of the interwar republic of Armenia describes the fate of the more than eighty-thousand Armenians of Javakheti after the region's occupation by the Ottoman army:Thirty thousand had perished as the result of the Turkish occupation, and those who survived were starving. Some mothers attempted to save their daughters by offering them as wives to Georgian militiamen and soldiers ... hundreds of women and children were pressed into servitude in the adjacent Muslim districts. All roads leading away from Akhalkalak were strewn with the bodies of fleeing Armenians. In September ... of the more than 80,000 Armenians in the county at the beginning of 1918, only 40,000 were left and that these were rapidly succumbing to famine, foreign marriages, concubinage, or to even worse fates. Although the Tiflis government regarded Akhalkalak as an integral part of the Republic of Georgia ... it did nothing to relieve the agony.Lord Curzon during the Paris Peace Conference discussions on the fate of the independent Transcaucasian republics assessed the ethnographic situation in the southwestern uezds of the Tiflis Governorate:Along the line marking the proposed northeastern boundary of Armenia, the counties of Akhalkalaki and Akhaltsikhe fell on the Georgian side, even though, it was stated, they were populated primarily by the Armenian descendants of refugees from Turkey: “On the grounds of nationality, therefore, these districts ought to belong to Armenia, but they command the heart of Georgia strategically, and on the whole it would seem equitable to assign them to Georgia, and give their Armenian inhabitants the option of emigration into the wide territories assigned to the Armenians towards the south-west.” Soviet era Georgia came fully under Soviet control in 1921, and Javakheti, along with other former Georgian territories, became part of the Georgian SSR. The remaining Muslim minority in Javakheti, also known as "Meskhetian Turks", were deported to Uzbekistan in 1944 during the regime of Stalin. Republic of Georgia Currently Armenians form the ethnic majority in the region. Since independence many members of the Doukhobor community have left for Russia. Current situation An expected improvement is the planned construction of the highway (financed by the US Millennium Challenge Account) to more effectively link the region with the rest of Georgia. Also, a railway line has been constructed to run between Kars, Turkey to Baku, Azerbaijan via the area (see: Baku–Tbilisi–Kars railway), which opened in 2017. The Armenian population of Javakheti was opposed to this rail