The Shusha massacre or Shushi massacre (Armenian: , romanized: Shushii charder), also known as the Shusha pogrom, was the mass killing of the Armenian population of Shusha and the destruction of the Armenian half of the city in 1920.The massacre took place between 22 and 26 March 1920, and had as its background a conflict over competing claims of ownership of the region by Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR; Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan Demokratik Cümhuriyyəti), was the first secular democratic republic in the Turkic and Muslim worlds. The ADR was founded by the Azerbaijani National Council in Tiflis on 28 May 1918 after the collapse of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and ceased to exist on April 28 1920. Its established borders were with Russia to the north, the Democratic Republic of Georgia to the north-west, the Republic of Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south. It had a population of around 3 million. Ganja was the temporary capital of the Republic as Baku was under Bolshevik control. The name of "Azerbaijan" which the leading Musavat party adopted, for political reasons, was, prior to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918, exclusively used to identify the adjacent region of contemporary northwestern Iran.Under the ADR, a government system was developed in which a Parliament elected on the basis of universal, free, and proportionate representation was the supreme organ of state authority; the Council of Ministers was held responsible before it. Fatali Khan Khoyski became its first prime minister. Besides the Musavat majority, Ahrar, Ittihad, Muslim Social Democrats as well as representatives of Armenian (21 out of 120 seats), Russian, Polish, and Jewish minorities gained seats in the parliament. Many members supported Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist ideas.Among the important accomplishments of the Parliament was the extension of suffrage to women, making Azerbaijan one of the first countries in the world, and the very first majority-Muslim nation, to grant women equal political rights with men. Another important accomplishment of the ADR was the establishment of Baku State University, which was the first modern-type university founded in Azerbaijan.