Interlude

When Stalin died on March 5, 1953, Soviet society plunged into an existential crisis. As Jan Plamper has noted, “With the passing of the leader, the force that held their lives together suddenly was no more … ​His cult and its alchemy of power had made him seem larger than life.”...

Conclusion

This chapter recovers a historical experience of how Soviet nationality policies and practices promoted and erased the memory of a dynamic, interwoven experience of community building, rebuilding, trauma, erasure, and activism among people in the hopes of creating a communist world. It traces the people on the local level who actively participated in bringing several communist events about. It also assesses today's post-Soviet world as a direct consequence of experiences and how they were processed. The chapter looks at the 1962 petition that asked Nikita Khrushchev why the greater community could not love the Georgian-Ingilo language and culture. It addresses the issue of who belonged in the Soviet republics, who belonged in the Soviet future, and who had the power to determine that belonging.

Introduction

This chapter seeks to explain why history writing about nontitular minorities in the Soviet Union and in Azerbaijan has proven to be problematic. It looks at the variety of nontitular communities that live in Azerbaijan and the many ethnic conflicts that emerged during its transition to independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It also focuses on the state structures and the people living within Soviet Union and Azerbaijan, as well as their geographical range that intersects with the history of Iran, Turkey, and neighboring republics in the Soviet Caucasus. The chapter describes a regional world that extended beyond Soviet borders and argues that uncovering nontitular histories helps to better understand both Soviet and post-Soviet ethnic conflicts. It mentions the Soviet state that supported the development of minorities to counter the colonial legacy of Great Russian chauvinism.

Defining the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic

This chapter provides an exploration of the afterlife of early Soviet nationality policies and wartime territorial disputes. It reviews historiographical debates about Soviet citizenship, the depth and social meaning of Khrushchev's Thaw, and post-Stalin Soviet society and governance. It also recounts the new leadership cohort led by Mirza Ibragimov, Imam Mustafayev, and Sadykh Ragimov that took charge of Azerbaijan after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953. The chapter describes how Ibragimov, Mustafayev, and Ragimov pursued a nationalizing course that contributed to their respective dismissals at the close of the decade. It incorporates nontitularminorities into the history of Azeri nation-building in the 1950s.