Nagorno-Karabakh has been wiped off the map as what remained of the breakaway region surrendered to Azerbaijan’s troops on 20 September, after brief fighting that led to at least 200 ethnic Armenians being killed. According to the most recent reports, over 100,000 Armenians – almost the entire population – have now fled the region. The government of the enclave has declared that as of 1 January 2024 it will “cease to exist”.

As has become customary, the recent war in Karabakh is viewed from two sides in Russia: liberals extol the virtues of Turkish generals trained by NATO and Israeli drones, while both secret and obvious Putin admirers tell us on Liva (russo-ukrainian media) that revolutionaries (in quotes or without) always lose wars. There is not a grain of truth in this dichotomy. The militia armies created by the bourgeois revolutions have had great victories. Not only in the 19th century. Actually, the history of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic began with the victory of the Armenian militia in the war three decades ago. Then, Azerbaijan was richer, had a more numerous and well-armed army, but

The conflict that has erupted between Armenia and Azerbaijan is the bloody legacy of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. This is a barbaric war with reaction on all sides. All the powers intervening in the conflict claim to be victims, but the only real victims are the working people, on both sides, who are paying with their blood for the cynical and reactionary games of their leaders. Only internationalism and class struggle can direct the workers against their true enemies: their own ruling capitalist class. This statement by our Russian comrades

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Ottoman Empire’s attack on Armenians. On April 24, 1915, several hundred Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, arrested and later executed. This was the start of the Armenian genocide, a bloody massacre which was to last until 1917. Here we republish Alan Woods’ article that covers this tragic episode during the First World War.

The Armeniana people were once proud of what they achieved after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, in spite of the later Stalinist deformations. But since the demise of the former Soviet Union capitalism has been introduced and the effect has been a total collapse of what was once a developing and cultured country.

NOTE: This is a draft of a talk I presented in May, 1998 at a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts on the Karabagh Movement. I revised the draft slightly in December 1998, and except for minor changes, I have not bothered to update it since. I should point out, however, that an abundance of new research material has come to light recently, including revelations about massive emigration from the Republic of Armenia. (Some reputable sources have claimed that, by the year 2000, the population of the country had been reduced to one-half of what it had been ten years earlier.) These revelations confirm and reinforce the assessment presented below.