Academic Historiography in Azerbaijan at the Crossroads of Time (1989-1991)

Abstract

The scientific development in the USSR has come a long way. Despite all the obstacles posed during its formation and development, it has reached a reasonably high level by the mid-1980s. This achievement was mainly in the natural and technical sciences. The progress was determined by the USSR’s desire to keep the palm in space exploration, nuclear physics, petrochemistry, and other sciences of strategic importance for the country’s development. In these areas, contacts were established with world scientific centers and exchange of scientific achievements took place. As a result, Soviet scientists became winners of prestigious international awards, including the Nobel Prizes. As for the humanities and especially the social sciences, the dominance of Marxist-Leninist ideology and the corresponding interpretation of historical events significantly affected the development of Soviet sciences and reaching the world level quality. Until the mid-1990s, political history as an area of science of history, practically, did not exist. The “History of the CPSU” and the “History of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan” virtually monopolized the multifaceted nature of political themes, reducing it to the apologetics of the party history. Everything changed with the beginning of ‘Perestroika’ and ‘Glasnost’ (the officially announced publicity policy). As a result, the previously unknown pages of the past of the country and national republics became public. Almost every day, there were sensational publications of various authors published by popular magazines and newspapers, which also printed previously classified documents from historical archives. Traditional historical researchers and academicians were in shock. It was not easy for historians to abandon the 70-year-old account of history tied to ideological dogmas; the crisis associated with the loss of orientation was overcome with great difficulty and mainly by young historians. In the late 1980s, foreign historians, who studied the history of Azerbaijan, began visiting the country. Until that time, their existence was known only to a narrow circle of historians, who worked with foreign literature in specialized repositories of local and central libraries. For the first time, Azerbaijani historians left the USSR in 1990, when a conference was held at the University of London on the history of the South Caucasus. The event was attended by historians from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, as well as the so-called Sovietologists - scientists from Great Britain, the USA, and France. It is symbolic that in the same year in Moscow the last all-Union conference on political history was held. The event was attended by scientists from the Soviet republics, which declared independence the following year.