CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | King, Joseph Harrison |
|---|---|
| Title | The (Un)making of Soviet Kirovabad: Pogroms and the End of the Friendship of Peoples in Azerbaijan |
| Summary | Armed conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan is often seen as a precipitating factor that hastened the Soviet Union’s collapse, but few studies have analyzed how the dissolution of Soviet authority unfolded on the ground. This thesis takes an important step in that direction by focusing on the unraveling of ethnic pluralism in a single city in Soviet Azerbaijan. The following chapters tell the story of Kirovabad (present-day Ganja)—the second-largest city in the Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic—before, during, and after a series of pogroms in November 1988 initiated the mass exodus of some 40,000 Armenians. Though located outside the enclave of Nagorno Karabakh (a majority-Armenian autonomous region within Azerbaijan that became highly contested in 1988), Kirovabad experienced the fallout from this territorial dispute, and its depopulation sheds light on the dynamics of mob violence and the construction of difference that persisted after the riots dissipated. To reduce the scale of analysis to the municipal and street level allows one to capture the processes—such as governmental inaction, mass rallies, belligerent speeches, and the circulation of rumors—that enabled violence in Kirovabad and elsewhere. Zooming in reveals how seemingly spontaneous outbursts of primordial hatred were, in fact, not of this nature, but rather the result of a chain of precipitating events and cumulative pressures that prompted crowds of Azerbaijani men to brutalize Armenians. Moving beyond essentialist theories of ethnic conflict to address the convergence of historical memories, institutional legacies, and contingencies that polarized Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the twilight years of Soviet rule, this thesis seeks to demonstrate how the city’s violent breakdown epitomized the disintegration of mixed communities in the South Caucasus. Drawing on the testimonies of current and former residents of Kirovabad, this thesis also explores the zones of social interaction and the shifting, context-dependent role of nationality in everyday life in the decades preceding the pogroms. Rather than assume that mutual antagonism was an intrinsic feature of their lives, the present study seeks to highlight the sense of solidarity that united Armenians and Azerbaijanis as Soviet citizens inhabiting the same space, while uncovering the sources of tension that at times divided them. Though “indigenization” policies privileging Azerbaijanis from the 1960s onward alienated many Armenians, only the pogroms in 1988 permanently separated residents whose lives had been intimately intertwined. Since the Armenians’ flight and the subsequent demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, multiethnic Kirovabad has transformed into the distinctly Azerbaijani city of Ganja through the rewriting of history and the nationalization of urban space. Analyzing monuments, museums, and textbooks in Ganja as a window on nation building in Azerbaijan, the thesis argues that selective remembrance and active forgetting are among the lasting legacies of the pogroms. |
| Supervisor | Miller, Alexei; Rieber, Alfred J. |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/king_harrison.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University