Post-Soviet Identity and the Ukraine War: Self-Conception in the Caucasus

Our author is Russian-speaking Azerbaijani now living in Georgia. Is she a former soviet citizen? Or rather southern Caucasian?

View over Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia Photo: Imago

Being a Russian-speaking Azerbaijani, raised in 1990s Baku with Russian-Soviet-Azerbaijani-Western culture is almost the same as being a nobody. Or like being everything at once, like a creature from mythology with a human head, bird wings and a cat’s tail.

For a long time I had problems with my own national identity. My Azerbaijani identity was too narrow for me and I felt uncomfortable in the role of cosmopolitan. Over time I realized that I see myself first and foremost as someone from the southern Caucasus. And the three countries of this region – Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia – as a whole, a cultural-historical space. And the South Caucasus itself as part of the post-Soviet space. And my South Caucasian identity accordingly as part of a post-Soviet identity.

Way too complicated, right? Especially now that such a post-Soviet South Caucasian identity is almost indecent. With its invasion of Ukraine, apart from everything that has gone before, Russia has completely discredited not only itself, but even the very notion of “post-Soviet space” and everything that connects the countries that make it up.

And while Russia is shooting at Ukraine on the one hand, it is holding the reins of the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan on the other. The South Caucasian peoples have been separated from each other with barbed wire out of hatred and fear for thirty years.

It has always seemed to me that a kind of ideal variant for the countries of the South Caucasus would be to “stick together”, forming some kind of political and humanitarian union. But I realize that this is utopian. And against the background of all current events, the only “place” where I can afford my “indecent identity” is in emigration.

Now that I live in Georgia, which is neutral on the Karabakh conflict, I allow myself to be “Southern Caucasian”. The last time I had my hair cut, my hairdresser, a young Armenian from Tbilisi, sang a song in Russian from an Azerbaijani film from the 1950s.

“Heaven, Sergo, how do you know that anyway?” I asked him.

“I heard that when I was a kid from a painter who was renovating our house,” he explained.

If I ever emigrated beyond the borders of our region, I could probably be a “post-Soviet Southern Caucasian”. That is, myself. One of those mythological creatures with human heads, bird wings, and cat tails that actually exist.

From the Russian by Gaby Coldewey

The project is financed by the taz Panter Foundation.

The publishing house edition.fotoTAPETA published a diary anthology in September 2022.