Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan through Peace and War by Thomas de Waal

Product Details

Synopsis

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2003

Black Garden is the definitive study of how Armenia and Azerbaijan, two southern Soviet republics, got sucked into a conflict that helped bring them to independence, bringing to an end the Soviet Union, and plaguing a region of great strategic importance. It cuts between a careful reconstruction of the history of Nagorny Karabakh conflict since 1988 and on-the-spot reporting on its convoluted aftermath.

Part contemporary history, part travel book, part political analysis, the book is based on six months traveling through the south Caucasus, more than 120 original interviews in the region, Moscow, and Washington, and unique primary sources, such as Politburo archives.

The historical chapters trace how the conflict lay unresolved in the Soviet era; how Armenian and Azerbaijani leaders exacerbated it; how the Politiburo failed to cope with the crisis; how the war began and ended; how the international community failed to sort out the conflict.

What emerges is a complex and subtle portrait of a beautiful and fascinating region, blighted by historical prejudice and conflict.

Foreign Affairs

Of the half dozen violent conflicts that erupted during the disintegration of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the most complicated and intractable has been the Azerbaijani-Armenian dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh. Never have all the twists and turns, sad carnage, and bullheadedness on all sides been better described — or, indeed, better explained, for de Waal, by deftly combining history with carefully assembled on-the-ground detail, offers a deeper and more compelling account of the conflict than anyone before. He ferrets out critical material from an amazingly diverse set of interviews and assembles the story in a calm, firm, utterly fair-minded fashion, one likely to exercise give-no-quarters partisans on both sides.

Biography

Thomas de Waal is a writer specializing in Russia and the Caucasus. He has reported for, amongst others, the BBC World Service, the Moscow Times, and the Times of London and is co-author of Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus (NYU Press). He is currently Caucasus Editor for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London.