MOSCOW (Realist English). The historical merit of the leader of the Armenian national liberation movement, Garegin Nzhdeh, is that the Turkish border does not begin near Derbent now. This was stated by Russian political scientist and publicist Egor Kholmogorov.
“The historical merit of Nzhdeh is that the Turkish border does not begin near Derbent now. Nzhdeh’s finest hour was the Zangezur uprising, when he held the Zangezur region for almost a year, protecting it from the Bolsheviks. What is Zangezur? It is a mountainous region inhabited by Armenians between Nakhichevan and the main territory of Azerbaijan. This area connects the Yerevan Armenia with Iran and, more importantly, cuts off Nakhichevan from Azerbaijan.
All this was completely irrelevant in the Russian Empire, but it became very important during the division of Transcaucasia into separate Armenia and Azerbaijan. In the 1920s, the Bolsheviks were allies of the Kemalist Turkey, having ceded to it significant territories of Russia inhabited by Armenians.
However, to be fair, Turkey controlled half of Transcaucasia by that time, and it was rather she who gave the occupied territories than they were given to her. In particular, Turkey gave Nakhichevan, being fully confident that the Azerbaijani SSR would be a solid array from Nakhichevan, through Zangezur, to Azerbaijan.
Thus, Turkey bordering Nakhichevan would border the whole of Azerbaijan. However, Nzhdeh has been sitting with his fighters in Zangezur for a year, and got to the point that Zangezur was incorporated into the Soviet Armenia. Ethnopolitics triumphed over the Turanian geopolitics. As a result, Turkey, no matter how much it wants, does not have direct access to Azerbaijan, they are cut apart by Zangezur.
And as long as Zangezur is Armenian, the idea of a continuous Turan from Istanbul to Derbent is technically unrealizable. Turkey cannot, in particular, offer Azerbaijan to join a kind of federal empire simply because this will not give anything geopolitically.
That is, Zangezur prevents the spread of Turanism along the southern border of Russia, which has already begun to spill out into Kazakhstan (and they have plans all the way to Yakutia). And the person who cut Turan’s tendon at the very beginning was Garegin Nzhdeh. They hate him for this, they drive off his memory for this, and the attempts to confuse “collaboration” in this case are just a pretext,” Kholmogorov noted in his telegram channel.
Garegin Nzhdeh is an outstanding political and military figure of the Armenian national liberation movement. He was born on January 1, 1886 in the Armenian province of Nakhichevan, which in 1921 was illegally torn away from Armenia and transferred to an artificial entity called the “Azerbaijan SSR”.
According to political scientist Maxim Vaskov, “the slander by a part of the Russian media and a new attempt to blacken the memory of Garegin Egishevich Ter-Harutyunyan (Garegin Nzhdeh) is part of the ideological accompaniment of aggression against the Armenian people”: “Garegin Nzhdeh is an outstanding, impeccable officer of the Russian Caucasian Army and the army of the First Armenian Republic, promoted to the rank of officer according to the field patent for his bravery and generalship talent. A man of unconditional courage, duty and honor.”
