East or West? Armenia votes for one direction

Repost for a pivotal election: Nagorno-Karabakh basics. Boomtown Baku. Turkish taboo

Jun 07, 2026

A symbol of Armenian identity: The ‘tatik-papik’ or grandmother and grandfather sculpture hewn from volcanic rock in Nagorno-Karabakh. Image: IsaaK Alexandre KaRslian, Unsplash

This Week, Those Books links the big international story to the world of books and has a few thousand followers on every continent except Antarctica. Our aim is to provide, in roughly five minutes, crucial context – from fiction and non-fiction – to the shouty, doomscroll news cycle.

Housekeeping note:

Back with new content next week. This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared in October 2023

Armenian exodus and the pains of history

Rashmee Roshan Lall

October 4, 2023

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The Big Story:

Armenia’s June 7 election, the first since its 2023 loss of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region to Azerbaijan, is seen as pivotal in three capitals: Moscow, Brussels, Washington.

Will the South Caucasus nation of 3 million people re-elect Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who has made overtures toward the West? Or will it favour his rivals, who advocate for closer ties with Russia?
Opposition parties have blamed Armenia’s stinging defeat in Nagorno-Karabakh on Prime Minister Pashinyan. But Pashinyan champions a politically sensitive agenda that includes a peace agreement with neighbouring Azerbaijan and the normalisation of relations with Turkey.
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This Week’s Books:

A Turkish bestseller on a taboo subject.
An on-the-ground report from post-Soviet Azerbaijan.
A forensic analysis of the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Bastard of Istanbul

By: Elif Shafak

Publisher: Viking

Year: 2006

This, Elif Shafak’s sixth novel, became the first to be tried in a Turkish court for “insulting Turkishness”. That’s because the story – about two families, one Turkish Muslim, the other Armenian-American – refers to the “millions” of Armenians “massacred” by “Turkish butchers” who “then contentedly denied it all.” Shafak examines how differently Turks and Armenians view the past and the shadow cast on the present by long-ago atrocities.

Choice quote:
“We have first managed and then badly failed to live together.”

Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporter's Adventures in an Oil-rich, War-torn, Post-Soviet Republic

By: Thomas Goltz

Publisher: M.E. Sharpe

Year: 1998

Veteran American correspondent-turned-academic Thomas Goltz, who died in 2023, wrote this account in the early 1990s. It was, he said, “a dirge for a dead country”, where “it was impossible to find a new toilet seat”, such was the “level of chaos, confusion, and self-destruction”. Then, Baku became an oil-boomtown, with Mercedes dealerships “springing up like hydrocarbon-fed mushrooms”. Through his satirical social commentary, Goltz shows how everything changes – but doesn’t – in Azerbaijan. This diary, which he calls “history as contact journalism” (laced with lots of vodka), portrays the “no war/no peace” situation over Karabakh.

Armenia and Azerbaijan: Anatomy of a Rivalry

By: Laurence Broers

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Year: 2019

One of the world’s leading experts on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute explains that it was inseparable from the mostly peaceful unravelling of the Soviet Union and exceptional in having become violent. The Armenian and Azerbaijani conception of their homelands was always “older and wider than a Soviet frame of reference”, he writes. This nuanced book looks at the role of foreign powers and diasporas in the longest-running dispute in post-Soviet Eurasia. After the late 2023 Azerbaijan takeover of Nagorno-Karabakh, Broers, co-founder and co-editor of the journal Caucasus Survey, said “Russia’s acquiescence…tore up the ‘Putin’s frozen conflicts’ script”, which merely shows Russia’s decline.

The Backstory:

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought three wars in as many decades.
Nagorno-Karabakh was claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan following the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The predominantly Christian Armenians regard Nagorno-Karabakh as an ancestral homeland, a cradle of their culture. Muslim Azeris also have cultural ties to the territory, particularly the city of Shusha, the home of Azerbaijani poetry.
Nagorno-Karabakh is within Azerbaijan and the international community has long recognised it as such, but from 1994, it was controlled by its ethnic Armenian population.
In October 2023, more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled their once defiantly autonomous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, after Azerbaijan reclaimed the territory.
Armenian history provided a grim backdrop to that 2023 Nagorno-Karabakh exodus. In an opinion piece, Kim Kardashian, perhaps the world’s best-known Armenian-American, called for the US “to Stop Another Armenian Genocide”.
The reference was, in the words of the UK’s Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, to “policies of expulsion and extermination” carried out by the Ottoman empire from 1915, resulting “in the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenian men, women and children”. The atrocities against Armenians prompted Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the term “genocide” in 1933. Turkey says it “does not deny the suffering of Armenians, including the loss of many innocent lives (but) objects to the one-sided presentation of this tragedy as a genocide by one group against another.”