The world is slowly getting used to the idea that the boundaries of the Soviet Union may be changing. While the crisis over Lithuania has not yet been fully resolved, it appears from the Soviet leader's own pronouncements that independence is merely a matter of time. And that raises all sorts of possibilities, unthinkable until recently.
Some argue that the three Baltic states are a special case, because of the internationally admitted illegality of their occupation by the Soviet Union in 1940; there must be people arguing thus in Moscow. But many others are sure to be thinking of a "domino theory.” If the Baltic states become independent again, who would leave the Soviet Union next? Moldavia, probably, as it was annexed at the same time as the Baltic states. It was seized from Romania, to which it might now be resorted. And after that? Very likely one or more of the three republics in Transcaucasia. Already events there have produced the worst crisis as far as Moscow is concerned, a crisis that came to a head two months before Lithuania's confrontation.
The three republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan are dominated by three ethnic groups whose names they bear. Other groups live there also, and many more in the Caucasus mountains bordering the region to the north. That nationalism has revived in that region is not surprising. The histories, traditions, languages, literatures, and civilizations of the Georgians and Armenians are much older even than those of Lithuania, which has such a distinguished history. Armenia was a Christian kingdom in the fourth century. Georgia received Christianity about the same time, and these peoples are still to a great extent Christian: Armenians of the Gregorian Monophysite church, Eastern Orthodox Georgians. As for the Azeris (or Azerbaijanis), a Turkic people, they have been part of the Islamic civilization for eight or nine centuries and they now have close ties with all the Muslim world.
The three territories briefly become independent when the earlier Russian Empire, which had occupied them in the nineteenth century, collapsed in the 1917 Revolution. The independent republics of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan had short and troubled histories, but that brief spell of independence is being recalled today. Georgia had become a fully recognized state before it was occupied by the Red Army in 1921; and say that they too, as well as the Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians, can talk of illegal occupation.
The Georgian independence movement, despite the deaths caused by Soviet forces in April 1989, is the most advanced in Transcaucasia. For Armenia and Azerbaijan, however, the situation is complicated by feuding, which came to head on January 20, 1990, when the Red Army forced its way into Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
The feud has many complex roots. It is not a purely religious conflict any more than is the conflict in Northern Ireland; and recent plans to set up a fundamentalist Islamic state in Azerbaijan were denied by the Azeri leaders. But as in Northern Ireland, religious differences go together with others to divide communities, and the process becomes self-reinforcing over generations. Historically Armenians were better educated, Western-influenced, and commercially oriented, and Azeris were more agrarian and hierarchically oriented. When Armenians migrated to the oil-rich city of Baku in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they lived apart from
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