Following the Russian Revolution and the emergence of independent republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in South Caucasus in 1918, Artsakh with its majority Armenian population was briefly occupied by the Ottoman Turkish forces who ordered the Armenians to submit to the rule of the new Azerbaijani government whom the Turks viewed as their ethnic allies. The Turkish troops withdrew at the end of World War I and were quickly replaced by the British. The latter, acceding to the demands of sovereignty over Artsakh by the nascent Republic of Azerbaijan, approved the appointment of an ethnic Azerbaijani as the governor-general of Artsakh, pending a decision on the status of the region at the Paris Peace Conference. British support for the Azerbaijani control of Artsakh further reinforced Tsarist Russia’s administrative separation of this region in spite of its Armenian majority (89% according to the first Soviet census of 1926) from the rest of Armenian-populated areas to the west.
The Armenian National Council of Artsakh rejected the sovereignty of Azerbaijan over the territory, demanding the right of self-determination. A provisional agreement in August 1919 between the Council and the Azerbaijani authorities granted local autonomy to the Armenians who in turn agreed to conditional Azerbaijani jurisdiction over the territory. Frequent violations of this agreement by Azerbaijan resulted in a failed Armenian revolt in March 1920. In retribution, the Azerbaijani forces sacked the capital Shushi, massacring the Armenian population in their thousands and burning the Armenian quarters of the city.
With the step-by-step sovietisation of the three republics in South Caucasus between 1920 and 1921, Artsakh remained within the borders of Soviet Azerbaijan until the thaw in the Soviet Union instigated by the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev. In February 1988, a mass demonstration in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, demanded the unification of the region with Soviet Armenia. In Azerbaijan the reaction to this mass protest was swift: late in the same month mobs in the industrial town of Sumgait attacked ethnic Armenians in their homes and in streets, ransacking and burning homes, raping and murdering for full twenty-four hours before the Soviet forces intervened. In the post-Soviet power vacuum the conflict between the two republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan over Artsakh escalated into an all-out war resulting in thousands of casualties and massive movements of refugees on both sides. A fragile ceasefire was reached in 1994, leaving Armenians in control of Artsakh and occupying territories between the region and the Republic of Armenia and in the lowlands to the east. The ceasefire resulted in the de facto independence of Artsakh with close, intertwined relations with Armenia. Despite international efforts of mediation to reach a peace settlement in the region, skirmishes have continued to a higher and lesser degree along the line of ceasefire, erupting into a full-fledged war on Sunday, 27 September 2020.
By Gagik Stepan-Sarkissian