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

3.5. Peculiarities of the Ethnic Relations Policy in the Soviet Period

The Bolsheviks took power after the April coup (28 April 1920). They overthrew the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the first secular, democratic state in the East, which had existed for 23 months. Although the Bolsheviks built their national-cultural and religious (actually anti-religious) activities in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic on the basis of an authoritarian-totalitarian regime, the historical multicultural environment and tolerance were maintained in the Soviet period too.

On taking power the Bolshevik dictatorship decided to strike a blow to the national spirit of the people in order to break their resistance. On 15 May 1920, by decision of the Military Revolutionary Committee, the Ministry of Religion abolished the Board of Muslims of the Transcaucasus and the institution of Sheikh ul-Islam. The Constitution of the Azerbaijan SSR, approved at the First All-Azerbaijan Congress of Soviets on 19 May 1921, recognized the freedom of all citizens to perform religious rituals and to campaign against religion. However, the articles of the Supreme Law remained only on paper and the proletarian

dictatorship launched a struggle against religion. Consequently, 120 mosques were closed in the districts of Azerbaijan in 1929, while 400 mosques were closed in the whole of Azerbaijan in 1930. Waging a continuous struggle against religion, the Soviet authorities resorted to acts of vandalism, and in 1936 Bibi-Heybat Mosque was blown up. In 1920-44 the Board of Muslims of the Transcaucasus remained frozen.

In their struggle against religion, the Bolsheviks closed­ Christian churches in Azerbaijan, too; the Orthodox Alexander Nevsky Church in Baku, known as the Golden Church, was blown up in 1936.

During World War II the attitude towards Islam began to change in the USSR. One of the factors influencing this was the conversion to Islam of some generals of the German Army who prayed in mosques during the occupation of the north Caucasus. Taking into consideration the socio-political situation, the Soviet leadership gave up its radical position against religion in order to mobilize the population against the common enemy, and on 14 April 1944 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR adopted a resolution on the restoration of the Board of Muslims of the Transcaucasus.

When considering inter-ethnic relations in the USSR, it is worth paying attention to the Bolshevik slogan ‘Workers of all countries unite!’ The Soviets tried to solve the national issue on the principles of Bolshevik-proletarian ideology. They built the map of the USSR on the principle of ‘scissoring’ which aimed to form an artificial historical category – the Soviet people by giving formal independence to the nations, but not taking into account the historical territories of peoples, and uniting them in administrative territorial structures. The main aspects of the nationalities issue in Azerbaijan were built on the basis of artificial principles of ‘internationalism’; the alphabet of the Azerbaijani people was twice changed to deprive them of their historical memory. Those who uttered the words ‘land’ and ‘motherland’ were labelled ‘pan-

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Turkists’; Azerbaijani émigrés were painted as ‘enemies’. Along with the Azerbaijani people, the Germans, who considered Azerbaijan their second ‘motherland’, suffered political and moral pressure during World War II: they were exiled to Central Asia and Siberia by Decision 001487 adopted in October 1941. The principles of authoritarianism and enforcement led to a number of national and ethnic conflicts on the eve of the collapse of the USSR. This was seen clearly when Mikhail Gorbachev was the general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1985-91). Bloody tragedies occurred in the USSR, of which the fabricated Nagorno-Karabakh problem stands out in particular.