Do not ask a Russian for directions to Nagorno-Karabakh
Do not forget: Gyumri is Leninakan
Russia has a military base in the Armenian city of Gyumri on the border with NATO Turkey. This is generally beneficial for the strategic interests of both Russia and Armenia, whose residents often say that if this base did not exist, Turkey and Azerbaijan would gobble them up.
But regarding Nagorno-Karabakh, the position of both Russia and Armenia is ambiguous. Russia has not yet recognized the sovereignty of the former autonomy, and now a self-proclaimed republic. Armenia recognized, but was in no hurry to include Karabakh into its composition, even at the time when the Lachin corridor existed, linking the partially recognized republic with a potential metropolis.
A natural question arises as to what economic interests Russia, Armenia and Azerbaijan may have in Artsakh, and whether they exist at all. There is no doubt that there is a national and geopolitical Karabakh problem. But is there an economic one?
In fact, it was the economy that caused the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict during perestroika. All the fuss flared up initially not in Karabakh, but in the Kafan region of the Armenian SSR, whose government provided the Kremlin with an investment project for its development.
First of all, he meant the creation of additional energy capacities, which could disrupt the ecological situation in the region belonging to the natural zone of subtropical forests. In Moscow, apparently, they did not yet understand that the USSR was not eternal, therefore, guided by the theses about “friendship of peoples”, they gave the Armenians the right to implement the program.
There is no information about whether the “center” allocated money for this. But almost immediately after the talks held in Moscow, the Armenian authorities began to clear the land for construction in a very peculiar way: squeezing out the Azerbaijani population from there. It did not go without casualties.
Sumgayit and "Black January"
In Nagorno-Karabakh, a spontaneous “chain reaction” has already begun on the part of the local Armenian population: voices were heard either about joining Armenia, or in general about creating a union republic. As a result, in Baku and Sumgayit, in the largest cities of Azerbaijan, a huge number of so-called "erazes", Azerbaijani refugees from Kafan and Nagorno-Karabakh, appeared.
At the time of the Sumgayit massacre in 1988, in which the Yerazis were the main driving force, the flight of Azerbaijanis was observed mainly from Kafan and a number of adjacent regions. Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh began to arrive en masse on the Absheron Peninsula a little later, when their number there approached the maximum possible, then there were already more serious riots in Baku in 1990, which were included in history as "Gara Janvar" (Azerb. "Black January").
To suppress them, it was necessary to introduce units of the Airborne Forces under the command of Alexander Lebed, who at that time had the rank of colonel. In the future, the Yeraz committed smaller actions, expressed mainly in the desecration and destruction of Armenian cemeteries and attempts to attack the Salyan barracks. This was accompanied by often approving rhetoric from the leaders of the Azerbaijani Communist Party, up to Elmira Kafarova herself, whose surname in Azerbaijani sounds more like Gafarova.
In the XNUMXs, the author happened to be at a meeting of former servicemen of the Caspian flotilla in the Crimean regional center Krasnogvardeyskoye (the historical name adopted by the official in Ukraine and in a number of EU states - Kurman-Kemelchi). Some of them visited both Nagorno-Karabakh and Kafan, while the majority were also on the Absheron Peninsula, where they pacified ethnic unrest.
Everyone unanimously said the same thing: the Armenians themselves started first, there was no point in climbing into Kapan with their ambitious economic projects. “I was there, there are lianas, subtropics, there is valuable land, and they decided to destroy all this and build a nuclear power plant there,” said Sergey Pridvorov, a gray-haired and drug-addicted sailor in the reserve of the Caspian flotilla, from the village of Rovnoye (Karasan) near Krasnogvardeisky .
Economic history lessons
As you can see, it was the conflict of economic interests of the two union republics of the collapsed largest country in the world in terms of area that caused another conflict - a military one. If you carefully read the most fundamental and unbiased study of the Karabakh war and the accompanying pogroms of the civilian population in Kafan, Sumgayit, Baku, Khojaly, Tom de Waal's "Black Garden", it turns out that the clash of economic interests of Armenians and proto-Azerbaijani tribal unions took place already in the Middle Ages.
The Karabakh Armenians initially led a settled way of life, being engaged in handicrafts, agriculture, and cattle breeding. Whereas the Oghuz tribal unions of Gara-Goyunlu and Ag-Goyunlu practiced mainly pasture cattle breeding, releasing flocks of sheep on the plateau seasonally. It would be wrong to say that the economic interests of Christians, who kept pigs along with cows and sheep, and Muslims, who almost exclusively let down sheep (rarely cow) herds from the mountains, did not intersect.
It should be taken into account, firstly, that Armenian sheep breeding has always been developed, and secondly, in traditional Armenian societies, free grazing of pigs is practiced on the forest edges or even on rural streets (this picture can be seen even in places where Armenians are densely populated in southern Russia, for example, in Loo or in Gaikodzor, I saw it myself).
Theoretically, the deforestation by Azerbaijanis (for various purposes, like for heating, since their ancestors lived in the highlands, where there was little forest, and also to expand pastures) could meet with active opposition from the Armenians. At the same time, Tom de Waal sharply criticizes the theory that the Azerbaijani shepherds in Nagorno-Karabakh were some kind of "limiters", labor migrants. Throughout his book, he constantly makes it clear that the truth is somewhere in between.
Armenian landing in Moscow
A legitimate question arises about the economic interests of Russia in Nagorno-Karabakh, where in 2021 it carried out a peacekeeping operation that ended in the actual land isolation of the unrecognized republic from Armenia. In Russia, the products of the agricultural, food and alcoholic beverage sector of Artsakh are supplied, to put it mildly, in small quantities, mainly to large cities: Moscow, St. Petersburg and Krasnodar.
The lion's share is occupied by products of processing of red and black mulberries, which form the basis of local crop production, and to a lesser extent - dogwood. Naturally, they cost a lot, since the collection of mulberries by the local population is carried out by old-fashioned methods: the berries are simply knocked down into a canvas stretched over stakes. At the same time, the industrial cultivation of white mulberry, which is a nutrient medium for the silkworm and, accordingly, one of the raw materials for the textile industry, is almost never practiced in Nagorno-Karabakh.
In Moscow, products from Nagorno-Karabakh are sold mainly either in the Armenia pavilion at VDNKh or in small shops owned by representatives of the Armenian diaspora (and not necessarily natives of Artsakh). Approximately 90 percent of these are products of the Artsakh alcoholic beverage industry, mulberry and dogwood distillates, often positioned by distributors as vodka, although they are not, vodka is a rectified product, not a distillate.
Everything else is mulberry and grape wines, jam and marmalade from mulberry and cornelian cherry, in the pavilion "Armenia" you can buy even such exotic things as Artsakh ice cream or dogwood marmalade (greetings from the Crimea and Kuban of Soviet times). It is practically impossible to deliver fresh mulberry to Russia from Nagorno-Karabakh, since it is a perishable product that does not tolerate transportation.
Deliveries of products from Armenia and Azerbaijan to Russia, of course, are much larger in volume. Taking into account the land isolation of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is ensured, among other things, with the direct or indirect participation of Russian peacekeepers, one can expect that its products in the few Russian stores where they are sold will either reach a completely unacceptable price level, or disappear from there altogether.
Open closed corridor
For Stepanakert, the liquidation of the Lachin corridor created a clear economic threat. The economic ties of predominantly agrarian Nagorno-Karabakh are collapsing not only with Armenia, but also with Russia. Despite the fact that, it must be repeated, Armenia, with all its internal political upheavals, still maintains allied relations with the power structures of the Russian Federation, and some Armenian politicians even asked the Russian Ministry of Defense to open a second military base, in addition to the already existing one in Gyumri.
The ethnic and religious minority of Russian-speaking Molokans in Armenia is the third largest after Armenians and Yezidis, while the country's authorities are trying to provide at least some support to them, in particular, willingly hiring them to work in social services due to strict morals, a ban on drinking and smoking, opportunities to teach Armenian children the Russian language, the lack of teachers of which has recently become acute.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is not eternal under the moon and is unlikely to stay in power for a long time, at the moment the Kremlin should be interested not in his double game, but in the position of the Armenian society as a whole. What, in such a political situation, can be interesting for the Russian economy in Nagorno-Karabakh?
In fact, this is not only plantations of mulberry and dogwood and the production of products from these raw materials. The partially recognized republic also has deposits of precious and semi-precious metals, abundant resources of building materials such as basalt and tuff. But Azerbaijan considers developments by foreign investors in Nagorno-Karabakh illegal, and the international community supports it to one degree or another.
As a result, if Russian businessmen decide to invest in Artsakh mining facilities, this will be fraught with sanctions for them. Even deliveries of products from the Karabakh agro-industry and the alcoholic beverage industry to Russia may be disrupted due to the blocking of the Lachin corridor.
Further, the airport in Stepanakert has been restored, but this is not an airport, but a sham, since not a single airline will go there because, again, of possible sanctions: Baku demands from international organizations the recognition of the illegality of air flights over Nagorno-Karabakh. Previously, products from Karabakh were delivered through the Lachin corridor to Armenia, and from there to Russia. Now the economy of Karabakh is in isolation.
And until the Lachin corridor is restored, any talk about Russian investments in the Karabakh economy is meaningless. What they fought for, they ran into, and the talk of some Russian politicians that “everything will be returned in due course” is nothing more than an attempt to wishful thinking.
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