Vol. 2 (2025)
Articles

The Politics of the Past: Reconsidering the Socio-Political Tensions of 1950s-1970s Baku

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  • Heather D. Dehaan,
  • Shalala Mammadova
Heather D. Dehaan
University of Binghamton, USA
Shalala Mammadova
Independent researcher
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/asiac-3478

Published 2025-11-10

Keywords

  • Village,
  • Azerbaijan,
  • Demography,
  • Cities,
  • Urbanization,
  • Migration
    • ...More
    Less

How to Cite

Dehaan, H. D., & Mammadova, S. (2025). The Politics of the Past: Reconsidering the Socio-Political Tensions of 1950s-1970s Baku. ASIAC – Studies on Central Asia and the Caucasus (SCC), 2, 5–23. https://doi.org/10.36253/asiac-3478

Copyright (c) 2025 Heather D. Dehaan, Shalala Mammadova

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Due to the demise of the Soviet Union and the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict over Karabakh, Azerbaijani history has often been viewed through the lens of ethnic conflict. This lens has also impacted scholarly interpretations of Soviet migration, particularly of rural-urban migration in late Soviet Azerbaijan. As a corrective, this paper examines how rural-to-urban migration shaped Azerbaijani national and social life and the goals and social orientation of rural and urban inhabitants, resulting in tensions and fissures that were not necessarily ethnic in nature. To make sense of the reasons for and outcomes of rural-to-urban migration, this paper first undertakes a comprehensive survey of the social conditions prevalent in Azerbaijani villages and cities during the 1950s and 1960s. This opening section explores the state’s exploitative wage system and fiscal policies, environmental degradation, and their collective impact on rural gender norms, sex demographics, and power structures. Turning to cities, this study then examines the migratory patterns that brought rural inhabitants to urban areas, where they experienced significant social marginality. Through this, the paper demonstrates that the migration of Azerbaijanis from rural to urban areas during the post-Stalin period was driven by the socio-economic marginalization of the Azerbaijani countryside, coupled with significant shifts in the distribution of industry and opportunity across the Soviet Union as a whole, and that the migration sparked intergenerational tensions in the village and friction between rural migrants and city dwellers.

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