Paper long abstract:

The emergence of the Azerbaijani and transformation of the Armenian identities occurred in the situation of the ethnic clashes between the two, revolutions and the collapse of the empires at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the age of the shattering empires, against the background of the inter-ethnic confrontation between Armenians and Azerbaijanis (then known as Caucasian Tatars), the transformations of the identities were entangled.

While the conflicts pushed forward certain narratives and visions, it is the new interpretations of the history that endowed the structural transformations. Historical narratives are tools for transformation of the social groups into political communities. The stories of the past and the present are told and retold to include the historical memories of certain social groups, to privilege certain symbols and myths, and to overlooks others. Historical narratives developed and stressed in the historiography crystallized the self-determination process in which the identification of “others” also plays a crucial role.

In this paper, I am investigating the Armenian and the Azerbaijani historical narratives from the late Imperial to the end of the Soviet eras. The main focus would be the Soviet Azerbaijani and Armenian historians. Particularly, I will follow the transformations of the heroic self-images of these nations and the emergence of mutual exclusion. By doing this, I will keep the overall historical background and especially the Soviet nationalization politics in my sights.