threatened to result in Azerbaijan declaring a war [against Armenia] any minute". According to data from Caucasian Ethnographical Collection of Academy of Sciences of the USSR, "the settlements of Azerbaijani population in Armenia had become empty." Nataliya Volkova writes that the ruling party of Armenia, the Dashnaktsutyun, followed a policy of "cleansing the country from outsiders" which "targeted the Muslim population", especially those who had been driven out from Nor Bayazet, Erivan, Etchmiadzin and Sharur-Daralayaz uezds. A Soviet Armenian source writes that at least 200,000 Turks and Kurds were driven from Armenia in 1919 as a result of the ARF government. Moreover, the author adds that by the time of the Sovietization of Armenia in 1920, some 10,000 Turks remained within Armenia. Another Soviet Armenian historian, Bagrat Boryan, charged that the ARF had not established state authority for the administrative needs of Armenia, but for the "extermination of the Muslim population and looting of their property". However, Turkish-German historian Taner Akçam posits that the massacres against the Muslim population of Armenia are exaggerated or even outright fabrications in order to "reinforce the image of the 'Armenian peril.'" Soviet rule The Soviet Armenian government facilitated the repatriation of some 60,000 refugees bringing the total of Azerbaijanis in Armenia up to 72,596 by 1922, forming 9.9% of the population; this number according to the 1926 All-Soviet population census grew to 84,705 whereby the Azerbaijani share of the population declined slightly to 9.6%. By 1939, their numbers had increased to 131,896 or 10.3% of the population. In 1947, Grigory Arutinov, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia, managed to persuade the Council of Ministers of the USSR to issue a decree entitled Planned measures for the resettlement of collective farm workers and other Azerbaijanis from the Armenian SSR to the Kura-Arax lowlands of the Azerbaijani SSR. According to the decree, between 1948 and 1951, the Azerbaijani community in Armenia became partly subject to a "voluntary resettlement" (called by some sources a deportation) to central Azerbaijan to make way for Armenian immigrants from the Armenian diaspora. In those four years some 100,000 Azerbaijanis were deported from Armenia. This reduced the number of those in Armenia down to 107,748 in 1959. By 1979, Azerbaijanis numbered 160,841 and constituted 5.3% of Armenia's population. The Azerbaijani population of Yerevan, that once formed the majority, dropped to 0.7% by 1959 and further to 0.1% by 1989.