by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] The Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry has demanded an apology from the Russian state news agency TASS. Baku was outraged that the agency used the name "Stepanakert" in the headline of the publication. Azerbaijan insists that the city in Nagorno-Karabakh should be called by the official name in the republic - Khankendi. " If such actions continue, in accordance with the principle of reciprocity, Azerbaijan has the right to call various toponyms in Russia by their historical names," the Foreign Ministry threatened. And Baku has moved from threats to actions.
The Azerbaijani publication Minval Politika began using the name Königsberg instead of Kaliningrad, exactly as the Foreign Ministry warned. One of the articles was published under the headline “Bundeswehr General: NATO will destroy Königsberg.”
In addition, in one of the reports, Orenburg is mentioned under the Kazakh name Orynbor (in Turkic-language publications it is often recalled that the “ancient city of the Kazakh steppe ” Orenburg was the capital of the Kazakh ASSR in 1920-25).
And the Volga is named after the Turkic toponym Itil, known since the times of the Khazar Khaganate.
Two circumstances related to the statement of the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry regarding Stepanakert-Khankendi are indicative.
Firstly, such a strong reaction was caused by the TASS news that on July 30, the Azerbaijani authorities demolished a monument to the Russian artist of Armenian origin Ivan Aivazovsky in Khankendi. The monument was installed as part of the "Alley of Russian Glory" project in 2023. But from Baku's point of view, the monument is subject to destruction, like everything connected with the liquidated regime of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.
Secondly, the indignation was expressed only in Azerbaijani and English. Characteristically, there is no Russian version on the MFA website. You need to use the translation to read, for example, the phrase: “ The name of the city of Khankendi “Stepanakert” is considered by TASS, the official state news agency of the Russian Federation, as an act of disrespect and an insult to the territorial integrity of our country.”
Translating the text, one can understand that the Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry accuses not only TASS, but also the Russian Federation as a whole of disrespecting itself. The statement reads:
“We remind the Russian side that the renaming of the city of Khankendi to Stepanakert in 1923 in the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, illegally created on the historical lands of Azerbaijan, was a manifestation of disrespect for Azerbaijan, since the city was named after the Bolshevik Stepan Shaumyan, who, together with the Dashnak Armenians, committed mass murders of the Azerbaijani people.”
This accusation from the Azerbaijani authorities is worth examining in more detail, as it is full of the kind of stretches that are so characteristic of adherents of the Turkic ideological myth.
THREE DELIBERATE MISTAKES
Firstly, the accusation of “disrespect for Azerbaijan” is strange, which was allegedly made in 1923, when Khankendi was renamed Stepanakert. At that time, Azerbaijan did not exist as an independent state. There was the Socialist Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, which was part of the USSR as part of the ZSFSR (Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic).
Secondly, was the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region “illegally” created? In the same year of 1923, by decree of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR, the Autonomous Region of Nagorno-Karabakh was formed from the part of Karabakh populated predominantly by Armenians “with its center in the town of Khankendi.” The decree was signed by the deputy head of the Central Executive Committee of the Azerbaijan SSR, Mir-Bashir Kasumov. Everything is completely legal.
On September 18, 1923, at a meeting of the Karabakh Regional Party Committee, the issue of "Renaming the City of Khankendi" was discussed. After a short discussion, a decision was made: "In commemoration of the memory of Stepan Shaumyan and 26 (Baku) commissars, the city of Khankendi will be renamed Stepanakert." On the same day, the resolution was approved by the decision of the Azerbaijan Central Executive Committee.
The Azerbaijani leadership was initially in favor of renaming the city in honor of Shaumyan. They only insisted on the name "Stepan-kend" ("kend" from Azerbaijani means "district" or "village"), which was used in official documents for some time. However, in the end, the Armenian side achieved official approval of the version "Stepanakert" ("kert" from Armenian means "yard").
Thirdly, to portray the head of the Baku Council of People's Commissars (Baku Commune) Stepan Shaumyan as an Armenian national chauvinist and an enemy of the Azerbaijani people is clearly a stretch. You can have different attitudes towards the period of the Baku Commune, but this government was not nationalistic. It included Russians, Armenians, Georgians, Jews, and Azerbaijani Turks - commissars Nariman Narimanov and Mir Hasan Vezirov. The office work was conducted in two languages, Russian and Turkic, that is, Azerbaijani.
From the party point of view, the Commune consisted of Bolsheviks and left Socialist Revolutionaries. The Armenian left nationalists - Dashnaks (with whom Shaumyan is now accused of complicity) were not included in the government. The Commune was accused of weakness - which became the reason for its overthrow - but not of organizing ethnic cleansing. Which indeed accompanied the civil war in Transcaucasia.
It is enough to recall the mass murder of Turks in Baku, organized by the Dashnaks in March 1918, and the massacre of Armenians in the same Baku in September of the same 1918 - after Turkish troops and the army of Musavatists - Azerbaijani nationalists - entered the city.
Nagorno-Karabakh was also the scene of bloody interethnic clashes during the civil war. Strictly speaking, the first Karabakh war should not be called the conflict of 1991-1994, but the Armenian-Azerbaijani war of 1918-1920. The mutual extermination was stopped only by the arrival of the Red Army in 1920, after which both Armenia and Azerbaijan were Sovietized. Peace was established here until the end of the 1980s.
IS KHANKENDI ACCURATE?
In 1991, the Azerbaijani government (declaring its continuity with the Musavatist Azerbaijan Democratic Republic) renamed Stepanakert Khankendi. The Baku authorities did not control the city at the time. It was the declared capital of the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, with which Azerbaijan was at war.
The NKR controlled the city until the destruction of the republic as a result of the Third Karabakh War on September 19–20, 2023, which was followed by a total exodus of the Armenian population from the region. Until that moment, the city was effectively Stepanakert, as it was called by local residents, 99.7% Armenian (2005 census).
When the Baku authorities de jure renamed Stepanakert to Khankendi in 1991, they assumed that the original, historical name was being returned. Strictly speaking, this is not the case.
Vasily Vereshchagin “View of Shushi”. Nagorno-Karabakh, XIX century.
Settlements on the site of the modern city on the right bank of the Karkar River have been recorded since the end of the 5th century. Medieval Armenian chronicles mention a village called Vararakn in Armenian. The territory was then subject to the state of Caucasian Albania. This early medieval Christian kingdom was mainly inhabited by tribes related to modern Lezgins and other peoples of Southern Dagestan.
From the 10th to the 16th century, the territory around Vararakn was part of the Armenian principality of Khachen, and from the 16th century, it was part of the feudal possession of Varanda, which belonged to the melik (princely) family of Shakhnazars.
Since the 18th century, these lands have been part of the Muslim Karabakh Khanate, a vassal of Persia. According to one version, the village was then named Khankendi - "Khan's village", since the estate of the ruler Ibrahim Khalil Khan was located here. According to another version, the name Khankendi began to be used constantly only in the mid-1840s.
The population was then defined not so much ethnically (the concept of "nationality" appeared only in Europe in the 19th century), but by religion. And both adherents of the Armenian Church and Muslims - Shiites and Sunnis - lived here.
HEADQUARTERS OF RUSSIAN SOLDIERS
Since 1813, according to the Treaty of Gulistan, which ended the Russo-Persian War, the territory became part of the Russian Empire. Neither Azerbaijan nor Armenia existed there by definition, noted Semyon Bagdasarov, an expert on Middle East and Central Asian issues, in a commentary to Regnum News Agency.
As for the ethnic composition, in the mid-19th century the village of Khankendi was rather Russian. At the suggestion of the "chief civil commander in the Caucasus", General Alexei Yermolov, "headquarters" were organized in Transcaucasia - military units with families "planted" on the land. Khankendi was one of the headquarters.
“The village of Khan-Kendi (or rather, a tract) was formed from retired soldiers, as well as members of their families who did not wish to return to their homeland after serving their term of service,” wrote the author of the description of the Elizavetpol province, Joseph Segal.
Semyon Bagdasarov recalls that during its stay in the Russian Empire and then in the Soviet Union, Nagorno-Karabakh gave the common country many outstanding people. In particular, a galaxy of great Russian generals, as well as 27 heroes of the Soviet Union.
“The name of Valerian Grigorievich Madatov alone is worth something, whose portrait, as one of the heroes of the Patriotic War of 1812, hangs in the military gallery of the Winter Palace,” the agency’s source noted.
The interlocutor listed the names of other outstanding commanders from Nagorno-Karabakh, including Marshals Ivan Bagramyan, Amazasp Babajanyan, Sergei Khudyakov and Admiral of the Fleet Ivan Isakov.
In the context of all-Russian history, the nationality of the artist Aivazovsky or the hero of the First World War Huseyn Khan Nakhichevansky, the Baku architect Gasim bey Khadzhibabekov or the conqueror of the North Caucasus General Moisei Argutinsky (Argutyan) did not matter.
The question of “blood” is important only for modern Azerbaijan and Armenia, which are building ethnocracies with an eye on the Dashnaks and Musavatists, respectively.
ETHNIC DIVERSITY
This ethno-nationalist approach appears all the more dangerous given the complexity and intricacy of the ethnic issue in the Caucasus.
"There was no such people as Azerbaijanis at that time, before the revolution. There were Transcaucasian Tatars. This can be seen in the population census. And we should not forget about it," Semyon Bagdasarov believes. Indeed, Transcaucasian Tatars was an established name in the Russian Empire for the Turkic-speaking Shiite population of the current Republic of Azerbaijan.
According to historians, the Turks began to penetrate into Transcaucasia in the 10th–11th centuries. Since the 16th century, groups have settled here that can be identified with the modern titular nation of Azerbaijan. They were called “Transcaucasian Tatars” in the documents of the Russian imperial authorities for simplicity.
According to the "Caucasian Calendar for 1904" (Tiflis, 1903), the ethnic composition of Transcaucasia did not include "Azerbaijanis". Peoples who arrived "to the Caucasus from the south and north" are distinguished, among whom were the Turks, Turkmens, Karapakhs, and also the Aderbeyjan Tatars - named after the Persian province of Aderbeyjan (this is Southern Azerbaijan in modern Iran)
It is believed that the Azerbaijani Tatars, "enjoying the support of the Persian shahs", migrated from the south and established themselves in the south-eastern part of Transcaucasia. Later they reached Southern Dagestan, where they met the Turkic-speaking Kumyks who came from the north. Of course, the state entity of "Azerbaijan" did not exist then.
"ONE STATE - ONE NATION"
But such complexities and subtleties only hinder national construction on the model of Europe (and in the case of Azerbaijan - on the model of the Turkish Republic of Kemal Ataturk ). "National building" implies the principle of "one nation - one language - one state".
For example, the Lezgins, a people who have lived on both sides of the modern Russian-Azerbaijani border since ancient times, do not fit into this process that has been going on since the early 1990s. Therefore, the Lezgin national movement, which was formed in 1989, is suppressed by the Azerbaijani authorities - both under the government of the "People's Front" and under Heydar and Ilham Aliyev.
The Lezgin movement "Sadval", created in Derbent, was officially recognized as terrorist in Azerbaijan; the activists of the movement, Azad Azayev, Afgan Kerimov, and Rakhib Makhsumov, were sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of committing a terrorist attack in Baku in 1994 "with money from the Armenian special services."
Based on the same demands for building a national state, the public movements of the Talysh people, a Persian-speaking people living in the southeast of Azerbaijan, are also suppressed. In 2020, Talysh scholar and journalist Fakhraddin Aboszoda died in Gobustan prison near Baku. He, like a number of other public figures, was accused of attempting to proclaim the Talysh-Mugan Republic in the summer of 1993 - note, an autonomous republic, and not a state separate from Azerbaijan.
For the same reason, the territory of Karabakh, according to the Azerbaijani authorities, must be nationally homogeneous (the Armenian population fled in 2023, fearing ethnic cleansing), and the main city of the region can only have an Azerbaijani name. These are the requirements of the local "national building". But since when did they begin to apply to Russia?