by David Zenian
The collapse of the Soviet Union shattered the infrastructure of many of its fifteen member republics, but also gave others a chance to build new states despite overwhelming odds.
Nagorno (Mountainous) Karabakh, landlocked and barely the size of Delaware, was not one of the fifteen. Instead, it was one of the USSR's many autonomous regions-in this case within Azerbaijan, thanks to a decision by Communist dictator Joseph Stalin in 1923, despite the ethnic composition of the region, its Armenian majority, the expressed wishes of its people and the fact that it had been part of Armenia from as early as the 3rd century BC.
Nagorno Karabakh was supposed to be legally autonomous, and its internal administration in the hands of its Armenian majority, but the reality was far from that. All key posts were in Azerbaijani hands, including the police. In 1974, the head of Nagorno Karabakh's cultural committee, Jean Andrian, tried to enhance ties with Armenia. He was dismissed from his post.
Similar cases of discrimination were evident in land distribution, roads, education and other aspects involving the daily lives of Nagorno Karabakh's Armenians.
"To travel from Stepanakert to Martakert, we had to go through a number of Azerbaijani villages. While the actual distance was only 40 kilometers, we had to travel 170 kilometers to get to our destination. The Azerbaijani authorities built roads only to link the Azeri villages, but not the Armenian villages," he said.
Under communist and Azerbaijani control, Nagorno Karabakh's agriculture, industry, technology, taxation, energy, and other pillars of its infrastructure were interlocked with other entities , some several thousands of miles away across the vast Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics.
"This was how the Soviet system was structured. Moscow saw to it that no one was self sufficient, and our status within Azerbaijan made things even worse," Deputy Minister of Economy Benyamin Babayan said.
"While the fifteen republics answered to Moscow, we could only take our grievances to Baku, which not only turned a deaf ear, but also followed a policy of discrimination against Armenian Nagorno Karabakh," he said.
So when the Soviet Union fell apart, Nagorno Karabakh-like all other members of the former Soviet Union-lost the precarious safety net of at least functioning within the larger Soviet infrastructure.
Production, be that in agriculture or industry, dropped-but often more because of the loss of markets than the war of independence. "We used to produce up to 150,000 tons of grapes per year. Today's production is not more than 6,000 tons per year," Babayan said.
The same is true with wheat. It is down from an annual crop of 110,000 tons to 34,000 tons now. Hundreds of acres of fertile land are too close to the front lines to be cultivated and manpower is depleted because of the war effort.
In the so-called "old days" the entire wheat crop went to Azerbaijan, where all the flour mills were located. Azerbaijan, in turn, kept what it needed and "sold" the rest to Moscow.
Nagorno Karabakh now has its own flour mills, and despite the drop in the wheat crop, "we still have more than enough to meet our own needs," Babayan said. "In fact, we are in a position to export quantities of wheat to Armenia. As for the grapes, most of our crop used to go to Russia-and that market no longer exists," he said. But regardless of the drop in agricultural production, the quality of life has improved for the Armenian farmers of Karabakh.
Under Azerbaijani rule, the best lands were in the hands of the minority Azeri population. "Our farmers worked for them-at least effectively. Crop management was in Azeri hands. The Armenian towns and villages were not even allowed to have their own flour mills. We gave them the wheat and in return, we received a pre-determined quantity of flour," Babayan said.
Freedom has changed all that.
The Armenian farmer is now the lord of his own land, despite the fact that land ownership is still not privatized like in neighboring Armenia.
"The farmer pays a small and symbolic rent to the government in Stepanakert and after that, he is free to do what he wants with his land. He has enough to eat and sell what he does not use himself, but often joins forces with other farmers nearby to create a more viable situation for himself and the group," Babayan said.
While the agricultural sector has been bruised, it has survived the breakup of the Soviet Union and the state of war that followed Nagorno Karabakh's independence, heavy industry has not been that fortunate.
"We are fairly self-sufficient as far as agriculture is concerned, but farming is not our only way of life. Many of our factories have closed while production in others is way down," Minister of Economy Spartak Terossian said, adding, "Is there a former Soviet republic whose economy has not collapsed?".
Terossian attributes the setback to the loss of the old Soviet markets.
Examples are many, but most striking are Karabakh's silk, shoe, electrical and semi-conductor factories which once employed thousands of people and generated millions of dollars-however not to bolster the treasury of the pre-dominantly Armenian and legally autonomous Nagorno Karabakh, but all for the central government in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.
Levon Kocharian, director of the 70-year-old silk factory, says "We lived under the Azerbaijani thumb long enough. We suffered discrimination, persecution and injustice. We produced more, but freedom is more important than all that," he said during a tour of the semi-deserted factory on the outskirts of Stepanakert, the capital of Mountainous Karabakh.
Kocharian said under Azerbaijani rule, Armenian workers were always paid less than their fellow Azeri workers who also received preferential treatment from the Baku government.
"If two workers, one Armenian and another Azeri, got into trouble, the Armenian went to jail and the Azeri was not punished. No one asked him where he got all that money to spend on caviar and vodka. Armenians were questioned and often punished as thieves if they seemed to live above their means," Kocharian said.
Conditions are not much better at the Stepanakert shoe factory which once had a work force of 1,200 and produced up to 4,000,000 pairs of shoes a year.
Now only 170 are employed at the almost idle factory and while its only product today is several thousand pairs of military boots for Karabakh's armed forces, factory managers are constantly searching for new markets, especially in the Baltic states.
Like every public institution in Karabakh, the shoe factory has a memorial wall dedicated to its workers killed in the war with Azerbaijan.
On a recent Sunday, Sylva Tahirian, whose husband was killed in the fighting, was there with her children. Similar scenes are repeated across Karabakh every day.
At the once bustling electronics factory, which lost 44 of its workers in the war, director Vladimir Abrahamian is busy re-tooling in an effort to fight back a shut down. Change is in the air.
"We produced nearly 60 percent of the Soviet Union's needs in semi-conductors and stabilizers. Now those factories which used our products are closed, therefore we have no markets," Abrahamian said. Today, the electronics factory is producing electric water heaters, automobile floor mats from re-cycled rubber and other household appliances which stand a better chance of being marketed outside Nagorno Karabakh.
"We are constantly improvising. It's all part of the effort to stand on our own two feet. The old Soviet Union is gone and so has the 70 years of Azerbaijani hegemony over Nagorno Karabakh. These are difficult days, but there is no turning back." Thanks to personal initiative and help from the central government in Stepanakert, the people of Nagorno Karabakh are getting back on their feet. Restaurants, small shops, stores, and other trading kiosks are everywhere.
Local businessmen travel to and from not only Armenia, but also through Armenia to other parts of the former Soviet Union to trade-bringing much needed cash into the country. The collapse of the Soviet Union has had it's effects, but the people of Nagorno Karabakh are not lamenting the loss.
