We cordially invite you to the last lecture of the StředověC JinaX series this semester. We will meet as usual at 19:00 in the Hans Belting Library. The lecture will be in English and will be streamed online on our YouTube channel.

Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev will tell us about the Origins of “National Politics” in the USSR and the Destruction of Armenian Cultural Heritage in Nakhichevan and Karabagh.

“I shall discuss two interconnected factors in the ethnic and cultural cleansing in Azerbaijan. The first is the “Nation engineerin” in the Soviet Union, which led to the creation in each republic of a distinct autochthonous historiography for its “titular nation”. This process was accompanied by the restriction of the rights of other local cultures rooted in the territory of the same republic, as that of the Armenians on the territory of the Republic of Azerbaijan. With a reference to Engels’s writings it will be shown how the consolidation of “titular nations” at the expenses of ethnic and linguistic minorities answered the Marxist concept of “vehicle of historical development”. Stalin, who was the author of the Soviet state’s programmatic texts defining the “Politics of Nationalities” and its Commissar for nationalities (1917–1924), played a key role in the development of ethno-territorial nationalism which still conditions the relationships between post-Soviet states and societies.”

The lecture is part of the project Armenian Art and Culture: a More than Menaced Heritage 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.