Falsification of history in Azerbaijan
According to many scholars, the historical research carried out in Azerbaijan with state support has been falsified to exalt the Caucasian Albanians as the alleged ancestors of Azerbaijanis and to provide a historical basis for territorial disputes with Armenians. Much of this false historiography aims to root Azerbaijanis in the territory of Azerbaijan, cleanse it of Armenian heritage, and depict Armenians as newcomers.
Overview
Multiple observers — including those from government, genocide experts, and others — state that Azerbaijan engages in historical revisionism to support its territorial claims, deprive Armenians of their own territorial claims. and eliminate traces of historical Armenian presence. This has involved the falsification of history, alongside the erasure of Armenian cultural heritage sites, and place-names. as well as the imposition of a state monopoly over Armenian cultural studies, which limits independent research and enforces official narratives. Petrosyan et al. state that Azerbaijan's use of historical falsification aim "to neutralize the Armenian identity of Artsakh."Genocide scholars Edita Gzoyan et al. write "we are witnessing a systematic, scholarly, political, and military attempt to de-Armenize the land, its names, geography, and history. This process resembles Lemkin’s notion of genocide—the destruction of the national pattern of the targeted group and the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor." Analysts have observed that Azerbaijan is distinct from other genocidaires insofar as it not only attempts to erase the history of Armenians in the Caucasus but denies their very existence, thereby attempting to minimize the nature of the crime. The European Centre for Law and Justice states "to accomplish complete cultural erasure, Azerbaijan has gone beyond merely destroying Armenian heritage—Azerbaijan is also denying it ever existed," adding that "Azerbaijan seeks to erase...even the memory of the Armenian people."
Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights expressed concern over the "ongoing pattern of destruction and appropriation of Armenian historically, culturally, and religiously significant sites and objects.......the organised reinterpretation of the history of Nagorno-Karabakh to erase the traces of the presence of Armenians," adding concern that the "allegations that the combined attacks to people, monuments and symbols, the falsification of the historical narrative and erasure of place names...may amount to cultural cleansing."
History
Under Mir Cəfər Bağırov's leadership as First Secretary of the Azeri SSR, efforts began to erase the historical Armenian presence in Azerbaijan and elevate the Azeri majority to the sole titular nation. Anti-Armenian historical revisionism developed in the 1950-1960s, and promoted the false narrative that Azerbaijanis are descendants of the indigenous Caucasian Albanians. By the 1980s, Azerbaijani media and textbooks pushed more extreme revisionist accounts that included the following: that no Armenians had ever existed in Nagorno-Karabakh nor formed an independent state, that no Caucasian Albanians were Armenianized, that Armenians were newcomers to the region only following Russian intervention.These revisions, driven by Soviet and later post-Soviet nationalism, contributed to ethnic tensions and paved the way for the ethnic cleansing of Armenians. In certain instances, Azeri historiography explicitly prohibits mentions of Armenians, with the intention of erasing the historical presence of Armenians. Arsène Saparov, Caucasus expert, states that "the persistent Azerbaijani policy of denial of the Armenian presence and cultural heritage in the Caucasus...has been institutionalized since Ilham Aliyev became president."
The concept of "Albanian Khachdash"
One of the most typical and widespread medieval Armenian monuments are khachkars - stone steles with a cross and carvings used as tombstones and objects of worship. Khachkars remained in large numbers on all lands where Armenians lived. Therefore, an important manifestation of the "Albanization" of the Armenian cultural heritage was the theory proclaiming the Armenian khachkars of Nagorno-Karabakh, Nakhichevan and the Armenian Syunik as Albanian artifacts under the name "khachdashi". According to the Azerbaijani architectural historian, khachdashi are distinguished by the fact that they bear in their decor signs of a fusion of Christianity with pre-Christian Albanian beliefs and contain symbols of Mithraism and Zoroastrianism.In 1985, at the All-Union Archaeological Congress in Baku, Davud Aga-oglu Akhundov made a report in which he expressed these ideas, which provoked a scandal. The Armenian delegation announced its readiness to leave the conference, Leningrad scientists assessed Akhundov's report as a pseudoscientific political action. American archaeologist Philip L. Kohl believes that this report was a deliberate political provocation and aimed at creating a knowingly false cultural myth.
As Russian and Armenian critics later noted, Akhundov simply either did not know or deliberately ignored the well-known features of Christian iconography, declaring these subjects to be Mithraic, and also looked over the Armenian inscriptions on the "khachdash" he studied. According to the Russian specialist A. L. Yakobson, "Mithraist fog envelops almost all the monuments that the authors of
This theory is now officially accepted in Azerbaijani science and propaganda. Thus, the chairman of the Azerbaijan Copyright Agency, Kamran Imanov, denounces the "Armenian tradition of appropriating our cultural values" as follows: These "scientists" at one time stole almost all the wonderful examples of our Christian past – memorials, churches, steles, tombstones, our khachdash, announced "Khachkars". According to the latest theories of Azerbaijani scholars, the custom of erecting stone khachdash crosses was brought to the Caucasus by the Turks back in the "pre-Albanian era".
Rhetoric
Historians which have documented the falsification of Azerbaijani historiography include Victor Schnirelmann, Anatoly Yakobson, Vladimir Zakharov, Mikhail Meltyukhov, Hasan Javadi, Philip L. Kohl and George Bournoutian.Territorial Claims
Azerbaijani historiography portrays the early to mid 1800s as the "ideal" and "normative" situation with Azeri sovereignty over Nagorno-Karabakh and "Southern Azerbaijan", despite that a "united Azerbaijan" was never, in fact, independent but always part of the Iranian empires. In addition, "Western Azerbaijan" is an expansionist propaganda campaign that is used to refer to the territory of Armenia. Azerbaijani officials have falsely claimed that the territory of the modern Armenian republic were lands that once belonged to Azerbaijanis. The concept has received official endorsement by the government of Azerbaijan, and has been used by its current president, Ilham Aliyev, who, since around 2010, has made regular reference to "Irevan", "Göyçə" and "Zangazur" as once and future "Azerbaijani lands". The irredentist concept of "Western Azerbaijan" is associated with other irredentist claims promoted by Azerbaijani officials and academics, including the "Goyche-Zangezur Republic" and the "Republic of Irevan." In December 2022, Azerbaijan initiated its "Great Return" campaign which ostensibly promotes the settlement of ethnic Azerbaijanis who once lived in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan's "Great Return" program has been characterized as ahistorical and expansionist by international critics
Distortion of quotations and references
Historians A. A. Akopyan, P. M. Muradyan, and Karen Yuzbashyan in their work "On the Study of the History of Caucasian Albania" note that the Azerbaijani historian Farida Mammadova in the book "Political History and Historical Geography of Caucasian Albania" in confirmation of his the concept of the Armenian-Albanian border distorts the quotation of S.V. Yushkov, refers to books that do not contain such information. The authors also give an example where Mamedova, referring to Stephen of Syuni, distorts his message about the presence of several dialects, directly called by Stephen of Syuni Armenian dialects, presenting it as a message about the existence of various languages. The authors note that Mamedova criticizes the Armenian author of the late fifth century Pavstos Buzand for his tendentious attempt to prepare the population for the anti-Persian uprising that took place before Pavstos Buzand wrote the work. A. A. Akopyan, P. M. Muradyan, and K. N. Yuzbashyan summarize Mamedova's work as follows:"voluntarism in the study of antiquity, the falsification of the very concept of historicism, already the result of unhealthy tendencies, cannot be characterized otherwise than as an attempt to deceive one's own people, instill in them unworthy ideas, and tune in to wrong decisions."
Doctor of Philology E. Pivazyan gives an example of falsification of F. Mamedova in her work "Political History and Historical Geography of Caucasian Albania", which on pages 24–25 attributed the translator's notes, which were absent in the original, to the author of the medieval code of law Mkhitar Gosh.
Historians K. A. Melik-Ogadzhanyan and S. T. Melik-Bakhshyan also give examples of distortion of quotations and references to nonexistent statements. A.V. Mushegyan discovers false references to authoritative authors by academician Z. Buniyatov.
Schnirelmann gives another example of distortion of links in the works of Mamedova and Buniyatov:
"Later, some Azerbaijani scholars began to completely reject the participation of Mesrop Mashtots in the creation of the Albanian writing system and tried to find an ally in this in the person of A.G. Perikhanyan. Meanwhile, in the work of Perikhanyan, only a hypothesis was expressed that Mesrop Mashtots attracted the Albanian Benjamin as his assistant, passing him the experience of creating writing. Perikhanyan clearly demonstrated that the Albanian alphabet was created under the unconditional influence of the Armenian one. Consequently, she did not in the least question the fact of Mesrop Mashtots' participation in his invention.".
Leningrad historian D.I. n. A. Yakobson, criticizing the attempts of Azerbaijani historians to record the Gandzasar Monastery as a monument of Albanian architecture, also finds examples of distortion of quotations from the Azerbaijani historian Geyushev. Analyzing the report of D. A. and M. D. Akhundovs "Cult symbols and the picture of the world captured on the temples and steles of Caucasian Albania", Jacobson comes to the conclusion that the definitions given by the authors are "fake", and the report itself "distorts the artistic content and origin of the Armenian medieval decorative arts".
State support for history falsification
V. A. Schnirelmann notes that there is a direct state order for publications with distortions of the source texts in Azerbaijan, designed to "clear" the history of Armenians:"Another way to underestimate the presence of Armenians in ancient and medieval Transcaucasia and diminish their role is to republish ancient and medieval sources with cuts, replacing the term "Armenian state" with "Albanian state" or with other distortions of the original texts. In the 1960-1990s. Many such reprints of primary sources were published in Baku, which was actively pursued by Academician Z. M. Buniyatov. In the most recent years, describing ethnic processes and their role in the history of Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani authors sometimes generally avoid discussing the issue of the appearance of the Azerbaijani language and Azerbaijanis there, thereby making the reader understand that they have existed there from time immemorial. It is unlikely that Azerbaijani historians did all this exclusively of their own free will; they were dominated by the order of the party and government structures of Azerbaijan."
According to George Bournoutian, propaganda "historical" books are published in Azerbaijan by order of the government, in which Azerbaijani historians try to prove that Armenians appeared in the Caucasus after 1828.
At the ceremonial meeting dedicated to the anniversary of the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic, the then President of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev directly called on historians to "create substantiated documents" and "prove that Azerbaijan belongs to the lands where Armenia is now located". Thus, according to Schnirelmann, the Azerbaijani authorities gave direct instructions to historians to rewrite the history of Transcaucasia. Farida Mammadova admits that Heydar Aliyev personally demanded from her scientific criticism of every book about the history of Albania published in Armenia. Historian Arsène Saparov states that the case of Stalinist deportations of Azerbaijanis from Armenia became part of a state-sponsored "anti-Armenian conspiracy theory," adding that "any critical assessment of this case by Azerbaijani historians is impossible."
The existence of the state program of falsification of the history of the Transcaucasus in Azerbaijan is also noted by the historians Mikhail Meltyukhov, Alla Ter-Sarkisiants and Georgi Trapeznikov.
Historian Vladimir Zakharov, deputy director of the MGIMO Center for Caucasian Studies, commenting on the words of Ilham Aliyev that Armenia was created on the primordial Azerbaijani lands, notes that "historical research in Azerbaijan is at the service not of science, but of the political ambitions of the leaders," and Azerbaijani historians are engaged in deceiving their own people.
On 14 December 2005, Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, in a speech on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, called on Azerbaijani scientists to get involved in the program of justifying the lack of historical rights of the Karabakh Armenians to Nagorno-Karabakh before the world community. President Aliyev promised to subsidize the program of uniting the efforts of Azerbaijani specialists in the development and propaganda of his thesis that "the Armenians came to Nagorno-Karabakh, an integral part of Azerbaijan, as guests," arguing that "in the 70s of the last century, a monument was erected there, reflecting their settlement, the 150th anniversary of the settlement of Armenians in Karabakh was celebrated" and therefore "the Armenians have absolutely no right to assert that Nagorno-Karabakh in the past belonged to them". On 26 April 2011, at the annual general meeting of the National Academy of Sciences of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev repeated these theses and stated:
"Our scientists, responding positively to my call, in a short time have created excellent and based on real facts work related to the history of this region"The Azerbaijani state also has constructed a false historical narrative portraying Azerbaijanis as victims of genocide or ethnic cleansing, including through official commemorations such as the "Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis," despite the events cited not meeting the legal or historical criteria for genocide. Scholars characterize this narrative as a deliberate inversion of history, designed to counter and obscure the Armenian Genocide while simultaneously legitimizing territorial claims and the erasure or appropriation of Armenian cultural heritage.
De Baets from Wesleyan University notes that historians are persecuted in Azerbaijan for "incorrect" interpretation of historical concepts. Thus, in December 1994, the historian Movsum Aliyev was arrested for publishing the article "Answer to the falsifiers of history."
Formation of the image of the "enemy" in Azerbaijan and Armenia
The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict, has exacerbated relations between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. In Azerbaijan, this led to the formation of an image of a victim, combined with revanchist aspirations. On the other hand, in Armenia, where genocide has become the main factor shaping identity, Azerbaijanis are promoted as de facto Turks. Sergei Rumyantsev, candidate of sociological sciences, director of the Novator Center for Social Research cites the construction of the image of a "historical enemy" on the basis of a literary work of the Turkic world of the 11th–12th centuries. "Kitabi Dede Gorgud", which is not only presented as a "historical chronicle of our fatherland", that is, Azerbaijan, aged thirteen centuries, but also the replacement of the Kipchak tribes by the Armenians and Georgians. As the author notes, "basically all the appeals to the text of the epic in the textbooks were intended to serve as the basis for the constructed image of the "historical enemy." The events of recent years... have led to the fact that this "honorable" place was taken first of all by the Armenians". Sergei Rumyantsev illustrates this with the example of a school textbook published in 2003 on Azerbaijani history. According to independent experts in Armenia and Azerbaijan, this policy makes the differences more and more insurmountable every year. A generation of young people has grown up, for whom "Armenian" and "Azeri" have become an ideological cliché, an image of an "enemy".Literature
L. Melik-Shahnazaryan. A. Shakhnazaryan.- Crombach, S. G..