The article analyzes a large-scale political and historical scandal that unfolded in 1980 following the publication of the poem “Babek” by Rasul Rza, the people’s poet of Azerbaijan, in “Bakinsky Rabochy”, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, as well as travel notes by two special correspondents from “Izvestia” who visited the Nakhchivan ASSR of the Azerbaijan SSR. Armenian historians perceived Rasul Rza’s work as an insult to the Armenian people, while the travel notes of the “Izvestia” special correspondents were seen as grounds for raising territorial claims against the Azerbaijan SSR. They accused both the poet and the journalists of inciting interethnic hostility. The article demonstrates how a literary work and seemingly innocuous travel notes became a trigger for discussions on deeper ethnopolitical tensions in the South Caucasus, revealing the mechanisms of ideological censorship and the operation of national historical schools in the USSR.
Eldar Abbasov (Wed,) studied this question.