Part I – Russian occupation and demographic changes (1826-1897)
After the end of the Second Karabakh War, the phrase “Western Azerbaijan” began to take on a new meaning in Azerbaijan’s official rhetoric. President Ilham Aliyev in his speeches both at the end of the war and in the post-war period repeatedly stressed that Western Azerbaijan is the historical Azerbaijani land, saying that Azerbaijanis had been forcibly expelled from there, that Armenians had been relocated there only two centuries ago, that in the future the deportees would return to their homes, and even accusing in this context the leadership of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic for conceding Irevan. The renaming of the “Azerbaijani Refugee Society”, a public association active since 1989, into the “Western Azerbaijan Community” on August 3, 2022, as well as giving the administrative building intended for IDPs from Karabakh to the Western Azerbaijan Community, may be seen as an indication that the issue will play an important part in Azerbaijani politics for some time yet (Aliyev, December 24, 2022; APA, December 24, 2022; BBC News in Azerbaijani, July 14, 2021). In the context of this political rhetoric, the historical statistics of Azerbaijani Turks living in the territory of present-day Republic of Armenia and their complete disappearance from this area as a result of certain events may be of interest. In this article we attempt to look into the statistical data for Azerbaijani Turks and Armenians living in the territory of present-day Armenia since the 19th century, the migration of Armenians to the region, the impact of Armenian migration from abroad and at the will of the state (both the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union), which continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, on the demographic profile of the region.
1. The early years of the Russian rule and demographics
The Russian Empire completed its conquest of the South Caucasus in 1828 with a second victory over the Qajar Empire. The Russian Empire, which became permanently anchored in the region after this victory, along with establishing new administrative units based on both religious and ethnic affiliations, began “demographic engineering” among the local population, which had strong ties to Russia’s traditional adversaries in the region, the neighboring Ottoman and Qajar empires. Overall, the Russian Empire considered it safer for itself to settle Christians along the border with the Muslim world (Gachechiladze, 1995: 28). This policy justified itself, Prince Vorontsov-Dashkov, Viceroy of the Caucasus, writes in his report to Tsar Nicholas II almost 80 years after the annexation of the South Caucasus (Swietochowski, 1985: 43):
“Your Majesty is aware that throughout the history of our relations with Turkey in the Caucasus area, Russian policy has been based from the time of Peter the Great on benevolence toward the Armenians who have rewarded us with their active aid in the course of wars.”
Censuses conducted by the Safavid Empire (and by the Qajar Empire later), which ruled the region until the early nineteenth century, have not survived. Although the Qajars, under the signed Treaty of Turkmanchay, were forced to hand over to the Russians the available tax documents, Russia felt it necessary to obtain more information on this region. For this purpose, Ivan Shopen was commissioned. He arrived in the area in 1829 and headed the survey team which gathered statistical data. The report compiled by Shopen is the only accurate source for any statistical or ethnographical data on the region[1] before and immediately after the Russian conquest (Bournoutian, 1981: 2). According to Shopen’s report, the total Muslim population of the region before the Russian annexation numbered more than 111,849, but was reduced by 35,000 after it, on the account of those killed in battle and the military personnel and civil administration that left the region after the change of the traditional authority (Bournoutian, 1981: 3-4).
According to the 1826 data, before the Russian rule the number of Armenians living in the area was only 20,073 in the Irevan Khanate, 2,690 in the Nakhchivan Khanate, and 2,388 in the territory of Ordubad. Thus, before the Russian occupation a total of 143,000 people lived in the area where the future Armenian Oblast would be created, and of these only 25,151 people, i.e., only about 21 percent of the population, were Armenians (Bournoutian, 1981: 12).
During the war with the Qajars, the Armenian units of their army, seeking to break free from Muslim rule and come under Russian rule, fought on the side of the Russian troops (Bournoutian, 2018: 20). Apparently, apprehensive both of Armenian enthusiasm for this service and of the threat of a new war with the Ottoman or Qajar empires in the region in the future, the Russians decided to resort to demographic engineering. As a result, Article XV of the Treaty of Turkmanchay signed with the Qajars granted Armenians living in the Qajar Empire the right to move north of the Araz and sell their real estate. [2] At the time this treaty was signed, Russia was at war with the Ottoman Empire, the other traditional power in the region. In 1829 this war also ended with the victory of the Russian Empire, and the Treaty of Edirne was signed.[3] The Ottoman Empire de facto accepted the terms of Russia’s Treaty of Turkmenchay (Tucker, 2010: 1154). The defeat of the Ottoman Empire laid the foundation for the second wave of Armenian migration to the region. Thus, by 1832 the total number of Armenians in the region multiplied and reached 82,377. Conversely, the number of the Muslim population decreased sharply compared to 1826, amounting to 82,073 people. George Bournoutian writes that 35,560 people from the Qajar Empire and 21,666 from the Ottoman Empire arrived in the region after the wars (Bournoutian, 1981: 12). Another Armenian author, Aram Arkun says that 45,000 people from the Qajar Empire and 100,000 from the Ottoman Empire migrated to Russia after the wars (Arkun, 2005: 66). Since this does not match the statistics for the Armenian Oblast provided by Ivan Shopen, we can assume that the migrating Armenians settled not only in the Armenian Oblast, but also in other parts of the South Caucasus. Thus, we conclude that the figures given by Bournoutian represent only those Armenians who arrived in the Armenian Oblast, while the figures given by Aram Arkun represent those Armenians who arrived in the Caucasus or other territories of the empire as a whole. This could probably explain the origin of the Armenian communities in many cities of the Caucasus and the empire as a whole.
To summarize the period between 1826 and 1832, we can say that while the number of Muslims, who constituted about 80% of the region’s population in 1826, dwindled as a result of deaths in the wars, forced or voluntary migration to 49.91% (Bournoutian, 2018: 20), the number of Armenians increased from about 21% to 50.09% as a result of Russian Empire’s encouragement of Armenian migration from the neighboring empires (Bournoutian, 2018: 20).
2. Continuing Armenian migrations and the 1897 census
Thus, although in 1826 Armenians were the majority in only 3 of the 15 districts of the Irevan Khanate and only 1 of the 10 districts of the Nakhchivan Khanate (Bournoutian,2018: 19-20), this ratio continued to change throughout the 19th century as a result of a steady increase in Armenian immigrants to the Caucasus region after each war of the Russian Empire with the Ottoman Empire. Especially after the Crimean War (1854-1856), the Russian-Ottoman wars of 1877-1878, there were numerous migrations of Armenians in the Anatolian region (Bournoutian, 2018: 13, Arkun, 2005: 66). The exposure of the wealthy Armenian youth of Anatolia to Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century gave rise to nationalistic sentiments, widespread in Europe at the time, within this community (Kazemzadeh, 1951: 8). These widespread nationalistic sentiments led to Armenian uprisings in Anatolia, and the uprisings, in turn, contributed to the new wave of migration of Armenians to the Caucasus. After these uprisings were suppressed by the Ottoman army, many rebel Armenians moved to the territory of their patrons, the Russian Empire, (İpek, 1995: 261; Özkan, 2020: 283), and this process was followed by the migration of the Muslim population of the Caucasus to Anatolia.[4] The Muslim population that migrated from Azerbaijan was predominantly Sunni. As the Ottoman Empire was the main center of Sunnism, a caliphate state, and the main enemy of Russia in the region, the Sunnis in the region were under great pressure. For example, according to the estimates of the 1830s, incomplete as they were, the number of Sunnis and Shiites in the Muslim-populated lands north of the Araz was equal, even if the Sunnis were slightly more numerous, but in 1848-1860 there was a strong migration of Sunnis from the region, resulting in a 2:1 ratio in favor of the Shiites. Just before the Russian annexation of the North Caucasus was complete, that is, in 1863-1864, 220,000 people migrated from the North and South Caucasus (Swietochowski, 1985: 8, 199). We can assume that the Sunnis from Nakhchivan and Irevan regions were among the hundreds of thousands of those migrants.
As a result of all these processes, Armenians became a majority in a number of localities by the end of the century. We can see this from the census of 1897, the first centralized census conducted in the Russian Empire. The result of the census was as follows (Altstadt, 1992: 30).
Irevan Governorate[5]
Azerbaijani Turks Armenians Russians
Irevan uezd 77,491 58,148 3,713
Aleksandropol uezd 7,832 141,522 6,836
Nakhchivan uezd 64,151 34,672 1,014
Novobayazet uezd 34,726 81,285 2,716
Surmali uezd 41,417 27,075 1,361
Sharur-Daralayaz uezd 51,560 20,726 0,122
Etchmiadzin uezd 35,999 77,572 0,175
Total:
Azerbaijani Turks – 313,176
Armenians – 441,000
Russians – 15,937
As we can see, the ratio of Armenians to Muslims living in the region, which shortly before the Russian occupation was only 21 percent, changed dramatically over the years as a result of resettlements, the migration of the local Muslim population to the neighboring empires, reaching 50.09 percent in 1832. Interestingly, this rapid growth of the Armenian population almost never stopped in the 19th century, further accelerating following the Russian-Ottoman wars and the ensuing Armenian uprisings in Anatolia. Thus, according to the first all-Russian centralized census conducted in 1897, the number of Armenians in the region increased about 18-fold over a period of about 70 years, from 25,151 people to 441,000. As a result of this unnatural growth they were able to constitute a majority in 3 out of 7 uezds of the Irevan Governorate, the number of Armenians in the Aleksandropol uezd exceeding the number of Turks about 8 times and in the Etchmiadzin uezd 2 times.
In summary, after nearly 70 years of Russian rule, the percentage of Muslims living in the territory of the former Irevan and Nakhchivan khanates decreased from about 80 percent to 37 percent. But the process still continued, and there would be periods in the future when this process would only accelerate.
Gulamhuseyn Mammadov
Translated from Milliyyet.info
Sources:
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APA. Prezident İlham Əliyev: Qərbi Azərbaycan bizim tarixi torpağımızdır. 24 dekabr 2022. [APA. President Ilham Aliyev: Western Azerbaijan is our historical land. December 24, 2022.] Link: https://apa.az/az/resmi-xeber/prezident-ilham-eliyev-qerbi-azerbaycan-bizim-tarixi-torpagimizdir-739215
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[1] By the region we understand Iğdır together with the territories of the Irevan and Nakhchivan khanates. These three territories were made one unit in 1828 under the name of Armenian Oblast which existed until 1840.
[2] For the full text of the treaty, see: (Полное собрание законов Российской империи, C: III (Complete Collection of Laws of the Russian Empire, Third Collection), 1830: 125-130); for the text of Article XV see: (Полное собрание законов Российской империи, C:III, 1830: 130)
[3] For more information on the treaty, see: (Ciachir, 2017)
[4] For more information on the matter, see: (İpek, 1991)
[5] Zangezur uezd, which was not part of the Irevan Governorate, is not included in this list. It should be noted that the Zangezur region, the destination of heavy Armenian migration, had been the territory of the Karabakh Khanate since 1747 and after the dissolution of the Karabakh Khanate was part of the Shamakhi (later Baku) Governorate. In 1868 along with the establishment of the Elizavetpol Governorate, Zangezur uezd was formed and placed under the jurisdiction of this Governorate (Masalskiy, 1894:222-223).
