The end of the “Big Brother” myth in Armenia

In September 2023, tragic events took place that became just another chapter in the decades-long Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. At the centre of the conflict is Nagorno-Karabakh, the (until then) Armenian-populated enclave within Azerbaijan, which Armenians refer to as Artsakh. The conflict started in 1988, when both Armenia and Azerbaijan were part of the Soviet Union and Armenians in the region demanded unification with the Armenian republic. Inter-communal violence followed. As the USSR collapsed, the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh declared independence in 1991, with sporadic violence turning into full-scale war.

With the support of Armenia, the de facto Nagorno-Karabakh Republic won the First Karabakh War. However, in 2020 the Azerbaijani government launched a military operation that ended in a humiliating defeat for the Armenians. Russian peacekeepers were subsequently stationed in the region. A few years later, when the Azerbaijani government launched a new operation against the Armenians of the region in September 2023, the Russian peacekeepers were unwilling, or unable, to stop it. The entire Armenian population of the region, which at that time numbered around 100,000 people, was forcefully displaced.

Protectors no more

The present-day forced displacement of Armenians reactivated a deep-seated trauma within Armenia’s historical memory. About 100 years ago, in the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian genocide in Ottoman Turkey, Armenians had to flee the territory of what is today eastern Turkey. Following the withdrawal of Russian imperial forces from the area, Armenians were left at the mercy of advancing Ottoman troops. Although they took place over a century ago, these events still have huge significance for Armenians. This is due to the geopolitical continuity between the Russian Empire, the USSR and post-Soviet Russia on the one hand, and a similar geopolitical continuity between the Ottoman Empire and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey on the other (Ankara being Azerbaijan’s main ally in the current conflict). However, what seemed remarkable about the events of 2023 was not only the speed of the destruction of an entire community, but also the complete inaction of the Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenian perceptions of Russia have been changing since the Armenia-Azerbaijan war of 2020. These changes have affected not only Armenia’s foreign policy choices but also the place and significance of Russia within the collective memory of Armenians. In the “44-day War” of 2020, Russia failed to support its traditional ally Armenia when a war broke out with Azerbaijan, which was supported in turn by Turkey. This lack of direct support, which in Armenia was perceived as Russia’s tacit approval of Azerbaijani actions, repeated itself across several more armed clashes after 2020 in Nagorno-Karabakh itself and on the Armenia-Azerbaijani border. This all formed a pattern that culminated in the events of September 2023. The complicity of Russian troops came as a shock to many Armenian inhabitants of the region, who, like many generations before them, had been told that Russia was there to save them from attacks by their neighbours.

The image of Russians as “protectors” and “saviours” has been deeply embedded in Armenian political mythology throughout the past two centuries. This served in turn as a justification for the domination of the Russian Empire, then Armenia’s “Sovietization”, and, finally, Armenia’s neo-colonial dependence on the Russian Federation. This mythology has been largely based on events connected to the rule of the Ottoman Empire, where Russia often positioned itself as the defender of the region’s Christian population, particularly Armenians.

This narrative was constructed through official discourse but often contradicted by actual historical developments, leading to severe disappointment and anger among Armenians when Russia either ignored their calls for help or sided with Armenia’s enemies. Over time, Armenian intellectuals, dissidents and politicians of different generations have challenged this acquiescent attitude towards Russia, deconstructing its imperialist origins and showing the harm that it had done and continued to inflict on Armenians. Yet, in the last 200 years, each time Russia temporarily withdrew its support, it nonetheless somehow managed to restore its political influence over Armenia, renewing the very mythology that constructed the image of Russia as the country’s protector. Will the tragic events of 2020-23 turn the tide and become the final nail in the coffin of Russia’s mythological image as the “protector of Armenians”?

Conflict, narratives and empire

The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh is closely connected to the heritage of the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, as well as the policies of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. From the point of view of the peoples of the South Caucasus, the Soviet Union can be seen as the continuation of the Russian Empire in a new form, and Russia’s policies can be seen as neo-colonial in nature. While empires commonly pursue a “divide and rule” policy in their territorial conquests, the practical reality of colonial rule is often more complicated. Conflicts and differences are indeed exploited by imperial powers to impose and perpetuate their rule over their subjects. However, some of these conflicts and differences predate the imperial imposition and are not necessarily created artificially by the empire itself. This convoluted relationship between colonial order and social fracture is best described by the words of Maulana Mohammed Ali, a Muslim Indian scholar and activist. Commenting on how Hindu-Muslim antagonism had been exploited by the British Empire, he stated: “there is a division of labour: we divide, you rule.”

Imperial policies often exploit differences and heighten conflicts that already exist. This is done in order to first conquer and then realize the domination of the periphery. Furthermore, empires exploit these conflicts to serve their interests, while at the same time engaging in conflict management, or in certain cases, conflict resolution. Thus, empires not only exploit conflict, but can also provide a certain kind of conflict resolution (“Russkiy Mir” or “Pax Sovietica” in our case). This role of conflict mediator is used by those actors who pursue colonial or neo-colonial policies to achieve the continuity of their post-imperial or colonial geopolitical influence, legitimizing political meddling and diplomatic authority.

This type of conflict exploitation, management and resolution structured the complicated relationship between the Russian Empire and the Armenian-Azerbaijani situation and, on a larger scale, between Armenians and their various Muslim neighbours. By the late 17th century, the Armenian lands were divided between two major Muslim empires, the Ottoman and Persian, which were administered locally through feudal lords of Persian or Turkic origin.

Among the rare exceptions were the Armenian meliks (i.e. semi-independent princes of the Karabakh region). Religion was not just a social marker of identity but also a political category that determined the place of indigenous populations in the imperial hierarchy. As a result, this made Christian Armenians inferior in relation to their Muslim rulers and neighbours. This situation created resentment among Armenians, which was articulated predominantly by the educated representatives of Armenian communities in Armenia and across the Armenian diaspora. Time and again, Armenians rebelled against their Ottoman rulers, while missions were also sent to European countries, which asked for help in liberating the Christian Armenians from their Muslim overlords.

The Russian Empire as the “saviour” of Armenians

This inter-ethnic and inter-religious tension opened the door to European imperial powers. In the Caucasus the most active was the Russian Empire, which positioned itself not just as the disseminator of modern civilization in the East but also as the defender of Eastern Christianity. The precarious position of Armenians, Georgians and other Christian communities vis-à-vis their Muslim rulers and neighbours became political tools that were used by the European powers to justify their meddling in the affairs of the Caucasus and eventual territorial conquest. These concerns were put forward by Russia in its confrontation with the Persian and Ottoman Empires, particularly the two Russian-Persian and the Russo-Turkish wars that took place in the 19th century. After absorption into the empire, Russian rule supposedly solved existing contradictions between various religious and ethnic groups, a claim that became the framework for the imperial cultural narrative and the ideological basis for continuing Russian domination. The cultural-political aspects of imperial conquest thus invite various analogies from other imperial/colonial contexts characterized by divided ethnic and religious groups. While it would be naïve to see these differences and conflicts as artificially created, they were nonetheless used by the empire to advance its goals.

After the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union, the previous tsarist narrative of protecting Christians gradually transformed into the Soviet narrative of the “voluntary accession” of Armenia into Russia. In this narrative, not only was the inclusion of Armenia into the Russian Empire viewed as a positive event, but Russia also took on the role of the defender of the Armenians who remained oppressed within the Ottoman Empire, an oppression that culminated in the Armenian genocide of 1915. As is usually the case with such cultural narratives, the Russian saviour role was loosely based on some historical events, while being contradicted by many others.

This narrative was, however, a useful one during Soviet times, both for the Soviet centre and the local Armenian elites. It crucially underscored the peculiar compromise between Armenian nationalism and Soviet hegemony, which was formed by the late Soviet period. Armenians were allowed expressions of national identity, and even of a nationalist agenda, as long as it was not aimed against Russia/USSR. This narrative faced severe criticism by the end of Soviet rule, when this compromise began to unravel due to perestroika and the Karabakh conflict.

The emergence of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict

The short interregnum of 1918-1920, between the break-up of the tsarist empire and its re-emergence in the form of the Soviet Union, was marked by the formation of independent republics in Georgia, Armenia and elsewhere in the South Caucasus. These new republics, though short-lived, ensured that when Russia returned to the region, it had to accommodate the new political and social realities on the ground. This is how Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan became Soviet republics, as political units with many attributes of statehood, rather than simple provinces of Russia.

Today, all three countries, though in different forms, consider these short-lived independent republics, rather than the subsequent quasi-autonomous Soviet republics, to be the origins of their modern nationhood. At the same time, in the case of Armenia and Azerbaijan, the conflict that started in 1918-1920 was frozen, rather than resolved by the advent of Soviet power. As a result, after a forced pause of over six decades, this conflict reignited as the USSR became weaker in the late 1980s.

The Soviet annexation of the South Caucasus in 1920-21 had a two-fold effect for the existing Armenian-Azerbaijani rivalry. On the one hand, there was a certain resolution to the conflict, at least for the time being. Nagorno-Karabakh was awarded to Azerbaijan but an autonomous unit was created there to satisfy some of Armenia’s demands. Yet, the way it was resolved effectively institutionalized the conflict and, in effect, froze and perpetuated it.

In the post-war decades, as both Armenia and Azerbaijan were engaging in covert nation-building processes, the contradictions between the interests of the Armenian population of the region and those of the Azerbaijani leadership in Baku appeared again. The Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh complained about ethnic discrimination and encroachment on their cultural and linguistic rights. They claimed that the Azerbaijani leadership was pursuing a policy that aimed to transform the demographic balance in the region, and pointed to the example of another autonomous region in Azerbaijan, Nakhchivan, where Armenians had constituted almost half of the population in the 1920s but only one to two per cent by the end of the Soviet period.

In the eyes of Karabakh Armenians, the most obvious solution to their grievances was not the pursuit of civil rights, only possible in a democratic system, but rather the transfer of the region from Soviet Azerbaijan to Soviet Armenia. Representatives of the Armenian population of the region, including prominent communists and intellectuals, repeatedly sent requests to Moscow for the transfer of the region during the Soviet period. These requests were usually supported by Armenian Communist Party bosses in Yerevan and opposed by the leadership of the Azerbaijani Communist Party in Baku. These requests were denied and the general public knew little about them.

Movement for independence

The last time such a request was sent to Moscow, however, things got out of control. This happened in the age of perestroika launched by Mikhail Gorbachev. An important part of these policies was glasnost, the practice of making issues open and public. Thus, when the request was once again denied, Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh made it public. In February 1988, thousands of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians demonstrated in support of the request in Stepanakert, the capital of the autonomous region. These local protests prompted rallies in Yerevan and Baku both in support of, and against, the request. Such large-scale rallies were unprecedented for the Soviet Union, indicating how the regional equilibrium, achieved through imperial-style rule, was now compromised.

At the beginning of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Armenian society as a whole was overwhelmingly under the influence of the traditional narrative that pictured Russia (in this case the Soviet Union) as the protector and saviour of the Armenian people. However, as the Armenian national movement was becoming stronger, this narrative was increasingly questioned by Armenian intellectuals. Among the most influential voices was Rafael Ishkhanyan, who deconstructed this idealizing narrative to point out that it also implied that Armenians are doomed to extermination by Turkey without Russia’s protection. He argued that Armenians needed instead to take their fate into their own hands and become political subjects, dealing with their neighbours on the basis of their own national interests.

These ideas were shared by many in the leadership of the Armenian National Movement, the main opposition party. As a result of the first democratic elections in 1990, the party came to power as the USSR collapsed. However, the ongoing Karabakh conflict shed light on the contradiction at the heart of the agenda, between the challenges in solving disputes with neighbouring states and the need to establish independence from Moscow. In the early stages of the conflict this contradiction was not so obvious, as Moscow was perceived as an ally of Azerbaijan. However, upon Armenia’s independence, part of the new political elite, led by the first President Levon Ter-Petrosyan, realized that in the longterm this contradiction needed to be resolved. Their solution was to find a compromise with their Azerbaijani neighbours while at the same time building a pragmatic relationship with the former imperial metropole.

Balancing independence and security

Yet, a satisfactory compromise was difficult to find. Azerbaijan and Turkey were not open to the overtures by the Armenian National Movement, while internally the proposal was unpopular among the public in Armenia. This was especially true among the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who worried that Ter-Petrosyan was going to subordinate their interests in order to find a compromise with Azerbaijan.

The seemingly impossible resolution of the conflict turned the government towards Russia, once again to fulfil the role of security ally. The very people who had led Armenia to independence eventually concluded an alliance with Russia out of necessity, which included outsourcing important elements of Armenia’s security to Moscow. Of course, at the time of the decision, the majority of Armenians did not understand it as something that could compromise Armenia’s independence and sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the Armenian government did not abandon its efforts to find a compromise with Turkey and Azerbaijan. However, Ter-Petrosyan’s approach was not shared by many, even in his own team. Internal contradictions eventually emerged in February 1998 when Ter-Petrosyan was forced out of power by his own associates. Eventually, he was replaced by Robert Kocharyan, the former leader of the Karabakh Armenians. He rejected Ter-Petrosyan’s approach as “defeatist”, claiming that he could have gotten a better deal. In reality, the change in political leadership meant that finding a compromise with the country’s neighbours was going to be harder, since neither Baku nor Ankara seemed particularly interested in making concessions. On the contrary, Azerbaijan’s leadership was openly stating that its goal was to take back Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding territories at any cost, including military means, and was arming at a rapid pace. Hence, Armenia’s dependence on Russia was set to grow during this time.

As the balance of power between Armenia and Azerbaijan tilted in favour of Baku, Armenia’s dependence on Russia increased. In the 2000s and especially 2010s, this diplomatic alliance increasingly came to look like a neo-colonial dependency. Armenia’s reliance on Russia in terms of security gave Moscow significant political leverage, which was used to expand Moscow’s influence in Armenia across various sectors including the economy, mass media and culture. Armenia had little choice but to join Russian-dominated security and economic organizations. For example, it joined the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) in 2002 and then, in 2015, the Eurasian Economic Union. All this was happening in spite of the Kremlin’s parallel strategic partnership with Azerbaijan, which included massive sales of Russian weapons to that country. Obviously, Russia’s military exports to Azerbaijan angered the Armenians but these concerns were dismissed by Russian officials. Successive Armenian governments were often unable or unwilling to raise the issue with Moscow, at least publicly.

The Russian protection myth

As Armenia found itself once again under Russia’s hegemony, the cultural narrative of Russia as protector was renewed once again. By the second half of the 2010s a consensus formed within Armenia’s political and intellectual elites about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, which considered the preservation of the status quo the most desirable outcome for Armenia. The consensus entrenched Russia’s role as Armenia’s main security ally, with the alliance viewed as a viable guarantee of security for Armenia and Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

It is worth noting that this consensus was never openly articulated, but was also rarely challenged by influential actors. Even the revolution of 2018, which brought down Serzh Sargsyan’s authoritarian regime, did not initially challenge this consensus. Even though the new Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party, while being in opposition, had been critical of Armenia’s relationship with Russia, they changed course after coming to power. While the Armenian elite was unwilling to get rid of the mythologized narrative of Russian protection, the course of events once again shattered these illusions in ways that proved painful and dramatic. A large-scale war started in 2020 as Azerbaijan attacked the de facto Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh, which prompted Armenia to step in to protect it. In what became known as the “44-day War” Armenia suffered a humiliating defeat. Over the course of this conflict, Russia maintained a relatively neutral position, while Turkey fully and openly supported Azerbaijan. Eventually, when an Armenian defeat became obvious, Russia mediated a ceasefire agreement on November 9th 2020, which included the stationing of Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh. These soldiers were also to take control over the so-called Lachin corridor, the only road connecting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.

Once again, reality demonstrated that reliance on Russia as sole guarantor of security was not enough to solve Armenia’s issues. As Armenian society was slowly recovering from the shock and trauma of defeat, voices calling for a reappraisal of Russia’s role in the conflict became difficult to ignore. Russia’s position in the aftermath of the 2020 war increased public criticism, since in numerous ensuing episodes of violence Russian peacekeepers effectively let down the Armenian side, failing to prevent or stop Azerbaijani attacks on Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh or on Armenia itself. However, there was little that Armenia could do about this, as it seemed that Russia’s influence and military were the only things that stood between the defeated and weakened Armenians and new Azerbaijani attacks.

The situation dramatically changed in 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which also led the West to pay significantly more attention in the region, including the South Caucasus. In fact, western mediation efforts in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict started before the invasion of Ukraine although, at the time, it was obvious that Russia was the most influential force. With Russia overstretched in Ukraine in 2022, western involvement in the Caucasus meant that Armenia was finally getting a chance to move beyond its dependence on Russia. The watershed moment in the Armenia-Russia relationship came in September 2022, a year before the latest clash in 2023, when Azerbaijan launched a large-scale attack on the borders of the Republic of Armenia. At the time neither Russia, nor the Russian-dominated CSTO, did anything to help Yerevan. On the contrary, Armenia received diplomatic support from the West, as diplomatic pressure on Baku from the United States and the European Union helped cease Azerbaijani advances. Soon, an EU monitoring mission was placed on the Armenian side of the border with Azerbaijan. Since then, Armenia has begun a process of geopolitical re-orientation. This has included not only changes in foreign policy but also a reappraisal of the Armenia-Russia relationship.

Nevertheless, this change of course in the state of Armenia was not reflected among the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, where the majority continued to pin their hopes on Russian protection. Since November 2020, the presence of close to 2,000 Russian peacekeepers on the ground came to represent the only force preventing a military takeover of the region by Azerbaijan. While there were reservations about their conduct among Karabakh Armenians, the majority of the Karabakh Armenian political elite considered these troops as the only guarantee that the Azerbaijanis would not attack. Hence, Yerevan’s drive to reduce its dependence on Russia was not shared by the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, who hoped that the Russians would help them maintain their de facto independence from Azerbaijan.

The events of the following months dissipated the hopes that Karabakh Armenians placed on Russian peacekeepers. In December 2022, Russian peacekeepers did nothing to prevent an Azerbaijani blockade of the Lachin corridor. For several months the Karabakh Armenians lived under a partial and then complete blockade, a dire situation which Russian peacekeepers simply observed. Finally, on September 19th 2023, Azerbaijan launched a military attack on the positions of the Karabakh Armenians, as the Russian peacekeepers once again looked on. A day later, the de facto President Samvel Shahramanyan was forced to sign what was effectively a capitulation agreement. Within a few days, about 100,000 remaining Karabakh Armenians fled the region for Armenia. Once again, Armenians who had pinned their hopes on Russian protection ended up being forced out of their homes.

What is next?

Will the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023, carried out with Russia’s tacit approval, be the final chapter in this sad saga? Will Armenia be able to break not only its economic and military dependence on Russia, but also the cultural and ideological narratives that sustain this dependence? There are signs that the Armenian elites and society are, indeed, going through a process of deep reappraisal regarding the political thinking that has brought Armenians to this catastrophe. Today, in the context of the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, there is hope that countries like Armenia will finally be able to break their dependence on Russia, which has lasted for centuries.

Today, Russian imperialism and colonialism have once again become a topic of global discussion. In this context, societies that have historically been under Russian cultural hegemony are finding the language to talk about their experience, as well as the cultural tools to deconstruct the narratives that have served that hegemony. However, as Armenia’s experience of the last 200 years shows, Russian imperial domination has been surprisingly resilient, as it has been able to re-invent itself in many ways. What is more concerning is the fact that each time it was the contradictions and conflicts between Moscow’s former imperial subjects that allowed imperialism to return in a new form. Once again, “there is a division of labour, we divide, you rule.” Perhaps it is time for “us”, the people who have been subjected to imperial hegemony, to stop dividing ourselves, so that “they” can no longer rule us.

This text was originally published in the framework of the Confronting Memories project of the Civil Society Forum.

Mikayel Zolyan is a social researcher and political analyst from Yerevan, Armenia. His areas of expertise include issues of politics of memory, nationalism, national identity, foreign policy and regional conflict, as well as social and political movements and democratization in a post-Soviet context. After the revolution in 2018, Zolyan entered parliament as a member of the ruling bloc “My Step”. In 2021, he returned to academia and civil society, doing research on the politics of memory and working as a consultant with Armenian and international NGOs. He is also the host of a TV show on the Armenian educational channel Boon TV.

 Armenia, history, Nagorno-Karabakh war, Russia, Russian empire