The Final Decades of the USSR: a Lull before the Storm By  Andrew Andersen and Georg Egge

The Final Decades of the USSR: a Lull before the Storm The three-and-a-half decades between the death of Stalin and collapse of the USSR were marked by relative stability in the South Caucasus including Mountainous Karabakh and Armenian-Azerbaijani frontier[1]. The fragile status quo was possible exclusively due to the iron grip of the Soviet bureaucracy enforced by the army and security services that were capable of keeping under control any potential movement that could even hypothetically threaten the stability of the Soviet empire. The crash of Communist ideology and total collapse of Soviet economy by the middle of the 80-ies and the loosening of the grip that followed, resulted in the escalation of the unresolved conflict in Mountainous Karabakh and around it, pogroms in Baku and Sumgait and the war for survival of the Karabakh Armenians. But the description of the recent events that followed the disintegration of the USSR is going far beyond this paper.

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[1] By “relative stability” we do not at all mean total absence of occasional conflicts (some of them quite violent), not to mention that it was during the specified period when Nakhichevan ASSR was almost completely de-Armenized while the Armenian population in North Artsakh significantly diminished (Auth.)