Rauf Garagozov, Dr.

Leading Research Associate

Institute of Strategic Studies of the Caucasus

 

  

Various factors help shape the way any human community perceives its past and hence defines itself.  In many cases involving nations, one can even speak of a certain “politics of memory,” driven by competing forces including often most importantly nationalism and helping to define what is included and what is left out of narratives about the past.  Having regained its independence only relatively recently, Azerbaijanis now face a number of challenges and dilemmas on their way towards the redefinition of their national identity, and I argue most of those have their roots in the Soviet past.  

  

From the outset, the Soviet government strictly controlled historical accounts, not only modern but also ancient, out of a belief that only by controlling the past could it ensure its control over the present and future.  With regard to academic history, the Scientific Council of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences set specific and oft-changing agendas for national scholars on the basis of instructions from the various departments of the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) Central Committee.  And nowhere was the influence of these groups on historical accounts and hence national definition greater than in the case of the Muslim communities which found themselves under Soviet rule.

  

Most of these peoples lacked a national historiographic tradition of their own and consequently were clean slates on which the Communist Party could impose its vision.  The party did so through the Oriental studies system which Moscow held responsible for ensuring that the collective memories and national identities of these groups were consistent with Marxism-Leninism.

  

In the first years of Soviet power, Moscow viewed the Turkey of Mustafa Kemal and even the entire Muslim East through friendly eyes as about to awaken from centuries-old slumber and thus to join the Bolsheviks in fighting against Western capitalism.  But by the early 1930s, Moscow changed course and instead of pushing research stressing the links between Muslim peoples inside the USSR and Muslims abroad, the Soviet government and its Oriental studies arm did what they could to cut the one off from the other.  Scholars working on Azerbaijan thus had to tread carefully lest they fall afoul of the party and be accused of pan-Islamism or Pan-Turkism.  That they had to do so, of course, had a doleful impact on historical scholarship. 

However, many Azerbaijani scholars succeeded in advancing the study of the past by carefully selecting, translating and providing commentaries on primary sources from the Arabic, Persian, and Turkish worlds.  They embraced the chance to get involved in scholarly debates on issues where Moscow had not defined a specific line, such as the discussion of the legacy of Caucasian Albanians that took place between Azerbaijani and Armenian scholars from the 1970s on.  And they also engaged in a variety of other informal communications and scholarly networks to advance their understanding of the national past.

  

With the rise of Gorbachev and the beginnings of glasnost and perestroika, Azerbaijani interest in and ability to study accurately the national past exploded, all the more so because the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict prompted Azerbaijani historians to look into the historical record for arguments explicitly proving that Nagorno-Karabakh was an inalienable part of Azerbaijan and not the Armenian outpost that Yerevan and its supporters claimed. 

 

But Azerbaijani historical scholarship did not limit itself to this task.  It also called into question long-standing but ultimately distorted Soviet understandings as the history of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century, the establishment of Soviet power in Azerbaijan, and the course of Armenian-Azerbaijani clashes in the first decades of the 20th century.  Ziya Bunyatov, an Azerbaijani Orientalist, played a key role in publishing documents and studies on all these issues in the last years of Soviet power.

 

After Azerbaijan regained its independence, two kinds of nationalism – one based on ethnic attachments and the other based on citizenship – entered into intense political competition and had an impact on historical understanding and research.  Ethnic nationalism reached its apogee under President Abulfaz Elchibey, who was himself an Orientalist by profession.  He regarded Azerbaijanis as Turks and their language as a dialect of Anatolian Turkish, and he was responsible for getting the parliament to change the name of the national language from Azerbaijani to Turkic.  But after he was replaced by Heydar Aliyev, who was more committed to nationalism based on citizenship, much of this movement in the ethnic direction was reversed, including the official name of the language. 

 

Like the national narrative of any people, Azerbaijanis have sought answers to the fundamental question: what does it mean to be a member of that community?  That in turn requires deciding who is the “we” and who is the “other.”  Given the conflict with Armenia, defining the major other has not been hard, but Azerbaijanis have had problems in articulating answers to the other questions, all the more so because of the lack of a venerable national historiography and the continuing impact of Soviet policies.  Consequently, questions of how to write national history and whom to include in the list of “national heroes” remain unresolved.  

    

The demands of the Communist ideology of the past could hardly satisfy the interests of contemporary Azerbaijanis.  That was particularly the case with regard to Soviet efforts to “construct” Azerbaijani identity by consciously setting it in opposition to “pan-Islamism” and “pan-Turkism.”  Moscow clearly expected that its model of the “Azerbaijani nation” would make it easier to integrate Azerbaijanis into the “Soviet people.”  To that end, Soviet scholars created “a national history” and a list of “national heroes” to distance Azerbaijanis from other Turkic peoples.  Among those included in this list were Javanshir, a seventh century Albanian Christian prince and commander, and Babak, a ninth century defender of Zoroastrianism and the leader of a rebellion against Islam.  These individuals, connected to Azerbaijan only by their birthplace were, in the Soviet vision, to stand for an Azerbaijanism cleansed of Islamic and Turkic features.

 

Such a rendering of the past not surprisingly is of limited value to Azerbaijanis now in their quest to define their past as they seek to evolve as a nation state.  Indeed, many Azerbaijani nationalists today argue that what the Soviet version represented was a history of “Azerbaijani territory” rather than a history of the “Azerbaijani people,” whose connections to the Turkic and Islamic world are ignored.  As a result, contemporary Oriental studies in Azerbaijan are driven by a nationalist ideology that seeks to link the nation to its Turkic and Islamic roots.

  

Thus, one can say that there are two main approaches to Azerbaijani nationhood, one that traces the history of Azerbaijan and another that considers the history of the Azerbaijani people.  Serious debates are taking place between the two.  Supporters of the former are convinced that the construction of national history should take place within the basic Soviet paradigm with the addition of data on the Turkic and Islamic features that had been neglected in the past.  Those who support the latter approach believe that the Soviet paradigm of Azerbaijani history must be abandoned and that a new historical narrative must be composed.  The future of nation building in Azerbaijan will to a certain extent be defined by the ways in which this debate is resolved.