In a referendum held amid the Soviet Union's collapse, more than 99 percent of Armenian voters chose independence, formally ending seven decades of Soviet rule. The vote came just weeks after a failed coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow accelerated the breakup of the USSR. Armenia declared independence the same day, becoming one of the first Soviet republics to formally separate.
Armenia's independence referendum unfolded against the backdrop of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with neighboring Azerbaijan, a territorial dispute already simmering into war even as the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Turnout for the vote was enormous, and the result was almost unanimous — a reflection both of genuine nationalist sentiment and of the Soviet system's evident collapse rendering the old order irrelevant.
Armenia has a long, layered historical memory: it was the first nation in the world to adopt Christianity as a state religion, in the early 4th century, and it endured genocide under the Ottoman Empire in 1915, a trauma still central to Armenian national identity in 1991. Independence, when it finally came, felt to many Armenians less like a beginning than a long-delayed restoration.
Levon Ter-Petrosyan became the country's first president weeks later. The newly independent state immediately faced economic collapse, an energy blockade, and open war over Karabakh — a rough birth for a nation carrying thousands of years of history into a very uncertain decade.
Key people: Levon Ter-Petrosyan, Mikhail Gorbachev