25th Anniversary of Karabakh Movement

Karabakh movement - a social movement in support of the demands of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh region of the transfer of the Azerbaijani SSR to the Armenian SSR (late 1980s - early 1990s).

On February 13, 1988, Armenians in Karabakh, then an autonomous oblast in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic, began demonstrating in their capital, Stepanakert, in favor of unification with then Soviet Armenia. Six days later they were joined by mass marches in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, with the Soviet of People’s Deputies in Karabakh voting overwhelmingly on February 20 to request the transfer of the region to Armenia.

Nationalists in Azerbaijan responded with pogroms in Sumgait and further ethnic reprisals against hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Baku and other cities and towns across the country.

The collapse of the USSR in late 1991 triggered a war over the enclave that ended in 1994 with Karabakh Armenians gaining de-facto independence from Azerbaijan.