Středověc Jinax: Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev – The Origins of National Politics in the USSR and the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage

We cordially invite you to the last lecture of the Stredovec Jinax series this semester. Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev will discuss the beginnings of "national politics" in the Soviet Union and the destruction of Armenian cultural heritage in Nakhichevan and Karabakh.

he lecture will address two interrelated factors of ethnic and cultural cleansing in Azerbaijan. The first is the Soviet "national engineering" that led to the creation of a distinct autochthonous historiography in each republic that was chargeable to the "titular nation". This process was accompanied by the restriction of the rights of other local cultures with roots in the territory of the same republic, as in the case of Armenians in the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. With reference to Engels' writings, we will show how the consolidation of "titular nations" at the expense of ethnic and linguistic minorities corresponded to the Marxist concept of the "driving force of historical development". Stalin, who was the author of the Soviet Union's programmatic texts defining "national policy" and its Commissar for Nationalities (1917-1924), played a key role in the development of the ethnoterritorial nationalism that still conditions the relations of post-Soviet states and societies today.

The lecture was produced within the framework of the Armenian Art and Culture: an Endangered Heritage project in cooperation with the Embassy of the Republic of Armenia in the Czech Republic and with the financial support of the Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sport of the Republic of Armenia.

You can also watch the lecture online on our YouTube channel.