propiska. The main refugee apartment building was located on Domostroitelnaya Street, which was initially built in the 1960s for factory workers. The neighborhood was not healthy because of the surrounding factories that polluted the air with dangerous chemicals. Anna Politkovskaya, who was a Russian

183 Kolsto, “The Ethnification,” 4.

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journalist and human rights activist, reported that “finally the Sanitary Epidemiological Station of

the Moscow’s West region recognized that the Vostryakovo region was not environmentally safe

for a long-term living.”184 Pollution was the main reason why Muscovites moved away from the

area. The Moscow officials “got an idea” to designate the area for Armenian refugees.185 It was a

cruel move from the city administration because Muscovites had been advised that they should not

live there for the long-term. It was the ‘perfect place’ for refugees. Politkovskaya named the region

Zakavkazkoe Ghetto (Caucasian Ghetto) because it was designed to keep this ethnic group away from the rest of Moscow’s population.186 The undesirability of the location made it, for the city

administration, an ideal place for refugees. None of the apartments were ready for refugees to

move in because Muscovites had completely stripped the apartments, taking with them front doors,

toilets, wood floors, and even electrical outlets. Refugees had no alternatives but to accept the

apartments. One of the refugees, Nelli Kasumova, recalls the condition of her apartment when she

moved in:

They gave me a two-room apartment on the last floor. I am retired and live with my

son, a student. I began fixing the apartment on my own. Suddenly, the roof

collapsed, and the rooms were wrecked. I went to the Migration Service and

declined the apartment. They nodded their heads stating that they understood. They

refused to renew my registration. For refugees, it is almost a death penalty, because

184 Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya, “Zakavkazkoe Ghetto: Refugees Are Pushed Close to Cemetery,” Novaya Gazeta No. 48, December 7, 1998, trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, http://politkovskaya.novayagazeta.ru/pub/1998/1998-01.shtml. 185 Politkovskaya, “Zakavkazkoe Ghetto.” 186 Ibid.

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now they denied my pension and eligibility to receive medical assistance. What to

do next?187

I include this quote to point out that refugees were pushed to into a corner and were left with few alternatives. Refugees were forced to pay for apartment rent and utilities monthly. They were also assigned apartments in an environmentally unsafe area and if they refused, they were stripped of the right to renew their registration. Only a few apartments had landlines, the rest were not equipped for corded telephones. It was clear that refugees had no rights or opportunities to overcome the hardship of resettlement even after a decade living in Moscow.188

Life was so hard for Armenian refugees that in 1999, Tatiana Shabanova, a human rights

activist with Russian citizenship living in the United States, sent a new petition to Janet Wood

Reno, a then Attorney General of the United States and to the dozens of other U.S. agencies. The

petition consisted of more than 600 pages, which included detailed accounts of the refugees’

experiences living in Moscow. She included evidence, such as excerpts from Russian newspapers

that describe the lives of refugees in Russia and copies of letters that they sent to various Armenian

organizations in Russia and the United States. As of 2002, there were approximately 3000 stateless

Armenian refugees in Russia.189 Before the U.S. allowed the reopening of admission,

representatives from United States Citizenship and Immigrations Services arrived in the refugee

ghetto, Vostryakovo. My mother saw them walking on the street and asked them to come to our

187 Ibid. 188 Margarita Lezgiyeva “Life in Moscow,” interview by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, January 20, 2018, audio, 55:12. 189 Nataliya Zubkova,” Bakinskie Armyani Mitaryat v Rossii. I S Nadezhdoi Glyadyat Na Ameriku,” Innostranec, No. 25, July 20, 2002, trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, http://refugee.memo.ru/C325678F00668DC3/%24ID/E7AF5AE996AD2B3EC3256C080080C9A6.

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apartment to see the living conditions for themselves. She still recalls one of them being shocked,

stating “shame on Russia.”190 According to Nataliya Zubkova, the United States International

Organization of Migration and the Department of Homeland Security had been closely monitoring

the situation with Armenian refuges in Russia.191

After years of unsuccessful petitions to obtain Russian citizenship and to the United States to admit the rest of the refugees again, the U.S. finally agreed to reopen the 1992 case of Armenian refugees in response to Shabanova’s petition. Indeed, after the Washington Processing Center in

Moscow accepted 2000 refugees in 1992, U.S. officials worked to accept the rest of the refugees.

That group included my family. Refugees were notified to go to “Grazhdanskoe Sodeistvie” (Civic

Assistance Committee) to acquire applications. My mother was the first applicant to receive an application. Surprisingly, that morning when my mother and others rushed to fill in their applications, journalists from various international newspapers were there. The co-founder of

Grazhdanskoe Sodeistvie gave an interview to journalists and refugees stating:

These people (Armenian refugees) who arrived here from Azerbaijan, ran from

ethnic pogroms. They moved to the outskirts of the capital of their own country-the

Soviet Union. And for twelve years, they were given the status of refugee, which

had to be renewed annually. In 2000, they (city officials) announced that the

documents were not valid, and they were left out of the laws. There was a unique

precedent in world legal practice, de-legalization of refugees’ status. In other

countries illegal migrants, after living for three consecutive years, get legalized.

190 Margarita Lezgiyeva “Life in Moscow,” interview by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, January 20, 2018, audio, 37:04. 191 Nataliya Zubkova,” Bakinskie Armyani Mitaryat v Rossii. I S Nadezhdoi Glyadyat Na Ameriku,” Innostranec, No. 25, July 20, 2002, trans. by Sudaba Lezgiyeva, http://refugee.memo.ru/C325678F00668DC3/%24ID/E7AF5AE996AD2B3EC3256C080080C9A6.

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However here, the citizens of their own country become outlaws…And now,

United States as a country, which accepted refugees from all over the world and

has many humanitarian organizations, decided to admit these refugees, because

they did not receive protection in Russia.192

This statement summarizes the legality of the refugee crisis in Russia as whole. With the help of the International Migration Services, the application process went fast.

By the end of September 2002, my family was one of the first families that received an invitation for an interview. We were advised that we had approximately twenty minutes to explain the reasons why we wanted to move to the United States. I was afraid that the United States immigration officer would not understand our suffering in Moscow. Nervously waiting for the decision, we could not believe that soon we would leave this abyss. The application was approved the same day and we were advised that our immigration documents would be ready in a month.

Even more exciting, the United States Immigration Services allowed us to bring our dog.

In February 2003, almost five months later, we and three other Armenian refugees landed at J.F.K. Airport in New York, where volunteers from the International Rescue Committee welcomed us. The U.S. government, with our promise that we would repay the cost within two years. paid for the flight tickets. In contrast to Russian efforts to ignore us, for the first time in fifteen years, we felt welcomed and protected. We survived against absurd odds. Knowing that we had a dog with us, the International Rescue Committee in Baltimore provided a townhouse with all necessary domestic needs, including toothbrushes and even dog food. For the first couple of months, our case manager picked us up and took us for groceries, to banks and even on sightseeing tours of Baltimore. For us, the assimilation into a new society was unbelievably easy. Volunteers

192 Zubkova,” Bakinskie Armyani Mitaryat v Rossii.”

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helped us file the necessary documentations and find jobs. Things were new to us but we felt that we were a part of society now. In 2008, while speechlessly remembering our arrival in 2003, we became citizens of the United States. As I was thinking how the moment was extra special for us,

I also thought of many other refugees running from ethnic conflicts.

Due to the age factor and lack of English language, some refugees could not move to the

United States. In 2003, after the new Russian citizenship law of 2002, the remaining refugees in

Moscow applied for naturalization and were recognized finally as Russian citizens. The law contains provisions that allow certain categories of former U.S.S.R citizens to legally become residents of Russia. Even though progress had been made toward legalizing stateless Armenian refugees, the situation in other parts of Russia remain unresolved. Because their children are married to Russians, some refugees did not apply for resettlement in the United States. Some were not willing to leave family members behind.

In closing, the denial of citizenship caused the lack of the other essential needs for human life and inclusion in society: the right to work, the right of residency, the right to feel protected and free from maltreatment. It is clear that the city officials were reluctant to welcome Soviet refugees and to allow their full integration into society. While living in privatized hotels and dormitories, they had no choice but to renew their credentials annually so that they could reside in the capital. Without any doubt, donations were made and financial aid was drawn but no refugee ever received state assistance. While fighting against living in an environmentally unsafe region, they encountered predatory policing and experienced nationalistic sentiments on daily basis. As a result of the migration crisis in Russia, Armenian refugees and other minorities were not be protected from xenophobia and racist hatred. The situation was beyond words. The city administration continued to treat refugees as marginal, on the outskirts of Moscow society, until

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the U.S. reopened the program to refugees. For many refugee families, like ours, arrival at J.F.K airport was a new chapter in our exhausting lives. After years of persecution, injustice, and nationalist hatred in Russia, the transition and assimilation into a new society was smooth and welcoming.

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CONCLUSION

In the modern stage 1987-to the present of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, ethno-political

tensions influenced the historical development of both countries, Azerbaijan and Armenia. The

landlocked region, surrounded by mountains, is to this day still under dispute, and all proposed

negotiations have been unsuccessful in creating a peace agreement. That is unfortunate. The factors

that contribute to the continuation of this protracted conflict are complex, because both

Azerbaijanis and Armenians claim the sovereignty of the region based on its historical significance to their state. By referring to the historical importance of these events, I point out that that the

origins of the conflict began centuries ago; they are historical-cultural, territorial, and political, national in nature.

Due to an Azerbaijani de-Armenianization policy, which was designed to change the culture of the Karabakh region, the political struggle turned violent first in Sumgait. On February

27, 1988, Armenians were attacked,. Total chaos took over the streets of Sumgait. The unwillingness of the Soviet high officials to prevent the bloodshed was deliberate. The creation of inter-communal conflict helped Moscow to re-establish control over the area. Police detained

“extremists”, but that did not stop the pogroms from spreading to Kirovabad, where in May of

1988, as a result of the riots, more Armenians became victims of Azerbaijani mobs. Unfortunately, the growing radical nationalism promoted by the Azerbaijani government did nothing to stop it.

The capital was the next target. The murderous anti-Armenian pogroms in Baku were orchestrated to exile the Armenian population from the capital. The case in Sumgait, the Azerbaijani police and the Soviet troops were reluctant to intervene.

As a result of the ethnic clashes in Azerbaijan, thousands of Armenians fled to various regions of the former Soviet Union and to its capital. Uprooted from their birth country, Armenian

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refugees in Moscow became stateless and remained in a precarious situation. Upon arrival in

Moscow, the Soviet authorities instructed refugees to carry so-journ registration cards jointly with

their Soviet passports, at least until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The identity documents had

to be renewed annually and did not give the holders the possibility to obtain Russian citizenship.

On the whole, the reluctance of the Russian government to integrate Armenian refugees into

Russian society was obvious, because nationalism and chauvinistic positions in Russia created

obstacles for migration of ethnic minorities. No efforts were made to accommodate Armenian

refugees in Moscow, because, as historians like Brown, Martin, Slezkine, Shearer and Wojnowski

have shown, the communist experiment of ethnicity and nationality contributed to the

establishment of an ethnic hierarchy. As the years went by, the ethnicity card allowed more

favorable ethnic groups to prevail over others. Thus, in practice, the competition to stay on the top

of the ethnic hierarchy kept lower status ethnic groups in a locked cell.

With the same mindset, Moscow officials in the 1990s distinguished Armenian refugees as

“aliens,” a strange paradox in the supposedly inclusive Soviet Union, refugees were politically unimportant for Russia. The Soviet nationality and ethnicity policies were used to create a political hierarchy among ethnic groups to divide and control Soviet citizens into categories. It resulted in

an artificial ethnic structure, which contributed to the development of ethnic conflicts. This Soviet

legacy had a profound consequences in new Russia; the rise of Russian nationalism.

As Soviet citizens, refugees from Azerbaijan legally arrived in the capital of their country

to seek shelter and humanitarian assistance, but unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed,

they were denied inherent rights and freedoms to reside in the newly formed Russia. Despite the

fact that Yeltsin proclaimed that the Russian Federation became a legal successor of the Soviet

Union, ethnicity and nationality were the main factors in the naturalization process. In addition to

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keeping migrants and refugees away from Moscow, Russian officials re-introduced the propiska

system, which was actively enforced to limit the settlement of newcomers. The core of the Soviet naturalization policy was a categorization of potentially dangerous ethnic groups and Russian leaders made sure that the communist policy toward migrants and refugees continued to exist.

Beyond the power of other former republics, my analysis of the Belovezha Accord points out to

the fact that new Russia was meant to be a place only for Slavs.

In 1992, the U.S. admitted approximately 2,000 Armenian refugees, however, the rest

remained in Russia. During a period of economic hardship, stateless Armenian refugees had no rights to obtain residential registration or citizenship of Russia. But this was not the end of their struggle in Moscow. While residing in Moscow without proper documentation, social, and housing assistance, migrants and refugees were blamed for the rise of criminal activities in the capital. At the same time, Russian mass corruption and uncontrolled misconduct led to unjustified police violence against foreigners, especially scapegoated migrants and refugees from the former republics of the Caucasus. Moscow officials normalized predatory policing. Democratization was not implemented because law enforcement agencies and the security apparatus continued to repress potential enemies of the state as they did during the Soviet era. The notion that “aliens” and illegal migrants took over Moscow created xenophobic sentiments among Muscovites. And, using patriotic rhetoric as a tool to present Caucasians and other minorities as invaders, white

supremacists (skinheads) and nationalists hunted and committed crimes against migrants and

refugees.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in Russia there was an increased hostility toward

people from the Caucasus. In the Russia conciseness, economic stagnation and corruption are the

results of the migration of the Caucasians. Since the 1990s, the stereotype was expressed in the

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often repeated phrase ‘people of a Caucasian face.’ In the 1990s the Russian media began painting a negative image of this stereotype. The Caucasus is a diverse region that includes various ethnic groups. The South Caucasus includes Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, but the North Caucasus is divided into two regions. The republics of Dagestan, Chechnya and Ingushetia are in the eastern region and North Ossetia, Karachay-Cherkessia and Stavropol Krai are located in the western sub- region. The national composition of each ethnic republic is different one from another but for

Russians any individual with dark hair from the Caucasus is the same face. There was a growing nationalist sentiment against Caucasians because they had tendency to speculate on the market, which caused negative emotions among Russian residents. Because Armenian refugees had no permanent residency, citizenship, work or inclusion into Russian society, Russian authorities turned refugees into “parasites.” In the minds of many Russians, refugees were social “parasites”

living off of society. Despite the fact that they were willing to work and contribute to the society,

they were not given the opportunity to integrate into Russian society.

In the eyes of Moscow officials, environmentally unsafe Vostryakovo was an ideal place

for stateless refugees as it was on the outskirts of the society. Though refugees continued to send various petitions to the Washington Processing Center, they felt they had little hope to be admitted

to the United States. Yet, in 2001, the United States reopened the resettlement program for the rest

of the remaining refugees under 207 (a) of the United States Immigration and Nationality Act until

the end of 2003. In the case of Armenian refugees from Baku, the commitment of the United States

to assist stateless refugees was actually deep and not forgotten.

By emphasizing and focusing on the history and journey of stateless Armenian refugees, I hope that the United States continues to pledge generosity and understanding towards the dilemma of today’s refugee crisis, like that of refugees from Syria. Since some countries allow racists to

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attack refugees and asylum seekers, it is critically important to send a message that there are many

displaced and turbulent populations that continue to flee war-torn places and are in need of

protection.

Today, immigration reforms in the United States are subject to heated political debates and

within this dilemma, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is the most controversial

topic that cannot be overlooked. In 2012, the Obama administration initiated the Development,

Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act allowing qualified individuals who arrived

in the United States as minors to be protected from deportation, including a large number of

refugees from war-torn countries in South America. Nearly 800,000 Dreamers were allowed to

attend schools, receive work authorization and driver’s licenses, and purchase homes.193 Although

the DACA program was designed to create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, in

order to defer deportation, the beneficiaries had to reapply for DACA status every two years until

September 2017, when the Trump administration announced the end of the program. Analogously

to Armenian refugees in Moscow, after living in the United States their whole life, the DACA

status is set to expire in March 2018, putting thousands of recipients in danger of being deported.

The Trump administration and DACA opponents claim that the country needs a sharp reduction

in chain migration and that by providing amnesty to Dreamers, many illegal immigrants would be

encouraged to break immigration laws.

Dreamers want to become American citizens and live a productive life in the United States

comparable to the Armenian refugees in Russia. Dreamers are devastated by the fact that they can

become stateless in their own country, where they went to school and built lives full of memories.

193 Sabrina Saddiqui, “Trump Ends ‘Dreamers’ Program Leaving Fate of 800,000 Uncertain,” The Guardian, September 5, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/donald-trump- dreamers-program-young-immigrants.

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Unfortunately, while the DACA program is in legal limbo, the Dreamers are being subjected to

harassment by racists and police because these days rhetoric of immigration exclusions and restrictions are being used to promote a xenophobic political agenda. As a former refugee, I hope that the Armenian refugee case study can set an example for influencing immigration policy in the

United States because refugee resettlement should still reflect American values.

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