Ministry of Education of the Republic of Azerbaijan Baku International Multiculturalism Centre Azerbaijani Multiculturalism Textbook for Higher Education

3.4. Azerbaijani Multiculturalism in the Modern Period (19th and early 20th centuries)

Azerbaijani multiculturalism entered a new stage in the early 19th century when it became part of the Russian Empire. Russia invaded the northern khanates of Azerbaijan in the first 30 years of the 19th century. The empire pursued a policy of resettlement in the 19th and early 20th centuries in order to expose the local population

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– the Azerbaijanis – to assimilation, and absorb the Muslim lands within the empire. To this end the Russian Empire began to resettle in the country Christian peoples from outside the empire; new ethnoses, i.e. Germans and Russians, became part of the population, while the number of Armenians increased considerably as a result of mass resettlement from Iran and Turkey. This was a time of change in the demography of the country.

From the early 19th century the Germans took their own place in the history of Azerbaijani multiculturalism. When the Germans migrated to the south Caucasus, including the territories of Azerbaijan, the main goal of the Russian Empire was to introduce a Christian element into the Muslim country.

The first wave of German settlers consisted of Protestants from the German kingdom of Wurttemberg. Some of the Germans migrated to the south Caucasus and settled in the territory of Azerbaijan. In 1818-19 four German colonies were established in the country: Helenendorf and Annenfeld in the territory of Ganja, Katharinenfeld and Alexanderhilf in the territory of Borchali.*

While the Germans may not have met the requirements of Russian colonial policy, they nevertheless managed to introduce western elements into the country’s economy. Viticulture, viniculture, tobacco cultivation and the production of mineral waters were associated with them. By World War I there were 15,990 Germans who left their mark on Azerbaijani history.

The Germans influenced the development of the multicultural environment in the country. They experienced the socio-political unrest of the first half of the 20th century, but after the Soviet Union joined World War II they were exiled to the east of the USSR – to Central Asia and Siberia – as an undesirable ethnic group.

By the end of the 20th century when Azerbaijan had regained its independence, the Republic of Azerbaijan declared the protection

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  In order to weaken economically Ziyadoghlu, governor of Karabakh, Nadir Shah
  

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    presented Borchali as a gift to Teimuraz, tsar of Kartli-Kakhetia, in 1743, using the surrender of Sam Mirza II, leader of the second revolt of Shirvan, as a pretext.
    

of the rights and freedoms of minorities to be a priority in its state policy, and the German community benefitted from this policy. Since then the cultural monuments of the Germans have been restored and are now protected as part of the heritage of Azerbaijan. To promote further research into the history of the Germans in Azerbaijan, President Ilham Aliyev signed an instruction ‘On the 200th anniversary of German settlement in the South Caucasus’ on 30 August 2016.

In the first 30 years of the 19th century the Romanovs resettled Russians from the central provinces of the Empire to Azerbaijani land. The Russian language belongs to the eastern branch of the Slavic language group of the Indo-European language family. The Russian settlers were members of dissident Russian Orthodox sects

– the Molokans, Dukhobors, Subbotniks, Skoptsy and Priguns. The imperial authorities thought the resettlement of sectarian Russian farmers from the central provinces of Russia to Azerbaijan would weaken protests against the Russian Orthodox Church. From the second half of the 19th century, however, the empire preferred to resettle Russian Orthodox Christians to northern Azerbaijan. According to statistical data for 1886, 85,356 Russians were registered in three provinces of Azerbaijan – Baku, Yelizavetpol and Irevan. In the all-Russian census of 1897, the number of Russians had reached 119,236. In the early 20th century the Russian Empire gave preference to the resettlement of Orthodox Russians and, as a result, 60 Russian Orthodox settlements were established in the province of Baku and 29 in the province of Yelizavetpol in 1912. Thus, on the eve of the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty there were 249,835 Russians in northern Azerbaijan.

As a result of the mechanization movement in the 1920s-30s the number of Russians in Azerbaijan continued to grow. By the end of the 1980s there were more than 500,000 Russians in Azerbaijan, but following the collapse of the USSR there was a wave of departures for ‘the historical Motherland’. According to the census of 2009, 119,307 Russians lived in Azerbaijan.

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In the distant past Thracian tribes (ancestors of the Armenians) settled in the province of Phrygia in Asia Minor. Armenia emerged as a state on the banks of the River Euphrates in the 2nd century BCE, but after its collapse in 387 Armenians were scattered geographically. The non-indigenous Armenians joined other minorities in the Azerbaijani population. In the first 30 years of the 19th century there was a sharp increase in the non-indigenous population because of the mass resettlement of Armenians by the Russian Empire. In 1828-30 some 120,000 Armenians were resettled from Iran and Ottoman Turkey to northern Azerbaijan, where they settled mainly in Irevan, Nakhchivan, Ordubad, and Karabakh.

Touching on the issue of mass resettlement of Armenians to territories to the north of the River Aras, Academician Ramiz Mehdiyev drew attention to the erection of a monument in 1978 in the village of Margushevan (historical name Shikharkh) in Aghdara District of Azerbaijan by the Armenians to mark the 150th anniversary of the resettlement of 200 Armenian families from Maragha to this area in 1828.* Armenian resettlement to Azerbaijan continued in subsequent stages of Azerbaijani history. By the early 20th century Armenians made up 32.65% of the population of the country, whereas in the first 30 years of the 19th century Armenian Gregorians made up 9% of the population of northern Azerbaijan, the majority of whom were Gregorianized Albanians. In the early 20th century Armenians established their fabricated state in the territory of Irevan – historical Azerbaijani land that had never belonged to them. They made unfounded claims against Azerbaijan and introduced the fabricated ‘Karabakh problem’ to history.

94	* To erase the historical truth the Armenians destroyed this monument during the
	Karabakh War (1992-94).

The monument erected by Armenians in the village of Margushevan in Aghdara District, Azerbaijan, in 1978 to mark the 150th anniversary of the resettlement of Armenians from Maragha, Iran. The inscription ‘Maraga-150’ was written in Armenian at the base