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 , 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,: "The solution proposed by the [Karabakh uezdy] conference was similar to previous suggestions, but it also called for the creation of a Karabakh Oblast’, a region that would encompass both mountainous and lowland parts of Karabakh. It offered a way in which the creation of a predominantly Armenian autonomous unit in the mountainous part of the region could be avoided. During 1921, the position of the Azerbaijani leadership regarding Karabakh autonomy had been that suppression of banditry in the region would solve the ethnic conflict, and that there would be no need to grant autonomy to the Armenian-populated part of Karabakh. This tactic was successful in the short term.": "The borders were to be drawn before 15 August by a mixed commission...but without the participation of either Yerevan or Moscow. All would be presided over by Karaiev. Under such circumstances, the Armenians could expect to be grossly disappointed. On the one hand...they excluded, on the west, the 'corridor' made up of Lachin, Kelbajar, and Kedabek, which had been carefully emptied of its Armenian population to separate Mountainous Karabagh from Armenian Zangezur. On the other hand, in the north, without any justification, they removed the districts of Shamkhor, Khanlar, Dashkesan and Shahumian.. where the Armenian population was predominant (about 90 per cent)... From Shamkhor in the north to Shahumian in the south, Armenian villages in these districts have been systematically emptied...Mountainous Karabagh delimited in this way is only a portion of what had always been Armenian Karabagh, which itself is only a part of what was included in the ancient Armenian provinces of Artsakh and Utik...The spectre of ‘Nakhichevanization’ haunts...Mountainous Karabagh, which had 125,000 inhabitants in 1926 who were 89 percent Armenian. This region has become an ‘enclave’ since the ‘cleansing’ of the Hagaru Valley in order to separate Karabagh from Zangezur by a narrow strip emptied of Armenians...Azerbaijan still contained a large Armenian minority. Aside from the ‘bastion’ of the Autonomous Region of Mountainous Karabagh, Armenians were numerous in Baku and in the region north of the Autonomous Region, up to Shamkhor, where the Armenian villages had been deliberately left outside the frontiers drawn in 1923 and, thereby, subjected to direct Azerbaijani authority. From north to south, these areas had already largely been ‘swept clean,’ with the exception of the area of Shahumian, the northern gateway to the Autonomous Region. The Azerbaijani plan was clearly described in the declaration by the Karabagh Committee on 2 December 1988: 'Exploiting the anarchic situation, the Azerbaijani authorities are about to unleash a monstrous programme: to expel Armenians from their several millennia old homes in Gandzak and the areas north of Artsakh, in preparation for an invasion of Mountainous Karabagh.' Already about 120,000 Armenians have left Azerbaijan, and 50,000 have sought refuge in Armenia and the others in the North Caucasus and Central Asia." 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 marginalizationBroers, Laurence, ed. The limits of leadership: Elites and societies in the Nagorny Karabakh peace process. Conciliation Resources, 2005. p.93