MOSCOW (Realist English). The connection of Azerbaijanis with Caucasian Albania, which was invented in the Soviet years, was designed to consolidate Baku’s rights to Nagorno-Karabakh. This was stated by the Russian anthropologist and ethnologist Viktor Shnirelman.
“During the short period of the existence of the Republic of Azerbaijan and then in emigration, Azerbaijani nationalists associated their ancestors with medieval Turkish conquerors who created empires and spread the Turkic language.
Then in the Soviet Union, during the struggle for internationalism and friendship of peoples, at the turn of the 1920s and 1930s, there was another theory it was believed that Azerbaijanis and Armenians could have had common Caucasian roots and local ancestors. Then, in the late 1930s, a theory was put forward according to which the Azerbaijanis allegedly descended from the Medes.
At first, it was intended to reveal their Indo-European roots and make them relatives of Armenians in order to reduce the long-standing enmity. In the 1940s, this concept received a new direction and was designed to legitimize Soviet claims to the lands of Iranian Azerbaijan.
In the last Soviet decades, the official theory of ethnogenesis was the association of the ancestors of Azerbaijanis with Caucasian Albania. This is the fourth stage. This was supposed to make the Azerbaijanis a truly indigenous autochthonous people and consolidate their rights to Nagorno-Karabakh. But even then, the pan-Turkist theory began to compete with this theory, not only returning to Azerbaijanis their Turkic heritage, but also Turkifying the population of Azerbaijan and neighboring regions of the Middle East.
This theory received official recognition in Soviet Azerbaijan. It combines language with the idea of autochthonicity and optimally corresponds to the claim of the dominant majority to power in the Republic. That’s how the people changed their ancestors five times during the Soviet period,” Shnirelman said in his lecture, which was held at the Gaidar Forum in 2012.
The term “Azerbaijanis” appeared in the 1930s in the USSR to refer to the Turkic-speaking population of eastern Transcaucasia, which was previously called “Turks” (according to the USSR census of 1926), “Caucasian Tatars” (in the XIX century), or “Turks” (a Persian term that has long been common in Transcaucasia, as well as in Iran, Armenia and Georgia).
