User:ZuluKane/sandbox

 

quotations
"the best way to avoid bias is to edit articles about which one is apathetic" - NinjaRobotPirate :D

Revival of the Karabakh issue
After Stalin's death, Armenian discontent began to be voiced. In 1963, around 2,500 Karabakh Armenians signed a petition calling for Karabakh to be put under Armenian control or to be transferred to Russia. The same year saw violent clashes in Stepanakert, leading to the death of 18 Armenians. In 1965 and 1977, there were large demonstrations in Yerevan calling to unifying Karabakh with Armenia.

In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power as the new general secretary of the Soviet Union and began implementing plans to reform the Soviet Union encapsulated in two policies: perestroika and glasnost. While perestroika had to do with structural and economic reform, glasnost or "openness" granted limited freedom to Soviet citizens to express grievances about the Soviet system itself and leaders.

Karabakh Armenian leaders complained that the region had neither Armenian language textbooks in schools nor in television broadcasting, and that Azerbaijan's Communist Party General Secretary Heydar Aliyev had extensively attempted to "Azerify" the region, increasing the influence and number of Azerbaijanis living in Nagorno-Karabakh, while at the same time reducing its Armenian population. Aliyev stepped down as General Secretary of Azerbaijan's Politburo, in 1987. The Armenian population of Karabakh had dwindled to nearly three-quarters of the total population by the late 1980s.

The movement was spearheaded by popular Armenian figures. Some members of the Russian intelligentsia expressed support for Armenians, including the dissident Andrei Sakharov (according to journalist Thomas de Waal). Support for the movement among the Moscow elite was suggested in November 1987, when L'Humanité published personal comments made by an economic adviser to Gorbachev, Abel Aganbegyan, to Armenians living in France, in which he suggested that Nagorno-Karabakh could be ceded to Armenia.

In February 1988, Armenians began protesting and staging workers' strikes in Yerevan, demanding unification with the enclave. This prompted Azerbaijani counter-protests in Baku, on 19 February 1988 (the seventh day of Armenian rallies). The poet Bakhtiyar Vahabzadeh and the historian Suleyman Aliyarov published an open letter in the newspaper Azerbaijan, declaring that Karabakh was historically Azerbaijani territory.

On 20 February 1988, the leaders of the regional Soviet of Karabakh voted in favour of unifying the autonomous region with Armenia in a resolution reading:"Welcoming the wishes of the workers of the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region to request the Supreme Soviets of the Azerbaijani SSR and the Armenian SSR to display a feeling of deep understanding of the aspirations of the Armenian population of Nagorny Karabakh and to resolve the question of transferring the Nagorny Karabakh Autonomous Region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR, at the same time to intercede with the Supreme Soviet of the USSR to reach a positive resolution on the issue of transferring the region from the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR." On 24 February, Boris Kevorkov, the Nagorno-Karabakh autonomous region party secretary and an Azerbaijan loyalist, was dismissed.

On 26 February, Gorbachev met with two leaders of the Karabakh movement, Zori Balayan and Silva Kaputikyan, and asked them for a one-month moratorium on demonstrations. Returning to Armenia the same evening, Kaputikyan told the crowds the "Armenians [had] triumphed", although Gorbachev hadn't made any concrete promises. According to Svante Cornell, this was an attempt to pressure Moscow.

On 10 March, Gorbachev stated that the borders between the republics would not change, in accordance with Article 78 of the Soviet constitution. Gorbachev said that several other regions in the Soviet Union were yearning for territorial changes and redrawing the boundaries in Karabakh would thus set a dangerous precedent. While the Armenians viewed the 1921 Kavburo decision with disdain and felt they were correcting a historical error through the principle of self-determination (a right also granted in the constitution), Azerbaijanis found calls to relinquish their territory unfathomable and aligned themselves with Gorbachev's position.

I'll just leave these here:

Through the Brazilian Wildernesshttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Through_the_Brazilian_wilderness_(1914)_(20139303844).jpg