A year prior to the Russian Revolution, there were 80 thousand Armenians, whose ancestors migrated there in 15th–19th centuries, in the districts on the foothills of the Greater Caucasus Mountains (in the districts of Aresh, Geokchay, Nukha, Shemakha, and Zakatal), the territory of all was inherited by Azerbaijan. Most of the Armenian towns and villages in these districts were destroyed by the Azerbaijani–Ottoman advance against the Baku Commune in late 1918. By 1919, 23 Armenian parochial schools in Shemakha had been closed, and slightly more than 10% of the district's pre-revolution Armenian population survived as evidenced by the 33 wagonloads of their bones. In the Aresh and Nukha districts of the Elizavetpol Governorate, only 3 of 51 Armenian and Udi villages remained, indicating the massacre of 25,000 and the kidnappings of thousands of Armenian girls and women by Azerbaijani and Turkish officers. 48 Armenian villages were destroyed and the female population kidnapped and raped. By 1919, only half of the two districts' Armenian population had survived, forced into the remaining three villages of Nidzh (Nij), Vardashen (Oğuz), and Jalut (Calut). The remaining villages were later destroyed in March 1920 in retaliation for the uprising in Nagorno-Karabakh—causing the survivors to flee up into the Greater Caucasus Mountains or to Georgia. Many of these Armenians were forced into labor by beys, and were often unable to reclaim their stolen possessions. One of the Armenian deputies in Azerbaijan's parliament denounced the treatment of the Armenians in the Greater Caucasus slopes, but their appeals were ignored by the government of Azerbaijan. 1,500 Armenians from this region were later resettle in the Etchmiadzin and Surmalu uezds ("counties") of Armenia.
