Armenia between 1918 and 1921
Atlas of the Ethno-Political History of the Caucasus, Arthur Tsutsiev, Yale University Press, 2014
In May 1918, the republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Armenia were created. But the new Armenian state finds itself alone facing the Turkish army, which crosses the former Russian border in March. After taking Alexandropol, she marched on Yerevan, but was stopped at Sardarapat on May 24, 1918; the small republic of Armenia is saved, even if at the Treaty of Batoum in June, it must cede a good part of its territory to Turkey.
Border disputes between the three Caucasian republics are innumerable, in particular with Azerbaijan, a republic with a Turkish (“Tatar”) majority which takes the name of the ancient Adharbaijan of the south of the Araxes. The conflict mainly concerns Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh; the latter, with an overwhelming Armenian majority, has been de facto independent since the summer of 1918. But Azerbaijan, a de facto Turkish protectorate, was Sovietized from April 1920. In May it was the turn of Karabakh and in July that of part of Nakhichevan. At the same time, Turkish military aid did not weaken and the Turkish-Azerbaijani pressure was such that Armenia had to accept the temporary occupation by the Red Army of the three territories on August 10, 1920.
The collusion between the Bolsheviks and the Kemalist Turkish nationalists sealed the fate of the Republic of Armenia, weakened by the Bolshevik uprising of May 1920 and the border conflicts. Turkey attacked the Republic of Armenia in September 1920 and massacred Armenians in the town of Kars; Armenia must accept the drastic conditions of the Treaty of Alexandropol in December 1920, supplemented by the Soviet-Turkish agreements of Moscow and Kars which fixed the western border of Soviet Armenia in 1921; Nakhichevan and Nagorno-Karabakh are declared autonomous under the protection of Azerbaijan: Nakhchivan is an exclave to the west of Azerbaijan while Nagorno-Karabakh is an enclave in Azeri territory.