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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Oleg KUZNETSOV
Ph.D. (Hist.), Associate Professor, Deputy Rector for Research, Higher School of Social and Managerial Consulting (Institute) (Moscow, the Russian Federation).
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERNATIONAL LAW TREATIES
IN INSTITUTIONALIZING THE POLITICAL AND LEGAL STATUS OF THE NAKHCHIVAN AUTONOMOUS REPUBLIC AS A CONSTITUENT PART OF AZERBAIJAN (ON THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION OF THE NAKHCHIVAN AUTONOMOUS SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLIC)
Abstract
This article takes a look at the previously unstudied political and legal aspects of the acquisition and subsequent institutionalization of the political and legal status of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan Republic by means of international law. The author puts
into scientific circulation heretofore unknown archival documents that are the result of the efforts of the supreme political leadership of Soviet Russia and make it possible to take an entirely fresh look, in historical hindsight, of the political and administrative status of Nakh-chivan as a constituent part of Azerbaijan.
KEYWORDS: Azerbaijan S.S.R., Nakhchivan A.S.S.R., the Nakhchivan Territory, the Moscow Conference of 1921, the Moscow Treaty on Friendship and Fraternity of 1921, the Kars Conference of 1921, the Kars Treaty of 1921.
Introduction
The 90th anniversary of the formation of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan Republic is a wonderful official opportunity to revisit the history of its creation, and at the same time, in the light of the new results of archival research, correct the ideas circulating in the social sciences of the post-Soviet expanse about the emergence, political and legal institution-alization, and first years of its existence. This article does not claim to present a comprehensive analysis of the international events that, ninety years ago, determined the current status of Nakhchivan as a constituent part of the present-day Azerbaijan state. Its aim is to give readers interested in this topic the opportunity to review its historical and legal aspect based on new documental sources of
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Russian foreign policy of the Soviet period that have long been kept "top secret" and so have only been made available to researchers recently.
However, first we must make a very salient point regarding the international legal and political historical nature of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan Republic (NAR AR), without which it will be difficult to understand why we are focusing so much attention on how the treaty rules of international law influence the origin and inextricably related legal nature of the NAR AR.
The current political and legal status of Nakhchivan, as an internal sovereign autonomous republic that is a constituent part of Azerbaijan, differs significantly in its origin from other well-known autonomies that are constituent parts of European countries (Catalonia and the Basque Country as constituent parts of Spain, Tatarstan and the Crimea as constituent parts of Russia, and Northern Ireland as a constituent part of the United Kingdom, for example). The thing is that Nakhchivan acquired its status not as the result of regulating relations or removing collisions between this region and the state-political center, i.e. Baku (this is precisely how autonomization of several administrative-territorial entities took place in most of the European states today), but as a result of international law treaties entered simultaneously by several countries of the Caucasian region that endorsed Nakhchivan with the status of a political-administrative autonomy as a constituent part of Azerbaijan in two international treaties at once—the Moscow and Kars treaties of 1921. In other words, autonomization of Nakhchivan was not the result of an "internal affairs" decision made by the Azerbaijan Republic, but the consequence of the consolidated (partly also under the threat of the use of armed force) will of the political elites of several countries at once that saw this step as an effective way to overcome the region's political problems that objectively existed at the beginning of the 1920s.
The autonomization of Nakhchivan, or to be more precise, the international legal recognition and provision of its special political and legal status as a constituent part of Azerbaijan, pursued a geopolitical (and also domestic political for Soviet Russia) aim that was extremely urgent at the time—of diffusing the high level of ethnopolitical tension and related territorial conflict between the Armenians and the Muslim peoples of the Transcaucasus (primarily the Azeris and Kurds), the roots of which go back to the decisions of the Berlin Congress in 1878. The reasons for, driving forces behind, and specific manifestations of this conflict and its territorial aspects are well known and have been described many times in the scientific and journalistic literature. However, they do not have any direct relation to the current topic, playing more of a historical background role, and so we will not dwell on a description or analysis of them.
We will only point out that the actual fact of this conflict and the joint efforts of the region's countries to localize and minimalize its consequences after the end of World War I presupposed the unique nature of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, which was more of foreign political than domestic political origin. We have every confidence in saying that in the specific historical conditions of the beginning of the 1920s, the autonomization of Nakhchivan was a unique way at the time (and unique in the history of international law) of ensuring international legal protection of the national and political rights and interests of one ethnicity in conditions of aggression on the part of another at a time when both ethnicities were acquiring their national (meaning state-legal) identity. So studying and comprehending the historical experience of the state-political building of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic at the beginning of the 1920s is of continued importance not only for the history of Azerbaijan statehood and the political identity of Azerbaijan as such, but also for the universal state history and law in general as a unique example of a real way to efficiently apply international law to resolve an acute regional conflict.
In 1921, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic became the first state-territorial entity in another state, the political and legal status of which was defined from the outside, whereby with the direct participation of the metropolis state, under the jurisdiction of which it was transferred. It stands to reason that there have been examples before in the history of mankind (particularly after each consolidated armed aggression of European countries against the Ottoman Empire), when foreign
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states collectively determined the legal status of a particular part of the defeated country by means of international treaties on the results of the armed conflict. Examples of this are the history of the gradual administrative autonomization of some of the Balkan countries in the Ottoman Empire with their subsequent state-political sovereignization. This process on the part of the European nations pursued the precise goal of consistent withdrawal from the power of the metropolis of those regions and ethnicities populating them, as well as religious communities that were objectively in national-religious and, correspondingly, sociocultural antagonism with it (Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, and Serbia underwent similar processes in their history of acquiring their current political and legal status). In other words, the policy of autonomization long pursued the goal of gradually weakening and subsequently fragmenting empires, whereby not only the Ottoman, but also the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and even the British.
However, the question of the autonomization of Nakhchivan was diametrically opposite. In this separate, and so unique case, the policy of autonomization pursued the goal of preserving the political, cultural, and religious unity of the Azeri ethnicity in specific historical conditions of acquiring its national statehood that were not easy for it. The establishment of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic ensured not only political self-determination, but partly even the physical survival of some of the Azeri people during ethno-religious persecution of them, which predetermined the possibility of all Azeris of the Transcaucasus merging into a single political nation in the very near future. So we can say very definitely that the history of autonomization of Nakhchivan in the political and legal history of contemporary history showed an example of how state and political isolation of a specific territory could pursue not only separatist, but entirely unionist and integration goals, as well as serve the ideals of preserving and ensuring national unity of an ethnicity through diverse forms and ways of practical expression of political self-determination of this ethnicity. The Moscow and Kars treaties of 1921 only formalized and legally registered the political will of the Azeris for national-state self-determination in the form of international legal documents, even in the form of the simultaneous and parallel coexistence of two state (or administrative-state) entities formed by the representatives of one ethnicity (or several sub-ethnicities objectively close to each other in the sociocultural respect). This is why the political and legal history of the formation of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic deserves the closest and scrupulous study, even if it is an exception to the rule.
The problems relating to the establishment of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic have been repeatedly and diversely examined in Soviet, Azeri, and Turkish scientific literature. The authors of these studies include the following: S.I. Aralov, Yu.A. Bagirov, J.P. Hasanli, V. Gafarov, N.G. Kireev, S.I. Kuznetsova, A.F. Miller, P.P. Moiseev, Yu.N. Rozaliev, M. Mustafaeva, R.S. Mustafazade, M. Oz-tiurk, A.N. Kheifets, and A.M. Shamsutdinov.1 However, absolutely all of the authors indicated examined this process exclusively from a historical-political and partly even administrative-ethnograph-
1 See: S.I. Aralov, Vospominaniia sovetskogo diplomata, 1922-1923, Institute of International Relations Publishers, Moscow, 1960; Yu.A. Bagirov, Iz istorii sovetsko-turetskikh otnoshenii v 1920-1922 gody, AzSSR Academy of Sciences Publishers, Baku, 1965; J.P. Hasanli, Istoriia diplomatii Azerbaidzhanskoi Respubliki, in 3 vols, Vol. 2: Vneshiaia politika Azerbaidzhana v gody sovetskoi vlasti (1920-1939), FLINTA, Nauka, Moscow, 2013; V. Gafarov, "Russian-Turkish Rapprochement and Azerbaijan's Independence (1919-1921)," The Caucasus & Globalization, Vol. 4, Issue 1-2, 2010; N.G. Kireev, Istoriia Turtsii, XX vek, Institute of Oriental Studies, RAS, Moscow, 2007; S.I. Kuznetsova, Ustanovlenie sovetsko-turetskikh otnoshenii (K 40-letiiu Moskovskogo dogovora mezhdu RSRSR i Turtsiei), Oriental Literature Publishers, Moscow, 1961; A.F. Miller, Turtsiia: Aktualnye problemy novoi i noveishei istorii, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1983; P.P. Moiseev, Yu.N. Rozaliev, K istorii sovetsko-turetskikh ontoshenii, State Publishers of Political Literature, Moscow, 1958; S. Mustafaeva, "Soviet Russia and the Formation of Borders between the Caucasian States (Based on a Case Study of Azerbaijan and Armenia)," The Caucasus & Globalization, Vol. 4, Issue 1-2, 2010; R.S. Mustafazade, Dve respubliki. Azerbaidzhano-rossi-iskie otnosheniia v 1918-1922 gg., MIK, Moscow, 2006; M. Oztiurk, Sovetsko-turetskie otnosheniia na Kavkaze v 1918-1923 gg. : dissertation in defense of a PhD in History, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, 2010 (this work is interesting in that it contains an extensive bibliography of research studies on the dissertation topic published in Turkish); A.N. Kheifets, Sovetskaia diplomatiia i narody Vostoka, 1921-1927, Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1968; A.M. Shamsutdinov, Natsionalno-osvoboditelnaia borba Turtsii v 1918-1923 gg., Nauka Publishers, Moscow, 1966.
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ic viewpoint, completely ignoring the historical-legal aspects. In other words, they were primarily interested in the political context and to some extent the implication of the content of the Soviet-Turkish and Transcaucasian-Turkish talks that ultimately led to the signing of the Moscow and Kars treaties, but paid no attention to how the agreements reached were formulated and enforced in the texts of international legal acts or the context in which this occurred. These aspects revealed some enigmas and revelations, however, which will be examined more closely below.
First Step to the Autonomization of Nakhchivan: Behind the Scenes and the Outcome of the Soviet-Turkish Moscow Talks of 1921
As we know, the legal status of Nakhchivan as an autonomous republic within the jurisdiction of Soviet Azerbaijan was first regulated in international law by Art III and Appendix I (C) of the Moscow Treaty of 16 March, 1921 entered between the government of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic (R.S.F.S.R.) and the government of the Great National Assembly of Turkey (GNAT), whereby the content of the appendix to the agreement largely copied and only partially specified the provisions of the second paragraph of the indicated article of the agreement that defined the direction (leading line) of the border of the Nakhchivan District (this was precisely what the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic was called in the Russian version of this agreement) toward Armenia. However, despite all the brevity and even terseness of the legal formulations, the Moscow treaty regarding Nakhchivan (at least in its officially published Russian version2) contained three principal aspects that none of the researchers we know of had paid attention to before, so they should be examined in closer detail.
■ First, as follows from the formulations of the original text of the agreement, the government of the R.S.F.S.R. and the government of GNAT "agree," that is, recognize de jure the existence de facto around Nakhchivan of an autonomous territory under the protectorate of Azerbaijan, which was already Soviet at that time. In other words, both sides were only legitimizing in the form of a regulatory provision of an international legal act a historical fact that already objectively existed at the time the Moscow agreement was entered, signed, and ratified (it was ratified by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the R.S.F.S.R. on 20 July, 1921 and by GNAT on 31 July, 1921, and ratification instruments were exchanged on 22 September, 1921 in Kars at the opening of the Turkish-Transcaucasian talks) in this geographic area.
■ Second, neither the government of the R.S.F.S.R., nor the government of GNAT had a precisely formulated position regarding what the prospect or even the reality of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic might be. The vague ideas and positions of the parties to the Moscow treaty on this issue can best be described by the vague definition of the object of their legal regulation: for example, in the first paragraph of Art III of the treaty, the geographic area of the administrative jurisdiction of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is defined as "the Nakhchivan District," in the second paragraph as "the Nakhchivan Territory," and in Appendix I (C) as "the Territory of Nakhchivan."
It is well known that French was the working language of the Soviet-Turkish talks in Moscow, which was known for its precise and unambiguous semantic meaning of each
2 See: Sobranie uzakonenii i rasporiazhenii Rabochego i Krestianskogo pravitelstva RSFSR, No. 73, 12 December, 1921, pp. 731-735.
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word, and the Turkish delegation took back to Angora (now Ankara) with them a copy of the Moscow Treaty with the R.S.F.S.R. on Friendship and Fraternity drawn up in French. The different definitions mentioned emerged as a compromise of the positions of the Bolsheviks and Kemalists or as a result of the general vagueness of the situation, or as a result of the mutual lack of desire of the sides to specify their position in precise terms on the legal status of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic. Whatever the case, the fact remains that according to the provisions of the Moscow treaty, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic was postulated as a sovereign territory under the protectorate of Azerbaijan, which, in turn, could not refuse to perform the international legal obligation it had assumed in favor of a third party.
■ Third, in keeping with the second paragraph of Art III of the Moscow treaty, Soviet Russia stood aside of its own accord (or under pressure from Turkey) from participating in defining and subsequently demarcating the border between "the Nakhchivan District" and Armenia. The parties to the Moscow treaty concurred that all the issues relating to territorial demarcation and in situ determination of the borders of the Nakhchivan autonomy legitimized under the treaty should be resolved by a three-party commission consisting of representatives of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia. Russia's "interference" in this process was strictly technical and limited to ensuring that demarcation and determination of the border line by the delegates of this commission was carried out according to the map of the Russian General Headquarters at a scale of 1/210000—5 versts to one inch.
The three historical-legal aspects mentioned, which contemporary researchers and their Soviet predecessors failed to see, raise two principally important questions for us today, without an answer to which formation of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic will not be comprehensive, therefore inadequately studied.
The first question is related to the vague state-legal titles of Azerbaijan at that time in the text of the Moscow treaty. It was signed by authorized persons on 16 March, 1921, when the Azerbaijan Socialist Soviet Republic, declared on 28 April, 1920, already existed as a result of Sovietization. However, Art III of the agreement uses the term "Azerbaijan," and not "the A.S.S.R.," that is, an ethnonymic, rather than a state-political toponym. This means that at the Moscow talks, both Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey were little interested in the political-legal institutionalization of the Soviet Azerbaijan state that existed at the time when defining the status of the autonomy of Nakhchi-van. Instead the emphasis was placed on legalization of the state-legal unity of Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan, and not on specifying the political regimes existing in their territories.
Nor does the text of the Moscow treaty make it possible to talk reliably about whether the delegation members of the negotiating parties understood that the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic was a legal successor of proto-state entities existing earlier in its territory in 1918-1921 in the form of the Araz-Turkic Republic, the Southwest Caucasian Republic, the Provisional Governorate General of Southwest Azerbaijan, and so on. This opinion of ours is based on the terminology of the treaty: if the negotiators considered one of them to be a precursor, then why did Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey use the term "the Nakhchivan District," and not some autochthonous name (self-name)?
In the specific historical conditions of the spring of 1921, there were Turkish troops in the territory of Nakhchivan under the command of Colonel Vaisal Unuvar, which ensured, as it says in the verbatim records of the meetings of the political commission at the Soviet-Turkish talks in Moscow (kept in the depositories of the Russian Federation Foreign Policy Archive and studied in detail at one time by J.P. Hasanli), "Turkey's patronage" over the Muslim population of this territory. The Muslim population had called the Turkish troops to their defense, whereby they were willing to give the right of patronage exclusively to Azerbaijan. Due to this objective circumstance, the opinion of the Turkish side in the talks on this issue was decisive, which gave it the initiative to propose not only the content
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of the regulations in the articles of the Moscow treaty regarding the autonomous status of Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan's protectorate over it, but also their formulation. The members of the GNAT delegation at the Moscow conference, like all other revolutionaries of all times and peoples, wanted to be the creators of history themselves and start on a clean page, whereby being the founding fathers of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of Azerbaijan, and so were not willing to share this glory with the creators of the proto-state formations that existed before them in their territory and had now faded into oblivion.
Proof that the above conclusions are just can be found in the chronology and content not only of the official talks of the delegations of Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey, but also of the consultations held behind the scenes of their representatives, both among themselves and with the supreme political leadership of the two countries. J.P. Hasanli described the chronology of the Soviet-Turkish talks in sufficient detail by in Chapter VI "Russian-Turkish Conference in Moscow: The Nakhchivan Question in Regional Policy" in the second volume of his multivolume The History of Diplomacy of the Azerbaijan Republic,,3 so there is no need for us to discuss it in detail here.
However, we deem it necessary to draw readers' attention to the following aspect of these talks: having begun on 25 February, three days later they were on the verge of breaking up and the GNAT delegation returning to Angora due to the unwillingness of the authorized representatives of the Soviet government to unconditionally accept the provisions of the National Pact of the Ke-malists regarding several territories of the Transcaucasus that had earlier been part of the Russian Empire. The supreme political leadership of Soviet Russia was categorically against Ajaria's (the former Batum District) accession to Turkey, which, in turn, was just as categorically against transferring the rights to the territory of Nakhchivan to anyone else but Azerbaijan. Resolution of this collision required the personal unofficial interference during the talks of two political heavyweights—member of the Politburo and Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) Joseph Stalin and former chief of General Headquarters of the Ottoman Empire in Soviet Russia at that time Army General Ismail Enver-pasha, the participation of whom in the back rooms of the Soviet-Turkish talks in Moscow ultimately ended in GNAT prohibiting him from entering the country for the rest of his life (the order on this was issued on 12 March, 1921, but by that time he had already succeeded in doing his part to persuade the Turkish delegation to leave Batum under the jurisdiction of the newly declared Socialist Soviet Republic of Georgia). As a result, everything boiled down, as often happens in diplomatic practice, to mutual concessions that were of principal importance to the historical destiny of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic.
The personal participation of Joseph Stalin and Ismail Enver-pasha in the Soviet-Turkish talks ended in two personal unofficial meetings of the first with the GNAT delegation and a conversation of the second with Colonel General Ali Fuat Cebesoy, plenipotentiary of GNAT in Soviet Russia, a member of the official delegation. When preparing Joseph Stalin's second meeting with the Turkish negotiators, which was held on 9 March, 1921, People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the R.S.F.S.R. Georgy Chicherin sent him a written request about what specifically he had to say to the Turkish plenipotentiaries as one of the political leaders of Soviet Russia. Stalin's written reply, which is now kept in the Russian State Archives of Sociopolitical Information, to Chicherin's note came on 6 March, that is, three days before the scheduled meeting. This fact makes it possible for us to say very definitely that the content and course of the talks were under Stalin's constant and keen attention. He not only controlled, but also orchestrated each diplomatic step and statement of the Soviet delegation, being essentially its political supervisor, while People's Foreign Commissar Chicherin, as official leader of the delegation, was left to carry out representative and strictly technical functions, relaying the decisions Stalin had already made to the other side.
' See: J.P. Hasanli, op. cit., pp. 356-435.
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This can be fully seen in the directive tone of this letter, the content of which we present in full in Appendix 1.4
At the Soviet-Turkish talks in Moscow in 1921, Azerbaijan was represented by People's Commissar for Justice of the A.S.S.R. Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy, who was also the representative of the A.S.S.R. in the R.S.F.S.R. at that time. Due to his excellent knowledge of the Turkish language, he was an indispensable mediator between the official delegations when holding informal consultations behind the scenes of the talks and, since Stalin knew him personally during the years he spent in Baku, he essentially became his confident. Suffice it to say that as early as 7 March, he told Stalin about the reaction of the Turkish side to the proposals he had still not made on possible concessions on the part of the R.S.F.S.R, which he did not voice until 9 March. In so doing, Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy did not inform the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the R.S.F.S.R. Georgy Chicherin about the content and results of his contacts with the Turkish delegation to the same extent that he informed Stalin about them.
In particular, on 6 March, 1921, the day Joseph Stalin responded to Georgy Chicherin's inquiry about the precise content of his upcoming statement to the Turkish delegation, the text of which we published above, Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy had already discussed it with the official Turkish representatives. The next day, 7 March, he informed Stalin that the day before he had conversed at length with the Turks, as a result of which he found out that they were no longer particularly interested in Nakhchivan or Batum, since they were convinced that any arguments relating to those areas were futile, and were now more engaged in the initiative of moving the border line 20 versts from the railway right of way, in light of which they wanted to meet with Stalin personally as soon as possible.5 However, after his talk, he said to Chicherin only that the Turkish representatives were asking Stalin to allow three hours to discuss all the articles of the treaty.6 As we can see, thanks to Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy, member of the Politburo and Organizational Bureau of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) Joseph Stalin was much better informed about the moods and position of the GNAT delegation at the talks in Moscow than People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the R.S.F.S.R. Georgy Chicherin.
Incidentally, at that time the definition "the Nakhchivan District" was being actively used by Azerbaijani diplomacy to designate the territory located within the borders of the Nakhchivan, Sharur-Delaragez, and part of the Irevan uezds of the former Erivan Gubernia of the Russian Empire and controlled in the spring of 1921 by Turkish troops, as a result of which it de facto came into legal circulation during the Moscow conference in the form of legal custom. Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy naturally also had something to do with this, whom Joseph Stalin had essentially given the go-ahead in the final legal formulation of the results of the Soviet-Turkish talks on the Nakhchivan question. As a result of this, the term proposed by an outside participant in the talks who was not an official participant in the delegation of either negotiating party was used by the signatories in the text of the Moscow treaty. In this way, as a participant in the Moscow conference as an observer, Azerbaijan nevertheless had significant, if not to say decisive, influence on the content and outcome of this vitally important question for it.
In this respect, readers' attention should be drawn to another essentially important, in our opinion, circumstance: discussion of the Nakhchivan question and ultimate coordination of the formulation of Art II of the Moscow Treaty on Friendship and Fraternity took place on 10 March, 1921, that is, the day after the representatives of the Turkish delegation met with Joseph Stalin, which was re-
4 J.P. Hasanli included this document in the text of his work indicated above with unstipulated cuts in its reproduction, which is a violation of the rules of academic etiquette, and without adhering to rules accepted in Russia for the publication of archival sources, which led to significant loss of the emphasis of the semantic meaning contained in it (cf.: J.P. Hasanli, op. cit., p. 388).
5 See: Letter from B. Shakhtakhtinskiy to J. Stalin of 7 March, 1921, RGASPI, rec. gr. 558, inv. 1, f. 3529, sheets 1-2.
6 See: Ibidem.
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corded in the verbatim records of the meeting of the political commission of the talks. The question of transferring Nakhchivan under the protectorate of Azerbaijan did not arouse any major objections in any of the parties, just as the content of the appendix to this article containing a description of the borders actually existing at the time of the Nakhchivan District did not arouse any arguments. The discussion only developed during a search for ways to formulate the special guarantee of the autonomy of Azerbaijan after its territory was transferred to the state-political jurisdiction of Azerbaijan, as a result of which two interrelated regulations were included in Art III of the treaty that "the Nakhchivan Region ... forms an autonomous territory under the protectorate of Azerbaijan, providing that Azerbaijan does not concede its protectorate to a third state."7 The content and outcome of the talks during the meeting on 10 March graphically show that Stalin's political will, which he voiced a day earlier, that "in the question on Nakhchivan, word is granted to the representative of Azerbaijan," that is, Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy, was executed by the participants in the talks without objections, with particular effort, and in the shortest time possible. And this was the first step on the way to institutionalizing the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of Azerbaijan in its current form.
Second Step in the Autonomization of Nakhchivan: Collisions of Political and Legal Interpretation of the Results of the Kars Conference of 1921
The political-legal status of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of Azerbaijan, according to Art V of the Kars Treaty of 13 October, 1921, entered between the government of the Great National Assembly of Turkey and governments of the Socialist Soviet Republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia with the participation of representative of the R.S.F.S.R. Ya.S. Ganetskiy (Furstenberg), was defined even more tersely than in the text of the Moscow Treaty. The essence of the article boiled down to the fact that the plenipotentiaries of the Soviet governments of Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as of Kemalist Turkey "agree" that "the Nakhchivan Region within the borders defined in Appendix 3 of this treaty form an autonomous territory under the patronage of Azerbaijan." At first glance, the impression is created that this regulation of the Kars Treaty is identical in general in form and content to the same provision of the Moscow Treaty, but that is not the case.
The most superfluous comparative analysis of the text of Art III of the Moscow Treaty and Art V of the Kars Treaty make it possible to identify two principal differences between them of a legal, rather than political nature. As has already been mentioned above, the Moscow Treaty regulated the legal status of "the Nakhchivan District" or (in different formulations) "the Nakhchivan Territory," while in the Kars, the matter concerns an entirely defined "Nakhchivan Region." This fact, which is quite obvious from the historical-legal point of view, was unfortunately not noticed by most contemporary Azeri researchers, who prefer today (for well-known and understandable reasons) to place the focus on the ethnopolitical and not the legal aspects of the topic. And they, nevertheless, make it possible to quite definitely claim that the shift in definition was based on an adequate understanding by the participants in the Kars conference of the fact that in the six months that had passed between signing the Moscow and the Kars treaties, state-administrative organization of the territory had been completed or largely carried out in Nakhchivan, which had acquired during this time all the necessary administration and governance institutions that qualitatively distinguish an organized and self-governed in the administrative respect region from a self-declared territory of which elements of anarchy and patrimony are characteristic. A short speech by head of the A.S.S.R. delegation at the Kars con-
7 J.P. Hasanli, op. cit., pp. 394-395.
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ference, Behbud Shakhtakhtinskiy, was devoted to the first results of and further prospects for state-political building in the Nakhchivan Autonomy of Azerbaijan. He gave an account of the general state of the administration of the autonomy and the conditions in which it would have to function. In addition, he gave the Turkish side a special memorandum that reflected the unified consolidated position of the Transcaucasian Soviet republics on the Nakhchivan question, in which the "formation of the Autonomous Nakhchivan Soviet Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan S.S.R." was declared.8 Both B. Shakhtakhtinskiy's speech and the memorandum itself were a graphic and, most important, objective and legitimate reflection of the first steps of the Azerbaijan Nakhchivan autonomy's existence under the protectorate of the A.S.S.R., which proved that Soviet Russia, although it had its geopolitical interests in the Transcaucasian regions, tried nevertheless to observe previously reached international agreements.
The second major textual difference in the content of the "Nakhchivan" articles of the Moscow and Kars treaties concerns the legal definition of the relations between Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan. The Moscow Treaty talked about the protectorate of Azerbaijan over Nakhchivan, while the Kars called it patronage. It is paradoxical but true that not one research study we know of on the history of Russian-Turkish-Transcaucasian relations in the 1920s published in Russian mentions, or consequently analyzes, the reasons for this terminological collision. And we think this is the main and even most essential difference in the content of the Moscow and Kars treaties in the context of the topic we are examining (at least this claim is entirely fair with respect to the officially published Russian-language versions of these two international legal acts9).
The reason for this terminological difference is quite easy to explain. In the history and practice of Russian and Turkish foreign policy, the term "protectorate" had a very specific semantic meaning, which was determined empirically. In 1775-1791, the Russian Empire carried out protectorate functions with respect to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Rzechzpospolita), and in 1786-1801, with respect to the Kartli-Kakhetia Kingdom; a large part of the khanates of North Azerbaijan (Karabakh, Sheki, and Shirvan) was transferred to Russian power on protectorate conditions at the beginning of the 19th century. So Soviet diplomats were well aware of the sizes and limits of such a political-legal regime from their courses on the history of diplomacy. The Turkish side was also very well aware of the legal gist of the protectorate regime, since in the 16th-19th centuries the Crimean khanate, Tunisia, and Tripolitania (or Tarabulus in Arabic)—a historical region in North Africa that corresponds to the northwest territory of present-day Libya—were under the protectorate of the Ottoman Empire. In correspondence with these universal ideas, the protectorate of the A.S.S.R. over the Nakhchivan District, in keeping with the provisions of the Moscow treaty, took the form of interstate relations, under which one country recognized the supreme sovereignty of the other over it, primarily in international relations, while retaining autonomy in domestic affairs and its own dynasty being replaced in the reality of the Soviet system with an independent set of power and administrative bodies that copied the state-administrative structure of the metropolis. It seems that this kind of state-political co-subordination, according to the Bolsheviks and Kemalists, most adequately took into account the specifics of the relations between Azerbaijan and Nakhchivan at the beginning of 1921, particularly in conditions when Azerbaijan was deprived at the official level of the opportunity to formulate and express its political-legal position (the Revolutionary Committee of the A.S.S.R. delegated its foreign policy powers to the All-Russia Central Executive Committee of the R.S.F.S.R.). So they used the term "protectorate" directly in the text of the corresponding article of the Moscow treaty.
Entering the Kars Treaty on Friendship between the GNAT government and the Socialist Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia with the participation of the R.S.F.S.R. initially presumed a certain amount of ideological kinship and unity (at least on record) based on the provisions
8 Ibid., pp. 480-481.
9 For the officially published text of the Kars treaty in Russian, see: Foreign Policy Documents of the U.S.S.R., Vol. 4, International Relations, Moscow, 1960, pp. 420-429.
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of the Moscow Treaty on Friendship and Fraternity between the R.S.F.S.R. and the GNAT government. So the term "protectorate," which had a specific legal meaning and was used in the text of the Moscow treaty to designate the co-subordination of Azerbaijan and the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic, was replaced with the word "patronage," which is neutral in terms of international law and vaguer. In so doing, it should not be forgotten that at the Moscow conference, the delegation of the GNAT government had already declared Turkish patronage at one time with respect to Nakhchivan. As a result, this concept became part of the terminology that circulated during the negotiations between the Bolsheviks and Kemalists, and so the shift in concepts occurred without any severe objections during the discussions.
The reason for this could have been the very reasonable formal-legal factor the delegations of the Soviet Transcaucasian states put into effect at the very beginning of the Kars conference. We have already mentioned above how a special memorandum of the A.S.S.R., S.S.R.A., and S.S.R.G. delegations was handed to the Turkish side before the talks began that indicated that Soviet power in the Transcaucasus carried out priority measures aimed at "the formation of the Autonomous Nakhchivan Soviet Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan S.S.R." In terms of the study of legal theory, the main distinction of any republic is formal-legal equality of all homogeneous entities of legal relations—citizens, legal entities, types of property, legal institutions, and so on, which, in turn, are a cornerstone of the theory of egalitarianism or universal equality, which is one of the ideological premises of Bolshevism and, strange as it may seem, of pan-Turkism. Such ideas about the "revolutionary" equality of all and everything naturally had an influence on the practice of international relations of the newly formed states, to which all of the Soviet republics and Kemalist Turkey participating in the Kars conference belonged. Based on the fervor of the revolutionary restructure of the world, the subordination of one of the two Soviet republics to another was unacceptable, however a specific and precise semantic meaning of the legal concept "protectorate" presupposed the subordination. So in order to avoid the difference in political ideal and legal reality, the authors of the Kars Treaty changed it to "patronage."
It should also be kept in mind that the Kars conference was held in specific historical conditions when the GNAT government was waging the 1919-1923 war of independence against all protectorates—British, French, Greek, and Italian—imposed by the provisions of the Treaty of Sèvres of 1919 on certain Turkish territories. Therefore, from the ideological standpoint, it could not permit in the Nakhchivan question that one part of a state friendly toward it carried out protectorate over another part of it.
As we see, there are many legitimate reasons for replacing one concept with the other in the textually similar articles of the Moscow and Kars treaties, each of which has the right to exist and so cannot be the only authentic one. We, in turn, believe that this terminological replacement was not accidental and expressed the change in views regarding Azerbaijani-Azerbaijani relations that was occurring as the sovereignty of Soviet Azerbaijan over the territories under its jurisdiction strengthened.
The change in terminology, that is the replacement of the specific-legal term "protectorate" for the indefinite-political concept "patronage," automatically entailed excluding mention of the impossibility of it conceding to "any third state." If from the formal-legal point of view, the right of protectorate could be conceded from one state to another, of which there were already examples in the history of the French-British alliance cooperation with respect to the occupied territories of the former Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, as happened in Trans-Jordan, for example, depriving a particular territory of patronage by a specific state in the legal reality of the 1920s was impossible, since patronage was a political formulation and not a legal definition. While insisting on the adoption of precisely that formulation of the regulation of the first paragraph of Art V of the Kars Treaty, the countries of the Transcaucasus were essentially transforming the protectorate of Azerbaijan over Nakh-chivan into a state-political sovereignty, thus depriving Nakhchivan of the known limits of political independence within the framework of an autonomy.
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The fact that the initiative of the GNAT delegation on the definition and enforcement in the treaty text in the form of appendices to the corresponding articles of the general legal foundations of the autonomy of Nakhchivan and Batum expressed when developing the corresponding articles of the previously adopted Moscow Treaty on Friendship and Fraternity was not reflected in either the structure or the text of the Kars Treaty on Friendship proves that our thesis is correct. We know that this initiative of the Turkish side existed from the telegram of plenipotentiary of the R.S.F.S.R. at the Kars conference Ya.S. Ganetskiy of 3 October, 1921 to People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs of Soviet Russia Georgy Chicherin, in which he states: "There were fervent disputes about Nakhchivan and Batum, since the Turks insisted adding an appendix for every article to the treaty to provide a precise definition of the general foundation of the autonomy of these regions drawn up immediately at the conference by the corresponding republics along with the Turks."10 The Bolsheviks (both the Russians and the Azeris) saw this initiative as threatening to spread the ideas of Kemalism to the territories they considered their own, and so they began actively opposing it, as a result of which appendices were included in the final rendition of the Kars Treaty that concerned only territorial and border issues. The Bolsheviks, as bearers of the idea of world revolution and supremacy of the principle of revolutionary expediency over legal regulations, found the autonomy of Nakhchivan extremely alien from the ideological viewpoint, which was why they used the conversations about it exclusively as a lever of influence or a bargaining chip in the talks with the Kemalists, for whom the autonomy of Nakhchivan as a constituent part of Soviet Azerbaijan was one of the ideological and, possibly, partly moral dominants.
Subsequent events showed this very obviously. J.P. Hasanli described the dynamics of their development in sufficient detail in his History of the Diplomacy of the Azerbaijan Republic,11 and so we will not examine the ups and downs of the political process of gradual deprivation of the Nakhchivan Region of its autonomous status as a constituent part of the A.S.S.R. This status was little coordinated with the international legal regulations of the Moscow and Kars treaties, the adoption of which was initiated by the Bolsheviks themselves. We will only point out that as a result of consistent and targeted efforts that took a little more than eighteen months, the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic was brought down from the heights of a semi-sovereign state to the level of an ordinary district. And Ke-malist Turkey was the only entity of international legal relations that really protested against this.
This abrupt change in the political-legal status of Nakhchivan as a constituent part of the A.S.S.R. greatly concerned Turkey, the Foreign Ministry of which sent a note to the R.S.F.S.R. People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs on 25 June, 1923 saying that the changes in the state structure of Nakhchivan after entering the Kars Peace Treaty had led to annexation of its territory by Azerbaijan. This is shown by the documents of the Politburo Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) sitting of 23 August, 1923, long kept under "strictly secret, to be returned within 5 days." To be very exact, the matter concerns the memorandum of the R.S.F.S.R. People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Georgy Chicherin to Politburo Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) member Joseph Stalin on the changes in the situation in the state structure and political life of Nakhchivan soon after entering the Kars Treaty that evoked such a severe reaction in Turkey. Since this document was previously unknown not only to the broad public, but also to specialists, we will present its text in full in Appendix 2.
This memorandum was examined at the sitting of the Politburo Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) on 23 August, 1923, and on its basis a decision was made, which was entered into the minutes of this sitting No. 27 with the following formulation: "To adopt the proposal of Comrade Chicherin, entrusting the Secretariat (Central Committee of the Russian Com-
10 Telegram from Ya.S. Ganetskiy (Furstenberg) to G.V. Chicherin of 3 October, 1921, RGASPI, rec. gr. 159, inv. 2, f. 108, sheet. 8.
11 See: J.P. Hasanli, op. cit., pp. 489-492.
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munist Party (Bolshevik).—O.K.) with regulating this question with the Transcaucasian Territorial Committee."12 Bringing the practice of state party-Soviet building in Soviet Nakhchivan into harmony with the regulations of international law was not long in coming: on 8 January, 1924, the Transcaucasian Central Executive Committee approved the decision of the Central Executive Committee of Azerbaijan on the formation of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic as a constituent part of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. and on 9 February, a corresponding decree was issued by the Central Executive Committee of Azerbaijan. This resulted in final state-legal institutionalization of Nakhchivan as part of the A.S.S.R., T.S.F.S.R., and U.S.S.R. as the Nakhchivan A.S.S.R., the successor of which at present is the NAR AR.
Conclusion
Summing up the above, we have every reason to draw several general conclusions:
■ First, the regulations of international law that were enforced in the Moscow and Kars treaties of 1921 have always played and continue to play an exclusive role in the history of the political-legal institutionalization of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of Azerbaijan in the Soviet period, creating in aggregate a legal foundation for the current state-legal status of the autonomy. This is why studying and comprehending the political history of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic is absolutely impossible without a detailed analysis of the legal side of this problem, since it is precisely the regulations of international law and not their interpretation in compliance with the political will of the ruling elite that were and still remain the cornerstone of the current state status of Nakhchi-van. This speaks again in favor of our thesis that the history of Nakhchivan acquiring an autonomous status as a constituent part of Azerbaijan is unique not only in the history of the Transcaucasus (although it was caused by its intricacies), but also in the context of human development in contemporary history.
■ Second, the state-legal status of the contemporary Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic (in contrast to the legal foundations of most other autonomies as constituent parts of all the other countries of the world) has as broad international legal guarantees as possible. This not only predetermines the unique status in contemporary times of the NAR as a constituent part of the AR, which cannot be compared with any other autonomy in the world, but also its inviolability, which fully excludes all transformations or modernization.
■ Third, the historical experience of the autonomization of Nakhchivan, its international legal recognition and support, as well as subsequent existence have also shown in practice and proven that this kind of state-political organization of one part of a state with respect to another could pursue the aim not only of creating an enclave to fully satisfy the social, economic, and cultural rights and legal interests of some of the citizens of this country in the ethnic or religious minority (as is happening today in most cases in essentially every country of the world), but also of pursuing a diametrically opposite—unionist—aim of ensuring civil and political unity of the representatives of one ethnicity living in two parts of the same country that do not have a common land border between them. Unfortunately, this political-legal fact has not been duly recognized and comprehended in the Russian-language scientific literature we know of on the history of state and law, and so will inevitably demand the closest attention in the near future.
12 Minutes No. 27 of the Politburo Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) sitting of 23 August, 1923, RGASPI, rec. gr. 17, inv. 3, f. 375, sheet 2.
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And last, when talking in historical hindsight about the political and state-administrative au-tonomization of Nakhchivan as a constituent part of Azerbaijan (both during Soviet and contemporary times), we cannot forget the great and even exclusive influence that the position of, first, the Kemal-ist government of the Great National Assembly of Turkey and, later, the Turkish Republic that followed autonomization had on its content and the results of the political and legal institutionalization of the autonomy. In the three years—from February 1921 to February 1924—that separated declaration of the idea of giving Nakhchivan the status of an autonomy within Azerbaijan enforced in the text of the Moscow Treaty on Friendship and Fraternity and its practical political and legal implementation in the form of issuing a decree of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. on the creation of the Nakhchivan A.S.S.R., first the Kemalists and the Turkish army and then the Turkish Republic were active and consistent protectors of the Muslim population of the region both from exile or destruction by the Armenian nationalists and from assimilation by the Bolshevik internationalists. Throughout the political history of the Nakhchivan autonomy, the role of the Turkish factor as a guarantee of its status has been more than significant.
Time has shown that the historical experience of the creation and subsequent institutionalization of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic as a constituent part of Azerbaijan is of immense significance. The Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic became a unique way in its time of ensuring ethnic and territorial unity of the Azeri nation when two areas of settlement of the representatives of one ethnicity divided by a strip of compact residence of the representatives of another and hostile ethnicity joined into a single state.
APPENDICES Appendix 1
"COMRADE CHICHERIN.
"I would like to inform you, according to your request, of the precise content of my statements to the Turkish delegates on possible, in my opinion, concessions by the R.S.F.S.R.
"1. A large part of the Batum District will remain in the R.S.F.S.R., Artvin and Ardenuch will go to Turkey, the new border between the R.S.F.S.R. and Turkey will pass approximately along the Liman-Bokhchkha-River Chorokh-River Imerkhevi line [and on toward the east] to the border of the Kars Region. It stands to reason that I am speaking of an approximate line, for a precise border based on this approximate line must be determined by a corresponding commission.
"2. The military does not agree to concede Ardohan to Turkey, considering it the key to Tiflis, nevertheless I (Stalin) hope to break the military and achieve concessions so that the border between the R.S.F.S.R. and Turkey passes approximately along the line of the old border between the Kars Region and the Tiflis Gubernia, whereby I make the same specification about a precise border based on the approximate line I made above in point one.
"3. Alexandropol is being cleansed by Turkey, whereby along the entire Alexandropol-Kamar-lu railway (to the west of this line), a strip of approximately 20 versts in width is provided in favor of the R.S.F.S.R.
"4. In the Nakhchivan question, the last word goes to the representative of Azerbaijan. "6 March, 1921.
"The Kremlin
"[Stalin]
"[P.S. I made the inserts in red ink. J. St.]."13
13 Letter from J.V. Stalin to G.V. Chicherin of 6 March, 1921, RGASPI, rec. gr. 5558, inv. 11, f. 824, sheet 8.
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The text of the document is typed, hand-written author's inserts are in square brackets, publication is carried out in accordance with the spelling and punctuation rules of contemporary Russian retaining the author's spelling of proper names.
Appendix 2
"21 August, 1923
"To Comrade STALIN
"Copies to members of the Politburo and members of the collegium of the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs.
"Dear Comrade,
"We once received a protest from the Turkish Government against annexation of Nakhchivan by Azerbaijan... According to the Moscow and Kars treaties, Nakhchivan is an autonomous territory under the patronage of Azerbaijan. The Turkish Government found out that by a decision of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan Republic, Nakhchivan has been turned into part of Azerbaijan territory, which contradicts the agreements with Turkey. None of our letters and telegrams sent to Tiflis about this (the matter concerns the Central Executive Committee of the T.S.F.S.R.—O.K.) have been answered. When Comrade Orjonikidze arrived in Moscow, I wrote to him about this, and now I have received a reply from him from Berlin that the congress of the Nakhchivan Territory has declared itself an inseparable part of Azerbaijan, and that at present it has been given the rights of a district. Comrade Orjonikidze adds that no one objected to this, believing that Nakhchivan has the right to do this.
"This, unfortunately, is not correct. If a certain territory has a certain status under an agreement, its status cannot be changed without the consent of the negotiating parties. Luxemburg, for example, cannot be annexed either by France, or by Germany, or by Belgium, no matter what the people of Luxemburg itself want. So, in this case, there has indeed been a violation of our agreements with Turkey. I do not see why Nakhchivan cannot be declared an autonomous region, which essentially will not differ particularly from its status as a district.
"With best communist regards,
"Chicherin."14
The author of this article is putting the full text of this document into scientific circulation for the first time.
14 Minutes No. 27 of the Politburo Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) sitting of 23 August, 1923, RGASPI, rec. gr. 17, inv. 3, f. 375, sheet 12.
