The Armenian movement to unite Soviet Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast in Soviet Azerbaijan started in 1988 as a protest for the arbitrary settlement of ethnic minorities’ autonomous territories by the Communist Party. That does not mean, however, that the movement did not occur before the Perestroika era and that the Armenian inhabitants in the NKAO initiated it. In the 1960s some Armenian intellectuals proposed the Soviet government to improve the living standards of the Armenians in Karabagh. Then, Armenian and Azerbaijani historians began to dispute on the historical issue of the former occupants of the Karabagh region.
It is true that the Armenians’ fear of the increase of the Azerbaijani population in the NKAO resulted in the movement for its secession from Soviet Azerbaijan in 1988. Armenian intellectuals’ sympathy for the compatriots in Karabagh, however, and the Armenian communists’ attitude toward the self-government of NKAO also played an important role to induce the Armenian unification movement. I focus on Armenian intellectuals’ reactions and the Armenia Soviet Socialist Republic government’s opinion around the speech of B. Kevorkov, the first secretary of the NKAO, at the general meeting of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast Committee of the Communist Party of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in March, 1975.
