 Similarly, by the end of 1988, dozens of villages in Armenia had become deserted, as most of Armenia's more than 200,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslim Kurds left.In December 1989 The Supreme Soviets of the Armenian SSR and Nagorno-Karabakh passed a resolution on the formal unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia, in accordance with the Soviet law on the people's right to self-determination.The pogrom of Armenians in Baku took place shortly afterwards and according to a number of sources it was a direct response to this resolution.