Azerbaijanand the troubling Russian cultural inheritance
Serban F. CIOCULESCU
February 17, 2010
Because Russia played a very controversial role in the creation and development of Azerbaijan as a modern state, especially through military conquest, communization and “russification”, the political class in Baku seems to be prepared for a cultural departure from Moscow after the political growing estrangement provoked mainly by Russia’s support for Azerbaijan’s arch-enemy Armenia regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Mass media in Baku, quoting the president of the Parliament’s Cultural Committee, Nizami Djafarov, announced that an Azerbaijani parliamentary commission is preparing a draft law concerning the de-russification of Azerbaijani last names. The commission’s activity is based on a committee set up by the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences which needed six months to develop the concept supporting the draft legislation.
The idea behind this proposal is meant to enhance the national pride but also to consolidate the legitimacy of the presidential administration, in spite of the fact that many times president Ilham Aliyev declared himself very proud of his country's multiracial and multicultural nature. But the facts in the field show that this measure will probably not generate big turbulences, at least domestically, because the ethnic composition of the population is: Azeris 90.6%, Dagestanis 2.2%, Russians 1.8%, Armenians 1.5%, and other 3.9% according to the 1999 census. In a country where democracy is incipient and the power is kept by the presidential family in a quasi-dynastic way, such political-cultural transformations have big chances to succeed.
The pattern of names’ russification has been a constant during the Soviet era because having a Russian-like name was considered to be a “guarantee” of socio-political ascension. Of course, not everyone was eager to embrace the Soviet system of names. Some Azerbaijanis did not endorse it and naming using local names became a subtle tool by which to express resistance to foreign oppression. While some Azerbaijanis were trying to gain social and political status by russifying their personal names, others did their best to preserve their national identity by deliberately choosing names of Azerbaijani origin. It is worth mentioning that even during the Soviet regime the government of Baku did not issue any official laws or any ultimatums relating to personal names. Without the obligation to choose a Russian-like name, the choice remained a pure expression of the inherent career-aspirations within the society. Many Azeris preferred not to put a classical “Islamic” first name for their children - Mohammad, Ali, Husein, Hasan – preferring Russian names or even “European” (Western) names taken from movies and books. But curiously, the personal family names (surnames) kept the Muslim aspect and received only a Russian termination! Thus, a secular and anti-religious Soviet regime allowed Azeris to keep religious inspired traditional names! Since the years 20-30s of the previous century, because most of the Azeris did not have official surnames, the Soviet employees simply created such names by taking the name of the individual's father and adding traditional suffixes, such as "-yev" / "-yeva" or "-ov" / "-ova" (for male and female), which means "born of." The few Azeris with national conscience tried with no success to keep traditional suffixes of Azerbaijani surnames, such as "-zade" (with Persian origin, meaning "born of") and "-li" / "-lu" with a Turkic origin, meaning "with" or "belonging to".
After 1991, since Azerbaijan gained independence, many Azerbaijanis began to “nationalize” their names by either removing the Russian endings (Ismayilova becoming Ismayil) or by simply changing the "ov" or "ev" to "ly". In order to get some uniformity in the naming system, Ali Hasanov, the head of the social-political department of President Ilham Aliyev's administration proposed that Russian suffixes from people's names could be changed to "az" which is Azerbaijan's domain on the Internet and also the first two letters of the name of the country. Even the president Ilham Aliyev may become Ilham Ali or Aliaz! Other possible terminations are li", "lu", "oglu", "gil" (from Turkish) and the change is eased by the 1993 law concerning the conformity between family names and the official state language. This concern for doing “justice” to the ancestors and abolish the “nefarious” Russian cultural inheritance is not confined only to Azerbaijan. Some years ago, the Tajik President Emomali Rahmon changed his name from the initial form “Rakhmonov”, in order to remove the russificated termination of his family name.
Of course, this action is seen by Russia as a hostile one and Moscow has repeatedly protested against the attempt to “revert history” by ignoring the will of many people. Beyond the 1,8% Russians there are also Azeris who does not want to give up their family names because they could be forced by the state. Thus, if the law will be approved it will be a controversial one, and there is a risk of increasing antagonism between Baku and Moscow, at a time when Azerbaijan is generally more isolated in the international realm, after Turkey and Armenia get closer to a historical agreement on opening the borders and the US and Russian Federation became more committed to find a compromise in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
