Krista Goff has written a book in two finely intertwined parts. The first chapters are mostly history, based on a wealth of archival and original material from a wide variety of central and local sites in the Caucasus and Russia. The last chapters mix in political ethnography, based on the author's 120 oral-history interviews with people in and from the region. The book sets out to discover how, “at the same time that Azerbaijani elites and others complained about their handicapped national rights, their own nation-building policies infringed on the national rights of minorities sharing the republic of Azerbaijan” (142).
This is a provocative approach given the author's main interest, the Azerbaijani state, with a majority Turkic population. It has fought a war since 1988 on this very question of national and minority relations, and through most of those years, has shared significant humanitarian and territorial losses with one of its minority groups, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh. Unable to study the history of the Armenian minority in Azerbaijan, Goff turned instead to study the mistreatment of its other minority peoples: the Kurds, Georgian-Ingiloi, Lezgin, and especially the Talysh.
The title of the book plays on the cliché of the Russian matryoshka nesting doll, in order to reveal the many-dimensional and complex relations between the nationalities of USSR with title and privilege and those without. Much of the evidence here reveals a Soviet system of fragmented and countervailing parts, all the better to divide and manage. Chapter 1 covers the historiography of Soviet nationality policy. Goff pays respect to the dominant “affirmative action empire” model, first raised by Ronald G. Suny in his Revenge of the Past, and made so famous by Terry Martin's book. This model animates Goff's whole approach, premised on the monolithic power of the Communist Party-state, defined here as “Moscow and Russians” (5), to make and unmake nations, at least in their artificial titular and non-titular forms. This chapter also discusses such Moscow directives as russification, deportation, and the terror.
Chapter 2 is a fascinating study of the regional geopolitics of the Second World War era, and Soviet nationality interventions and irredentism against nearby Iran and Turkey (an earlier section covered the role of the Kurds). It also surveys the strained relations and rivalries between Soviet Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia. By this point in the narrative, the Stalinist strongman, Mir Jaffar Bagirov, takes on the role of a founding father of a militant Azerbaijani national communism. The rest of the book focuses on the Khrushchev Thaw of the 1950s. We learn in Chapter 3 how Azerbaijani communists exploited Soviet national constructs and formal rights for their own “nationalization” program. They did this through new national origin stories, educational policies, and census taking. A Talysh case study (Chapter 4) reveals the violations of their rights along with their grievances, how Soviet “Azerbaijani chauvinism” (114) oppressed them as a minority group. Chapter 5 extrapolates that set of experiences to the Georgian-Ingiloi and Lezgin peoples of Azerbaijan. The affirmative action empire becomes a pyramid scheme of oppression.
Aggrieved national minorities in the region are, of course, dangerous things. Just look at the Russian state interventions, largely meant to divide and dominate its peripheries, in a recent series of local minority national protectorates: Transnistria, Donbass, Crimea, Abkhazia, Ossetia, and Nagorno-Karabakh. This book spends a significant section defining one of these failed historic regimes: the Talysh-Mughan Autonomous Republic in 1993.
There is a key element missing in the story: the independent Azerbaijani Democratic Republic (1918–1920) and its guiding Musavat Party, even though they were the foundational moments of a more truly sovereign Azerbaijan. The book instead offers several hackneyed Bolshevik references vilifying them. Their democratic leader, Mammad Amin Rasulzade, had a developed model of national-territorial governance (a civic federation, or “home of many rooms”), in competition with the national-cultural model of governance favored by the rival Volga Tatars (a confederation of autonomous communities). The focus on “Soviet” in this book displaces this whole rich dialogue.
There is a third book here too: memoir. Goff lived and worked among diverse populations when conducting the anonymous interviews. They offer poignant and captivating testimonies from real people. In a few of her own travel stories, framed by the introduction and conclusion, Goff identifies several contemporary Azerbaijani state officials for repeated approbation, shaming their oppressive nationalism. No Armenians or Georgians or any other minority officials of the Caucasus share the same fate.
