However, the new republic faced immense challenges, including refugees from the Armenian Genocide, and military threats from Azerbaijan and Turkey.

This led to coordinated Soviet-Turkish military campaigns, including the occupation of disputed territories like Nakhichevan, Karabakh, Syunik by the Red Army between May and July 1920.

These incursions, coupled with internal unrest and the suppression of a May 1920 Bolshevik uprising in Armenia, weakened the Armenian republic and left it isolated.

[1] Simon Vratsian, the last prime minister of the First Republic of Armenia, described the crisis as being caught between the "Bolshevik hammer and the Turkish anvil.

[1] On the same day, a new Armenian government in Yerevan, formed by a coalition of communists, declared Armenia a Soviet republic, renouncing the Treaty of Alexandropol.

The Red Army continued to face military opposition only in Syunik, where Garegin Njdeh an his soldiers fought until July 1921 under the banner of the Republic of Mountainous Armenia.

Additionally, Lenin feared the Entente was planning to use Georgia as a staging ground for retaking Baku, which provided oil to the Soviets.

Ceaseless warfare and massacres, anarchy contains tyranny, hunger and poverty, pillage and violence, blood and tears—those are the essential features of that period.

Gross agricultural output in 1919 had dropped almost sixfold as compared with 1913 and crop areas had decreased more than fourfold.