ABSTRACT
Armenia has been Russia’s main ally in the Caucasus since the break-up of the USSR. Armenia’s geographical location between Georgia in the north, Azerbaijan in the east and Iran in the south and a traditionally hostile Turkey in the west suggests a land-locked enclave in an unfriendly environment, extremely vulnerable. Armenia is a very old country, and at its largest, in the first century BC, Armenia reached from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea. It was later conquered by the Romans and Persians, and came under the Muslim yoke in the seventh century, was a free semi-state between the ninth and eleventh centuries, then crushed by the Turks, and divided up between the Ottomans and Persians in the seventeenth century. Armenians already then took refuge in the Russian hug and largely welcomed the Russian partial conquest in the early nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the First World War, Armenia proclaimed its independence, fought wars with Georgians and Azeris, was conquered by the Red Army in late 1920 and forced into the USSR in 1922 as part of the larger Transcaucasian Republic. The small population of some three million inhabitants and the large exile groups in the west (some 2.5 million) and in Russia/CIS (some 1.5 million) constitutes telling evidence of the problems in Armenia. Apart from Russia, Armenia’s other ally in the region is Iran (which fears the large minority of Azerbaijanis living on the Iranian side of Nachichevan to the south of Armenia. In the Soviet era, Armenia had many military-technological facilities which have only partly survived the break-up of the USSR. Despite Armenia’s weakness, it was the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh that set out to leave Azerbaijan and thus was the immediate cause of the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Below, I briefly present some bilateral issues in the Russian-Armenian relationship that have not been directly related to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
