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Abstract
The essay examines the effects of Soviet nationalities policy on Armenians living in Baku, the capital of the Azerbaijani SSR, and on ethnic Azerbaijanis in Kyzyl-Shafag, an Azerbaijani village in the Armenian SSR. A series of interviews were conducted with members of these two communities to explore some of the results of Soviet nationalities policy. Although the residents of Baku emphasised the multinational character of the city, they nevertheless conceded that ethnicity played an important role in their lives, even at the level of everyday practices. The same also applies for the Azerbaijanis in the far less cosmopolitan Armenian countryside, where ethnic boundaries remained largely impenetrable. Soviet language, with its essentialist categories that separated people into internally homogeneous groups, could not have been more appropriate for this purpose.
Notes
1 We intentionally use the term ‘Transcaucasus’, which has been marginalised in the context of post-imperial and postcolonial discourse, when we talk about the Soviet experience. This is how the region was designated in those years; the term ‘South Caucasus’ only became widely used after the collapse of the USSR.
2 At the end of the nineteenth and the start of the twentieth century, Baku was split into ethnic neighbourhoods: a Muslim (Azerbaijani) neighbourhood; an Armenian neighbourhood; and a Russian neighbourhood, also the administrative centre (Altstadt-Mirhadi Citation1986, pp. 283, 303).
3 Conventionally, generational change takes 30 years. According to Aleida Assmann ‘the memory can be called vital if it actualises the past in a conversation within a quite intimate context’ (Assmann Citation2006, p. 28).
4 Soviet discourse appealed to ‘the traditions of militant proletarian internationalism’ (Bretanitskii Citation1970, pp. 6–7). The proletariat in Azerbaijan was concentrated mainly in Baku, which was portrayed as the most international city in the South Caucasus region. The myth of Baku was so powerful that there was a discursive transfer of the city’s international reputation to the whole country; see, for example, Mel’nikov (Citation1967).
5 According to official ideology, the Soviet people was not ‘multi-ethnic’ (mul’tietnicheskii') but ‘multinational’ (mnogonatsional’nyi). The differences in the definitions of ‘ethnos’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘people’ and ‘nation’ (etnos, etnichnost', narod i natsiya) in Soviet political and academic discourses are not immediately apparent. The category of ‘ethnos’ can be equated with that of ‘nation’; thus, there were numerous Soviet ‘ethnic nations’. A person’s nationality was not determined by the citizenship of their parents (for example, Azerbaijan and Georgian SSR, or the Russian SFSR, or USSR), but by their ethnicity. Though the categories of the ‘people’ and ‘nation’ are often used as synonyms in the Russian language, the community of Soviet citizens was never designated as a ‘nation’ in official discourse. The ‘Soviet people’ was a hierarchy of Soviet ethnicities and ethnic nations headed by Russians. ‘Soviet people’ is not an ethnonym. According to Yulian Bromley, ‘the term “nation” in our literature is usually used to designate a set of people under one ethnonym living within one state’ (Citation1983, pp. 49–50). Though there was one state—the unitary USSR—it was divided into many ethnic areas, among which were 15 quasi-states—the Soviet national republics.
6 The status of the Azerbaijani language was gradually strengthened in the post-war years, but it always conceded superiority to Russian. In the 1950s, the city’s population composition and language problems were often discussed at meetings of the heads of the Azerbaijan SSR. For example, in a speech at the eighth plenary session of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan (CPA) in June 1959, secretary of the Central Committee of Azerbaijan, Abdulla Bayramov said, ‘if Baku was the city where up to 90–95% or even 80% of the population were Azerbaijanis and 5–6% of other nationalities, perhaps, to some extent, at a stretch, it would be possible to justify talks about the switch of institutions to Azerbaijani. But according to the last census, there are only 38% of Azerbaijanis and 62% of other nationalities in Baku’ (Gasanly Citation2009, p. 559).
7 In the Azerbaijan SSR, the entire republic beyond Baku was designated as ‘the regions’.
8 The Soviet ideology of ‘the friendship among peoples’ was formed in the late 1920s and early 1930s; for more details, see Suny (Citation2012, pp. 26–9). The Soviet internationalism associated with this ideological doctrine became a kind of antithesis to bourgeois nationalism. By calling themselves ‘cosmopolitans’ in the last decades of the USSR, Bakuvians continued the tradition of Soviet internationalism while at the same time symbolically distancing themselves from it to affirm the uniqueness of their urban community and its Europeanness. Bruce Grant notes that ‘to look back on Baku in the 1970s was not necessarily to reach for Europe …. What seems more important is that the cosmopolitan ideal more commonly appeared as an act of reaching itself, a respite from the older, more express ideologisms of the international, while still holding out for the right social mixing, the right kind of condominium agreement that the Caucasus region has long been obliged to go in search of’ (Grant Citation2010, p. 135).
9 According to official figures, the pogrom in Sumgait left 31 victims. Ronald Suny, in one of his earliest articles, published at the high point of the conflict, mentioned that ‘the reasons for Sumgait riots remain unclear. … Whatever the reality behind the rumours, the dimensions of the hatred had only been vaguely sensed before Sumgait. … With Sumgait the first phase of the Karabakh crisis came to an end. The situation in Transcaucasia had been radically altered. The possibility of a peaceful transfer of Karabakh to Armenia now became remote, and attitudes on both sides hardened. The idea that the mediated settlement satisfactory to both parties might be reached was now utopian’ (Suny Citation1992, pp. 492–93). According to Audrey Altstadt, ‘Sumgait was built by Azerbaijani Turkish refugees who had been forced out of their villages in Armenia in the late 1940s. In 1988 refugees fleeing from NKAO and Armenia (in early 1988, there were nearly 200,000 Azerbaijani Turks in Armenia) also settled in Sumgait. Some of the recent refugees joined relatives; those without family ties, who often had no jobs, proper housing, or medical care, sometimes struck out at local Armenians’ (Altstadt Citation1992, p. 197). She fails to name the sources of this information.
10 For more details about the life of ethnic Armenians in Baku after the ‘events’, see Huseynova (Citation2011).
11 In this case, one can talk about the ‘tribal stigma’ (nationality, possibly religion). According to Erving Goffman, ‘these being stigma that can be transmitted through lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family’ (Goffman Citation1963, p. 4).
12 In particular, to certain fields of study, above all, law and history, which granted access to bureaucratic and party power structures.
13 Mass urbanisation started in the Azerbaijan SSR only in the middle of the twentieth century. Thus, a large proportion of the inhabitants of new cities retained strong links with their native villages and regions till the end of the century. The republic is relatively small, and this allowed for continued relations and contacts with close relatives. In addition, local elites established the patronage system in post-war Azerbaijan, whereby attachment to one’s region of origin and to the ‘small motherland’ played a significant role in career trajectories (Willerton Citation1992).
14 Thousands of young people from national republics went to Russian and Ukrainian universities and institutions to study. Many remained there and never came back (Rumyantsev Citation2016).
15 Interview with Janna, female, 64, secondary special education, Baku, 25 May 2005. All informant names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
16 We drew these conclusions on the basis of a much broader range of interviews with Bakuvians (ethnic Azerbaijanis, Jews, Russians) conducted as part of different projects. Such conclusions are not only applicable to Bakuvians; see, for example, Oksana Karpenko writing about Tatars in St Petersburg (Citation1998, p. 44).
17 Interview with Janna, female, 64, secondary special education, Baku, 25 May 2005.
18 Interview with Marina, female, 37, higher education, Baku, 17 April 2005.
19 Interview with Violetta, female, 62, higher education, Baku, 21 March 2006.
20 Interview with Oksana, female, 67, higher education, Baku, 16 February 2006.
21 Interview with Marina, female, 37, higher education, Baku, 17 April 2005.
22 Soviet statistics recorded the least number of interethnic marriages in the Azerbaijani and Armenian SSRs. According to the census of 1989, these republics occupied, respectively, the penultimate and last places among the 15 national republics of the USSR (Kaiser Citation1994, pp. 298–99); see also Susokolov (Citation1987, p. 142).
23 For more details about pogroms and clashes at the beginning of the twentieth century, see Swietochowski (Citation1985, pp. 135–39), Altstadt (Citation1992, pp. 27–49, 89–107), Swietochowski (Citation1995, pp. 37–42), Baberowski (Citation2003, pp. 133–50) and Sargent (Citation2010).
24 Interview with Janna, female, 64, secondary special education, Baku, 25 May 2005.
25 Interview with Marina, female, 37, higher education, Baku, 17 April 2005.
26 The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (Ironiya sud’by ili s legkim parom). A popular Soviet romantic comedy directed by Eldar Riazanov ridiculing the Soviet way of life: the same housing, apartments, interiors, furniture, sets of china and so on.
27 Interview with Marina, female, 37, higher education, Baku, 17 April 2005.
28 Interview with Janna, female, 64, secondary special education, Baku, 25 May 2005.
29 Interview with Anna, female, 69, secondary special education, Baku, 16 June 2005.
30 Interview with Olia, female, 46, higher education, Baku, 1 March 2006.
31 Interview with Galina, female, 62, secondary special education, Baku, 5 February 2006.
32 Such interethnic cooperation, but on a more individual level, could be observed in Soviet Baku.
33 According to Mark Saroyan, ‘the hegemony of the titular nationality was reflected not only in the cultural practices of the dominant nationality but also in the cultural institutions and practices of ethnic minorities, that is, the nondominant national communities of each republic. Ethnic cultural institutions for the so-called “nonindigenous” national communities are weak, unlike in their home republic. While there are national language schools, newspapers, and dramatic and literary associations forming the nucleus of a cultural life for nontitular ethnic communities, these cultural institutions are few and operate with limited resources’ (Saroyan Citation1996, p. 407).
34 Interview with Veysal, male, 80, Kerkenj village, 12 July 2007. With the agreement of respondents, the names of Kyzyl-Shafag residents have not been changed.
35 Certainly, among the residents of the villages there were people who had a command of Russian, but it was not the main language of daily communication between the Shakhnazar people and the residents of Kyzyl-Shafag. Many residents of these villages (especially men) had a much better command of the language of their neighbours (the Shakhnazar people of the Azeri language and the Qizil Safaq residents of Armenian) than of Russian, which was more widespread in towns than in the countryside. Even in the twilight of the USSR in 1979, only 29.5% of Azeris and 38.6% of Armenians were fluent in Russian (Laitin et al. Citation1992, p. 141).
36 In the same years, a ‘new’ separatist movement started to develop among the Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians. Dina Zisserman-Brodsky notes ‘the question of Nagorno-Karabakh is the main focus of modern Armenian nationalism. One of the earliest available samizdat documents, the Letter to Khrushchev, signed by 2,500 Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh and other areas of Azerbaijan SSR, appeared in 1963’ (Zisserman-Brodsky Citation2003, p. 119).
37 Interview with Nasib, male, 53, Kerkenj village, 17 July 2008. This likening of Azeris to Turks became especially relevant at the start of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, when in February 1988 Armenian pogroms took place in the town of Sumgait near Baku. Marina Kurkchiyan notes, ‘the Sumgait attacks were presented in Armenia as a “Pan-Turkish threat to the whole nation” or as “the Turkish model of behavior” when dealing with Christian Armenians. In the Armenian perception, the identification of Soviet Azerbaijan with Ottoman Turkey was quickly made—however misleading’ (Kurkchiyan Citation2005, p. 154).
38 Interview with Nasib, male, 53, Kerkenj village, 17 July 2008.
39 It should be noted that, according to the memories of Bayram Allazov, the director of the Kyzyl-Shafag’s sovkhoz, mass rallies demanding the annexation of the NKAO to the Armenian SSR began in late October and early November 1988.
40 Interview with Ali-kishi, male, 75, Kerkenj village, 27 July 2008.
41 Interview with Madar, male, 48, Kerkenj village, 15 July 2008.
42 Interview with Nasib, male, 53, Kerkenj village, 21 July 2008.
43 Interview with Nasib, male, 53, Kerkenj village, 21 July 2008.
44 The most important Muslim feast of sacrifice, observed by Kyzyl-Shafag villagers even in the Soviet period.
45 Interview with Zakariia-kishi, male, 81, Kerkenj village, 1 August 2008.
46 Interview with Veysal, male, 80, Kerkenj village, 12 July 2007.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sergey Rumyantsev
Sergey Rumyantsev, Institute for Modern History, Humboldt University Berlin, Center for Independent Social Research, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]
Sevil Huseynova
Sevil Huseynova, Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University Berlin, Center for Independent Social Research, Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]