1. Foreword: The Struggle to Change the Logic of Armenia’s History

Levon Ter-Petrossian, whose select articles, speeches, and interviews dealing with Armenian-Turkish relations, the Karabagh conflict, and the future of the Armenian statehood are presented in this volume, was the first president of independent Armenia. He served in that capacity from 1991 to 1998 when he resigned following a political crisis triggered by his endorsement of a plan for settling the Karabagh conflict. Ter-Petrossian had briefly served as the Chairman of Armenia’s Supreme Soviet prior to Armenia’s independence and adoption of a presidential system. He had assumed that post in the summer of 1990 when the Armenian National Movement (ANM) unseated the Communists in the elections to the Supreme Soviet in the summer of 1990, becoming the first noncommunist government of a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. Ter-Petrossian was one of the leaders of the ANM, which had started as a movement demanding the transfer of the jurisdiction of the Nagorno Karabagh Autonomous Region from the Azerbaijani to the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, but which then transformed into a movement for democratic rule and independence from the Soviet Union. As such, it became an integral part of the wider democratic movement in the Soviet Union, while Ter-Petrossian became a highly respected figure in it, providing important critiques of the Soviet system, and forming particularly close ties with Boris Yelstin and the Russian liberals.