Today is the 35th anniversary of the beginning of the Karabakh movement.

In the future to the wishes of the Armenian population of the region, on February 20, 1988, the session of the Regional Council of People's Deputies of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region adopted a decision to appeal to the Azerbaijani SSR, Nagorno-Karabakh, to withdraw from Azerbaijan and include it in Armenia.

On February 21, the Artsakh delegation arrived in Yerevan with the decision of the regional council in hand. The rally participants received the news about the decision with great enthusiasm. And immediately, the first and only demand of the February rallies was formed. To convene an extraordinary session of the Supreme Council and immediately respond positively to their appeal.

On February 25 and 26, Yerevan's Theater Square, the adjacent park, and the streets were full of people from Yerevan and the entire republic. Rallies with such a vast number of participants were an unprecedented phenomenon not only in the life of the Armenian people but in the life of the USSR throughout its entire history.

From the initiators and participants of the first rallies to the first person of the Soviet Union, no one in the world could imagine what volume and coverage that movement would have, and even more so, what influence it would have not only on the USSR but also on geopolitical developments and the course of world history.