ABSTRACT
In the Caucasian regions, violent conflicts between national groups had begun before the Soviet Union broke up. The Muslims of Azerbaijan and the Christians of Armenia were virtually at war by 1990; the fighting had started in 1988 in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-peopled hill area in Azerbaijan. Until 1991, Azerbaijan, still ruled by hard-line communists, had support from Moscow, but in 1992 the tide turned in the Armenians’ favour. When international mediation helped to stop the war in 1994, they held nearly all of Nagorno-Karabakh and all the territory between it and Armenia. But 400,000 Armenians had had to flee from Azerbaijan, and Armenia had had to let in some Russian troops, who watched over its Turkish frontier. (The Turks, sympathizing with Turkic Azerbaijan although reluctant to get too involved, closed their frontier with Armenia during the war.)
Georgia, Stalin’s homeland, where vestiges of his ‘personality cult’ had persisted after his death, was rather unexpectedly quick to demand independence when the USSR began to crumble. But a separatist revolt promptly broke out in Abkhazia. The Abkhazians, themselves a very small community, were helped by fellow Muslims from neighbouring areas and, more obliquely but more effectively, by the armed forces first of the USSR and later of Russia. In 1993, Georgia had to agree to a virtual Russian takeover of Abkhazia. Meanwhile there had been a civil war among the Georgians themselves and a revolt in South Ossetia, whose people wanted to join the Ossetians north of the Caucasus range. Here, too, Russian forces took a hand; under their protection, South Ossetia was separated from Georgia in 1992. Russia also acquired a naval base at Batumi, in Muslim Ajaria, and by 1996 there were 30,000 Russian soldiers in Georgia.
