Ethnography, Demography and Assimilation – How Talysh Community was Made to Disappear in Soviet Azerbaijan

Abstract

The article explores one of the examples of assimilatory politics to the national minorities in Soviet Azerbaijan, and in particular to the Talysh community. In the 1930s, Talish were the fifth largest national minority in the country. The Talysh nationality erased from Soviet census categorization in 1959. Data from this census were used to support the decade-long political myth of "voluntary assimilation" of the Talish. The article also presents the instrumentalization of political manipulations in scientific discourses - Talysh minority were also recategorized by the ethnographers who consulted on census design and supported these government politics until 1989.