National Identities in Soviet Historiography

The Rise of Nations under Stalin

Harun Yilmaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317596639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Under Stalin's totalitarian leadership of the USSR, Soviet national identities with historical narratives were constructed. These constructions envisaged how nationalities should see their imaginary common past, and millions of people defined themselves according to them. This book explains how and by whom these national histories were constructed and focuses on the crucial episode in the construction of national identities of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan from 1936 and 1945.

A unique comparative study of three different case studies, this book reveals different aims and methods of nation construction, despite the existence of one-party rule and a single overarching official ideology. The study is based on work in the often overlooked archives in the Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan. By looking at different examples within the Soviet context, the author contributes to and often challenges current scholarship on Soviet nationality policies and Stalinist nation-building projects. He also brings a new viewpoint to the debate on whether the Soviet period was a project of developmentalist modernization or merely a renewed 'Russian empire'. The book concludes that the local agents in the countries concerned had a sincere belief in socialism—especially as a project of modernism and development—and, at the same time, were strongly attached to their national identities.

Claiming that local communist party officials and historians played a leading role in the construction of national narratives, this book will be of interest to historians and political scientists interested in the history of the Soviet Union and contemporary Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia.

1 The construction of Azerbaijani identity under the shadow of Iran and Turkey

Until 1937, Soviet publications and official documents referred to the titular nation of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic as Tiurk (Turkic) in Russian and Türk (Turkish and Turkic, as there are no separate words for these two concepts in Turkic tongues) in the local Turkic language. But as if a magic wand had touched the country in 1937, everyone began to define the titular nation as Azerbaijani. The current literature says that the term ‘Turkic’ (Russian: Tiurskii; Azerbaijani: Türk) was replaced by ‘Azerbaijani’ in the Stalinist years. However, when this change happened is not always clear. Some authors refer to the period from 1927 to 1931, when the first wave of purges occurred among the local modernist groups that joined the Bolsheviks following the 1917 Revolution, and claim that ‘Stalinist policies’ or ‘Soviet repression of Muslim peoples’ was responsible for this change (Wimbush 1979; Swietochowski 1994, 122). Others saw this change in identity definition as an effort to cut off the Turks of Turkey from their kin in the Soviet Union, and suggested that the Azerbaijani identity was artificially created as a result of the ‘divide and rule’ policy that was applied to all the Turkic nations in the Union (Altstadt 1992, 124; Leeuw 2000; Grenoble 2003, 124; Swietochowski 1993, 191–192; for a broader literature on the ‘divide and rule’ policy of the Soviet regime on Turkic peoples including Turkic Central Asia see Hayit 1963; Conquest 1970; Pipes 1997; Connor 1984, 1992; Carrere d’Encausse 1992; Simon 1991; Benningsen and Lemercier-Quelquejay 1961, 1967; Allworth 1990; Blank 1994; Hirsch 2000; Carrere d’Encausse 1989; Roy 2000). This approach implies that changing the definition of national identity was a calculated act on the part of Moscow and that the new policy was imposed upon Azerbaijan, and dutifully executed by Mir Jafar Bagirov, the first secretary of the CPA (Communist Party of Azerbaijan) and Stalin’s henchman in Baku. Certainly, the new policy aimed to further differentiate Turkic identities in Anatolia and Azerbaijan. However, this argument alone does not explain why this change happened seventeen years after the Bolsheviks assumed power in Baku. The Great Terror, a state act which claimed the lives of millions in 1937 and 1938, was probably decisive in the timing of the change but it was not the cause of such an ideological and political transformation. This chapter explains the most crucial decision of the nation-building and history-writing in Soviet Azerbaijan. It is argued here that, contrary to the claims above, it was the international and domestic political developments between 1920 and 1937 that left the Bolsheviks without a choice but to alter the Turkic definition to the Azerbaijani one.

A summary of the 1870–1920 period

At the end of the nineteenth century, national identities in the region were in flux and were not popular concepts. Yet, prior to Bolshevik rule, rival ideologies defined in different ways the Turkic-speaking majority which populated both historical Azerbaijan to the south of the Aras River and the Russian-ruled Baku and Elizavetpol guberniias in the north. The Russian colonial power had an ethno-linguistic definition in mind: ‘Azerbaijani Tatars were erroneously called Persians. They were Shi’ite by denomination and imitated Persians in many ways, but their language is Turkic-Tatar’ (Russian: Tiurko-tatarskii) (Baku 1891, 2a: 771). The official records of the Russian Empire and various published sources from the pre–1917 period also called them ‘Tatar’ or ‘Caucasian Tatars’, ‘Azerbaijani Tatars’ and even ‘Persian Tatars’ in order to differentiate them from the other ‘Tatars’ of the empire and the Persian speakers of Iran (Veidenbaum 1888; Svod 1893; Kovalevskii 1914, i). This was a result of a broader usage of Tatar in the Russian language as a generic name for all Turkic speakers. For the local people religious or regional identity came first and there was still a long way to go to transform peasants into a nation. For the Azerbaijani identity this was an age of ambiguities and discussions (Swietochowski 1994; Swietochowski 1995, 17–61). Mirza Fatali Akhundov (1812–78), a publicist, writer and intellectual in Tbilisi, who is claimed by both Azerbaijanis and Iranians as a nation-builder, defined his kinsmen as Turki but at the same time considered Iran as his fatherland (Swietochowski 1995, 28). When the first signs of modern national identity construction surfaced, the different definitions and tendencies also became clear cut. For example, Hǝsǝn bǝy Zǝrdabi (or Hasan bey Zardabi, 1837–1907), a science teacher and graduate of the Moscow University, and his newspaper Əkinçi (Akinchi, 1875–7) raised the issue of Turkic identity, which was still an idea of a minority. Following him, a new generation promoted a Turkic identity. Əli bǝy Hüseyzadǝ (or Ali bey Huseynzade, 1864–1940) and his publication Hǝyat, for instance, defined Azerbaijanis as Turks. Three consecutive events – the 1905 Russian Revolution and the following ethno-religious clashes with Armenians; the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in 1906 and its demise; and the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, which brought Turkists to power in the Ottoman Empire – increased Turkic national sentiments in Azerbaijan. Turkism in Azerbaijan emphasized its Turkic origins. The question was how to define this newly found Turkicness in relation to the Ottoman Turks? Əli bǝy Hüseyzadǝ in his other leading literary journal Füyuzat (1906) defined both the Turkic population of the Ottoman Empire and in Azerbaijan as descendants of the Oghuz Turks, and he claimed that the difference between the two peoples were of minor significance. He called for some kind of unification with the Ottoman–Turkish realm. Publications such as Açıq Söz (1915–18), edited by Mǝhǝmmǝd Əmin Rǝsulzadǝ (Mammad Amin Rasulzade, 1884–1955), also supported this Turkish cause. By contrast, writers in Azǝrijilar and other intellectuals such as Cǝlil Mǝmmǝdquluzadǝ (or Jalil Mammadguluzadeh, 1886–1932) and his periodical Molla Nasraddin (Molla Nasr al-Din) argued that following its recent ‘recovery’ following Persian domination, the Azerbaijani identity had to flourish separately from the Ottomans. At the same time, there were some Iranian Azerbaijanis in Baku who were against this Turkish ethno-linguistic identity. They published Azarbayjan, Joz’-e la-yanfakk-e Iran which promoted a Persian territorial identity in Baku. At this stage, the Iranian identity still had a dynastic definition, and a non-Persian speaker could be easily part of this all-Persian identity (Atabaki 2006).

On May 27, 1918, the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan (DRA) was declared with Ottoman military support. The rulers of the DRA refused to identify themselves as Tatar, which they rightly considered to be a Russian colonial definition. Instead, they defined the Turkic-speaking Muslim people of the south-east Caucasus as Turkic. In their native tongue they were Azerbaijani Türk or simply Türk, but with a broader meaning of the word. We understand the usage of this broader meaning from Russian texts of the same period where Tiurk or Tiurkskii (Turkic) was used. Officials of the DRA also frequently used ‘Muslim’ to identify the same group because the majority of the population still identified themselves by religion. Neighbouring Iran did not welcome the DRA’s adoption of the name of ‘Azerbaijan’ for the country because it could also refer to Iranian Azerbaijan and implied a territorial claim. That is why the authorities in Baku also used these definitions with the adjective of ‘Transcaucasian’ (Russian: Zakavkazskii) (Stavrovskii 1920; for the minutes of the parliament in the Azerbaijani language see Azǝrbaycan Xalg 1998; for the minutes of the parliament in the Russian language see Azerbaidzhanskaia Demokraticheskaia 1998; Pashaev 2006). All these contradictory steps in the region were natural when Turks, Iranians and Azerbaijanis were all in search of national identities. The following two decades became an era of state-sponsored constructions of national identities. Once nation-states were established and started to operate, they consciously promoted their own brand of nationalism, while fighting against other conflicting descriptions.

In April 1920, when the Red Army entered Baku, the Bolsheviks followed the designation of the previous nationalist government and accepted Türk in the native tongue and Tiurk in Russian as the name for the titular nation. Azerbaijan was kept as the name of the territory and the republic. What were the consecutive developments that induced the Bolsheviks to replace this Turkic definition by an Azerbaijani definition seventeen years later? The following sections of this chapter aim to explain the multiple factors that forced the Bolsheviks to take this extraordinary step in 1937.

Relations with neighbours

In the 1920s, the Soviet regime considered Azerbaijan a model of modernization and development that could be presented to the peoples of Iran and Turkey. If Ukraine was the Soviet Piedmont on its western borders (Martin 2001), Azerbaijan played the same role on the southern frontier. Hence, before their fatal journey to Turkey in 1920, the founding leaders of the Turkish Communist Party were based in Baku. Also, when the Bolsheviks decided to summon 1,800 delegates from the colonial and semi-colonial parts of Asia for the Congress of the Peoples of the East in September 1920, Baku was the natural choice for the convention. When the First Turkology Congress was organized by Soviet authorities in 1926, the venue was again Baku (Vsesoiuznyi Tiurkologicheskii s’ezd 1926; Lenczowski 1949, 6–8). As long as steady modernization steps were being taken in Baku, Azerbaijani Bolsheviks felt comfortable comparing their achievements with the situation in Turkey and Iran (for the presentation of the commissar of the Narkompros AzSSR, M. Z. Kuliev, at the sixth congress of All Azerbaijan Soviets, on the tasks of cultural construction in the Republic, April 6, 1929 see VI-oi Vseazerbaidzhanskii sezd’ sovetov 1929; Azerbaidzhanskii gosudarstvennyi universitet 1930; Bagirov 1934). Despite these comparisons, which aimed at demonstrating the desirability of the Soviet model of development to its neighbours, the first fifteen years of Soviet–Turkish and Soviet–Iranian relations were extremely positive (Rubinshtein 1982, 4–7). Turkey and the Soviet Union supported each other on different platforms. In order to improve relations, Soviet representatives including leading names from the arts and sciences visited Turkey, including composer Dmitrii Shostakovich (1906–75), Turkologist and linguist Aleksandr Samoilovich (1880–1938), linguist, historian, and orientalist Nikolai Marr (1865–1934), linguist and archaeologist Ivan Meshchaninov (1883–1967), Turkologist and historian Hadzhi Gabidullin (1897–1937), and also military figure Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969), as well as various engineering brigades for construction works (Shostakovich 1995, 112–113; Aydoğan, 2007; Tahirova 2010).¹

In 1934, the first signs of a changed policy came when Moscow sent Levon Mikhailovich Karakhanian (1889–1937) as the plenipotentiary Soviet representative to Ankara (an older account of the relations argues that they deteriorated in 1938–9; see Rubinshtein, 1982. However, the recent account of Dzhamil Gasanly (Cemil Hasanli), supported by primary sources, provides a more accurate view; see Gasanly 2008, 11, 12, 17). This decision was considered by the Turkish government as a signal that Soviet–Turkish relations were deteriorating. Apart from his ethnic Armenian origin and abrasive style, Karakhanian had been the secretary of the Soviet delegation at Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and had left a bad impression among Ottoman diplomats who had participated in the peace negotiations (Karakhanian remained in Ankara until 1937: Banac 2003, 54–55; Gasanly 2008, 20). At the same time, in anticipation of a military confrontation in Europe, Stalin began to consider an alliance with Turkey as an unnecessary liability (Banac 2003, 18). In Turkish foreign policy, the Soviet Union also lost its primary position after the Turkish state was admitted to the League of Nations in 1932 (Harris 1995, 3–6). In the following three years, and for a number of reasons, the gulf between Turkey and the Soviet Union only increased (Gasanly 2008, 22–49). The culmination of this new distrust between the two countries was reflected in the speech given by the first secretary of the CPA at the famous February–March plenum of the CPSU, in 1937. Bagirov claimed in his speech that Turkey supported the independence of the Turkic nations in the Soviet Union and that Ankara was trying to form a pan-Turkish state led by Turkey. It is quite clear that without the consent of Stalin, the first secretary of the CPA, Bagirov, could not have expressed these ideas at the plenum (for the speech of Bagirov see Materialy fevral’sko-martovskogo (1937g.) Plenuma 1994, 26). Finally, it should be noted that he gave this speech during the Great Terror in 1937–8 when thousands of Soviet citizens were prosecuted and shot as pan-Turkists or as the secret agents of Turkey.

Relations between the Soviet Union and Iran were not faring any better. In the 1920s Iran’s primary foreign policy objective was the loosening of the economic grip of foreign powers, and in particular the dislodging of Britain from its dominant economic position in the country. To this end, from 1926 until 1932, Abdolhossein Teymuourtash, the powerful Minister of the Court of the Pahlavi Dynasty, orchestrated a foreign policy that sought to simultaneously improve economic ties with the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. From 1927, Iran slowly began to show increasing receptiveness to Germany’s economic expansion and ties gradually intensified between the two countries. So long as there existed no serious political tensions between the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union, the Soviet regime was not hostile to an increased German economic influence in Iran. From the Soviet perspective, the German factor could even be seen in a positive light as Germany could successfully compete with the British in the region. However, when the Nazis came to power, the Soviet attitude towards German activities in Iran changed. After 1933 Reza Shah pursued closer relations with Germany, inviting German experts and investments in order to break Soviet and British dominance (Lenczowski 1949, 151–158; Ramazani 1966, 277–288; Rezun 1981, 314–332; Rubinshtein 1982, 62). In the second half of the 1930s, there was a rapidly increasing fear in Moscow that a German-led crusade against the Soviet Union in the western borders was imminent. The Soviet Union considered heavy German investments in Iran and the growth of diplomatic traffic between the two countries as signs of an Iranian subjection to a fascist influence and even as encirclement. Nevertheless, as a result of economic interests Iran preferred Germany to the Soviet Union and the Iranians responded more and more negatively to the Soviet Union, bolstered in their stance by their strong relations with Nazi Germany (Ramazani 1966, 216–228; Volodarsky 1994, 100–120). As a result of this increasing tension between the Soviet Union and Iran, in mid-1938 all Iranian subjects were expelled from the Soviet Union. Parallel to the increasing rift between the Soviet Union and its southern neighbours, Turkey and Iran came clo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the narrative and transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 The construction of Azerbaijani identity under the shadow of Iran and Turkey
• 2 The miraculous return of Babak to Azerbaijan
• 3 Pure Slavic blood for Ukraine
• 4 The adventurous lives of Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi
• 5 The rise of red batyrs in the Kazakh steppe
• Introduction to the war period
• 6 Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan at war
• 7 Kazakh batyrs marching in Stalingrad
• 8 Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi fighting against the Germans
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index