While the “Greater Azerbaijan” movement has employed varying strategies over time, its ultimate political objective has remained consistent. Thus, considering it impossible to occupy the Armenian territories by military means during the years of the Soviet government, leadership of Azerbaijan adopted a novel strategy. This entailed a shift from massacres, persecutions, and forced displacement to a policy of ethnic cleansing, disenfranchisement, national discrimination, distortion of the ethnographic image through ethnographic factor, statistics, and fabricated data, Turkification of toponyms, cartographic distortions, and appropriation of cultural values. It should be noted that the appropriation of new Armenian territories under the false slogan of “proletarian internationalism and friendship of the peoples” under the guise of creating nomadic economies also constituted a significant aspect in the expansionist agendas pursued by the governing bodies of the Azerbaijani SSR. According to Art. Abeghyan’s accurate definition, “...red imperialism continues the policy of white imperialism in the Caucasus. It keeps the Tatar in the state of a nomadic herder, so that the latter, perched on the heights of the Armenian world for six months, continues to hang the sword of Damocles over the head of the Armenian peasant, in a state of obedience to the Muscovite government and its Caucasian representatives.” At the same time, the author of the article emphasized that “The nomadic scourge of the past, which may be exemplified by the Armenian-Tatar conflicts of 1905–1906, brought numerous disasters to the Armenians, resulting in being the most effective weapon in the hands of the Tsarist regime”.

KeywordsGreater Azerbaijan Azerbaijani SSR expansionism pan-Turkism nomadic economy Central Executive Committee demography