[1924-1936]
The international conflict in the Caucasus became very serious and manifest in 1929. In Azerbaijan there were marked Pan-Turanic movements and there were many arrests as a result. There were also revolts among the Ajars, the Ossets, and Abkhazs who wanted to be separated from Georgia. The Armenians of Akhalkalak and Karabagh wanted to join Armenia.
[There were many in both countries who were exiled because of their advocacy of these issues.]
To prevent the pending disaster, Stalin, while increasing the range of reprisals, developed a new draft for a constitution which would fix the boundaries and relations of the multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic empire.
[…]
For the Armenian people nestled in the Araratian Plain, the new constitution was fatal, since it sanctioned all the injustices that had taken place in the territorial arena by granting Georgia control over Akhalkalak and by validating the Azeri annexation of Nakhichevan and Mountainous Karabagh.
On this occasion, Armenians in Tbilisi organized a demonstration which led to the arrest of 150 individuals. It was a tense situation and the interracial relations increased. The Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, Aghasi Khanjian, in vain shuttled between Yerevan, Tbilisi and Moscow trying to find a solution to the situation. On July 1935, during a meeting of the State Committee in Tbilisi with his Russian and Georgian friends, he got into an argument and he was shot with a pistol. His body was moved to Yerevan the 12th of July and was buried unceremoniously.
Asbarez, Fresno, September 1, 1961
The Karabagh File, Documents and Facts, 1918-1988, First Edition, Cambridge Toronto 1988, by the ZORYAN INSTITUTE, edited by: Gerard J. LIBARIDIAN, p. 41.
