The Wars in the Caucasus were a series of interrelated ethnic and political conflicts which engulfed the Caucasus in the period shortly before and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The conflicts, resulting from centuries of ethnic tensions, reached a boiling point as the former republics of the Soviet Union began to seek independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Exacerbated by ethnic nationalist claims, they led to the establishment of several de facto independent states, violent government change and a refugee crisis that led to the displacement of 1.5–2 million people.
Colonised by Russia during the 19th century, the Caucasus experienced significant unrest from 1917 to 1923, during the Russian Civil War. During World War II, several ethnic groups were expelled to Central Asia and Siberia by the Soviet government, and the land was subsequently settled by other peoples. After expellees returned to the Caucasus during the Khrushchev Thaw, they found that their homes were now occupied and that the Soviet government was continuing attempts to eradicate their cultures. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, dissent against the Soviet Union emerged in the North Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia. Between 1985 and 1989, this grew into a low-level uprising, as perestroika and glasnost led to increasingly-open dissent. Amidst the Soviet Union's dissolution, armed militants began engaging one another in combat.
The Wars in the Caucasus have at times been described as a series of decolonisation wars, ethnic conflicts or wars against Russian neocolonialism in the region. The Russian military was actively involved in all of the region's conflicts, pursuing strategies of securing strategic aims such as natural gas and railways or motorways. Russia intervened against nationalist leaders in Georgia (Zviad Gamsakhurdia), Azerbaijan (Abulfaz Elchibey) and Chechnya (Dzhokhar Dudayev), killing the latter.
The Wars in the Caucasus had a destructive effect on the region, leading to one of the steepest declines in economic output in the world during the 1990s. Numerous war crimes were committed during the war, including acts of ethnic cleansing and, in the case of Chechnya, what is occasionally referred to as genocide. As much as 10% of the population of the Caucasus was displaced by fighting, and organised crime, drug trafficking and Islamic extremism proliferated, leading to the insurgency in the North Caucasus and the growth of the Islamic State.
Background
The Caucasus, located in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, was colonised by the Russian Empire in the early and mid-19th century. The region has long been noted by foreign observers for the frequency of conflict in the region, with Russian observers describing it as "anarchic". A combination of Russian divide and rule tactics and poor harvests led to mass migration amidst the First globalisation, which exacerbated conflicts over land use. The Russian Civil War further helped to lay the groundwork for future ethnic conflicts in the Caucasus. This was particularly true in Azerbaijan, as Bolsheviks under the leadership of Stepan Shaumian formed an alliance with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation and subsequently began attacking Azerbaijanis.
The Civil War continued in the Caucasus until 1923, as Ottoman and British military interventions unsuccessfully sought the region's fragmentation. Upon its conclusion, the newly established Soviet Union initially accepted the ethno-religious differences in the Caucasus, declaring several ethnic groups to be formally self-governing. Sharia was initially maintained, as was the Arabic script used to write most languages in the North Caucasus. In the mid-1920s, these freedoms were clamped down upon and the local populace was forced to hand over its weapons to the Soviet government. Fearing a pan-Islamic uprising in the region, the Soviets pursued a process of further delimitation in order to foster sectarian tensions. The most notable of these cases was the formal division of Circassians into three separate ethnic groups (Adyghe, Cherkess and Kabardians) In other cases, multiple ethnicities were placed together under a single administrative unit, as Karachays were with the Cherkess and Balkars with the Kabardians.
Amidst World War II, the Soviets yet again shifted course regarding the Caucasus. Fearing that Muslims in the North Caucasus would defect to Nazi Germany, the government of Joseph Stalin recognised Islam and established a muftiate over the region. This policy, however, was limited in response to the brief German occupation, in which the German military reopened closed mosques, closed collective farms, and promised sovereignty to ethnic groups which collaborated. Once the Soviets regained control of the region, a series of decrees by Stalin from November 1943 to March 1944 led to the forced relocation of the entire Balkar, Chechen, Ingush, and Karachay populations to Central Asia and Siberia. The autonomous governments which existed in the region were dissolved and residents' homes were given over to new inhabitants, who were primarily ethnic Russians. Thousands died during the forced migrations, and Neil Melvin wrote in 2007 that they were "one of the darkest periods in the history of the native peoples of the North Caucasus."
Peoples who had been deported from the North Caucasus were permitted to return home in the 1950s, amidst the Khrushchev Thaw, but found their homes occupied by the new settlers. The political, military, religious and economic elites of the region had been completely destroyed by the Soviets and the government began pushing for the adoption of industrial agriculture and Russian educators, seeking to destroy the surviving identities of the returning populations. This was resisted by women, who became responsible for reviving local village traditions that had been lost in the deportations, and, in the Northwest Caucasus, tariqas adhering to Sufism.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, nationalism throughout the Caucasus continued to grow in strength. In Armenia and Georgia, Soviet dissidents increasingly came to be recognised by the Soviet government and public as a political force, particularly becoming violently anti-Soviet in Georgia. Georgian nationalism led to protests by Abkhazians, who felt threatened, and the Soviet government instituted affirmative action policies of "Abkhazisation" in the Abkhaz ASSR from 1978. These policies gave more or less opportunities to people based on the ethnicity listed on their internal passport, which could not be changed. Soviet policies led to the formalisation of ethnic divides in Abkhazia, where marriages between Georgians and Abkhazians had previously been common.
Meanwhile, North Caucasian ethnic groups who had lost land during the deportations began to organise, most notably the Ingush at the 1973 Grozny meeting, which demanded the return of formerly-Ingush territory held by the North Ossetian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Protests by Armenians demanding recognition of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO), which was governed separately from Armenia as part of Azerbaijan, began to intensify, spurred on by centralisation in Azerbaijan that restricted the Autonomous Oblast's rights and encouraged Azerbaijani supremacy over Armenians.
The policies of perestroika and glasnost, initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, marked the beginning of low-level conflict between local nationalists and the Soviet government; while a union-wide phenomenon, this was particularly present in the Caucasus. From September 1985 to August 1989 the number of those killed in such clashes was assessed by researcher Astrid S. Tuminez as being in the "low hundreds". This conflict served as a reflection of growing discontent with Soviet rule over non-Russians at the time – in the same period, forty-seven large demonstrations occurred in the Soviet Union, almost entirely in republics that sought secession.
History
First Nagorno-Karabakh War
Throughout the Soviet period, Azerbaijani authorities implemented policies aimed at suppressing Armenian culture and diluting the Armenian majority in Nagorno-Karabakh through various means, including border manipulations, encouraging the exodus of Armenians, and settling Azerbaijanis in the region. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Armenians protested against Azerbaijan's cultural and economic marginalization
Motivated by fears of cultural and physical erasure under government policies from Azerbaijan, Armenians launched a national liberation movement which came to be known as the Karabakh Movement between 1988 and 1991. The movement advocated for the reunification of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) – an autonomous enclave within Azerbaijan – with Armenia.
A referendum in 1988 was held to transfer the region to Soviet Armenia, citing self-determination laws in the Soviet constitution. This act was met with a series of pogroms against Armenians across Azerbaijan, and in November 1991, the Azerbaijani government passed a motion aimed at abolishing the autonomy of the NKAO and prohibiting the use of Armenian placenames in the region. As pogroms against Armenians occurred in Baku and Sumgait, Azerbaijanis were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh. The Nagorno-Karabakh Republic subsequently declared independence via referendum in 1991 and the conflict escalated into the First Nagorno-Karabakh War.
A string of military defeats in early 1992 led to the post-communist Azerbaijani government of Ayaz Mutallibov being overthrown and replaced by Abulfaz Elchibey, a former Soviet dissident. Armenia received direct military support from Russia, which sent the 366th Guards Motor Rifle Regiment to Nagorno-Karabakh. In backing Armenia, Moscow primarily sought to topple Elchibey, a nationalist who sought to increase his country's connections to the Western world. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, was backed by the Afghan Hezb-e Islami, which provided thousands of soldiers to fight Armenia as mercenaries.
Throughout 1993 the United Nations Security Council passed four resolutions relating to the conflict. The resolutions call for an end to hostilities and withdrawal of occupying forces, the preservation of territorial integrity, and a negotiated peace process – through the OSCE Minsk Group – that guarantees the rights and security of the local Armenian population in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Elchibey was overthrown in a coup d'état by Surat Huseynov (which journalist Thomas de Waal and researcher Murat Gül have claimed was done with the support of Russia), and Heydar Aliyev became president. In 1994, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe established the Minsk Group under the auspices of France, Russia and the United States, with the aim of negotiating a ceasefire. A Russian-backed truce was subsequently approved that May, though Aliyev rejected a plan to station 18,000 Russian peacekeepers in the region. The Nagorno-Kabarakh Republic acquired all of its claimed territories as well as swathes of undisputed land within Azerbaijan.
Georgian Civil War, ethnic conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia
Ethnic relations between Georgians and Abkhazians began to fall apart in 1989. Increasing Abkhaz demands for further autonomy led to Georgian protests, which were subsequently violently suppressed by the Soviet government. In July, the Abkhaz capital of Sukhumi was rocked by violent civil unrest over Georgian demands for the Georgian branch of the Abkhazian State University to be transformed into a local branch of Tbilisi State University.
In the South Ossetian Autonomous Oblast in northern Georgia, meanwhile, a legal struggle was evolving, as the Georgian and South Ossetian governments began passing contradictory laws. South Ossetia unilaterally declared itself an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic on 20 September 1989, a decision that was reversed by the Georgian SSR's government on 10 November. A series of riots in Tskhinvali, South Ossetia's capital, caused casualties and led the Soviet central government to impose a state of emergency in the region. On 12 December 1990, gunmen driving a car in Tskhinvali opened fire from a submachine gun, killing three Georgians and wounding two in what has been described as a terrorist attack and an act of ethnic violence. The Georgian government responded by blockading South Ossetia and eventually declaring the region's autonomy defunct on 11 December 1990. The South Ossetian war began shortly thereafter.
Zviad Gamsakhurdia, a nationalist anti-Soviet dissident, was elected as the first President of Georgia with 87% support after his party Round Table—Free Georgia won the 1990 Georgian Supreme Soviet election. Georgia seceded from the Soviet Union in a March 1991 referendum. After few months, the opposition started to demonstrate against President Gamsakhurdia, accusing him of violating the political pluralism and freedom of the press.
Though Abkhazia had voted in the 1991 referendum to remain as part of the Soviet Union, they initially accepted becoming part of a post-Soviet Georgia, unlike South Ossetia. In return for remaining under Georgia, Abkhazia was allowed to retain its autonomy and permitted an electoral system that disproportionately favoured Abkhazians over Georgians in the People's Assembly of Abkhazia. Meanwhile, fighting continued to escalate in South Ossetia; hundreds of villages were destroyed, 100,000 Ossetians fled to the neighbouring North Ossetian ASSR, within Russia and 23,000 ethnic Georgians fled from South Ossetia.
From September to December 1991, protests against Gamsakhurdia's government gradually evolved into street violence between his supporters and opponents. These protests culminated in a January 1992 coup d'état, overseen by members of the former communist nomenklatura, the Georgian mafia and disgruntled former allies of the President. Gamsakhurdia refused to surrender, fleeing to Chechnya, and his native region of Mingrelia (in Georgia's west) rose up in revolt against the new government. After two months of political deadlock, former Soviet leader of Georgia and foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze was offered the office of President, which he accepted. The Russian military, via the Transcaucasian Military District's headquarters in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, provided support to the putschists against Gamsakhurdia in retaliation for his nationalist and pro-Western views.