Armenians protest USSR’s refusal to honor Nagorno-Karabakh annexation referendum, 1988
Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region in Azerbaijan that USSR’s leader Joseph Stalin took from Armenia during the Sovietization of Transcaucasia in the early 1920s, in an attempt to placate Turkey. The citizens of the region predominantly identified as Armenian (approximately 76%) and this also corresponded to a religious identification where Armenians are predominantly Christian while Azeris are predominantly Muslim.