Moscow’s brutal application of force against the Azerbaijani people on January 19-20, 1990, an event Azerbaijanis commemorate each year as Black January, not only united Azerbaijanis around the conviction that they were not part of “the Soviet people” but must have an independent existence, but also changed the way the international community viewed the Soviet system and thus played a key role in destroying a regime, which had sought to keep itself in power by force alone. More than any other action by the Soviet regime under Mikhail Gorbachev, Moscow’s Baku operation was truly a...

Approximately a month later, on June 22, G. Chicherin noted in his report to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RKP(b) that, “we must finally speed up the realization of our plans in Turkey.” And when B. Mdivani, the Soviet representative in the Caucasus, reported a week later about the appearance of Turkish units in Nakhchivan, the Russian Peoples Commissariat of International Affairs felt compelled to become more active in relation to the Kemalists.  On the one hand, in Moscow, this was taken as “a turning point of the entire policy of the lesser Asian Turkish nat...