It’s often assumed that the “Albanization” of Armenian heritage — the policy of declaring medieval Armenian figures from Karabakh and Armenian monuments “Caucasian Albanian” — was born in the 1990s, alongside Azerbaijan’s independence. That’s not the case. The roots of the phenomenon go back to the Soviet era, and its principal architect was one man: Ziya Bunyadov.
Ziya Musa oglu Bunyadov (1923–1997) was a frontline veteran, a Hero of the Soviet Union, and later an academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Azerbaijan SSR. That status — which made him effectively untouchable — allowed him to promote for decades a historical framework that Western and Russian historians today describe as revisionist.
Russian anthropologist and historian Viktor Shnirelman, in his book Wars of Memory: Myths, Identity, and Politics in Transcaucasia (Moscow, 2003), traces this back to the 1960s, when the Azerbaijani Academy of Sciences began systematically reissuing sources with altered content.
According to Shnirelman’s reconstruction, Bunyadov’s key 1965 work on Caucasian Albania under Arab rule effectively swapped one identity for another: historians and writers who wrote in Armenian — Movses Kaghankatvatsi, Kirakos Gandzaketsi, the poet Davtak, the jurist Mkhitar Gosh — were recast as “Albanian-speaking” or “Armenian-speaking Albans,” and the medieval principality of Khachen and its rulers were labeled “Albanian.”
Bunyadov also claimed that a rich Albanian literature had once existed and was subsequently destroyed, its content allegedly distorted by Armenians when translated into classical Armenian (Grabar). Independent historians point out that no evidence of such a body of texts exists, whereas the actual destruction of Armenian manuscripts by the Seljuk Turks is a documented historical fact.
American historian Robert Hewsen, one of the leading Western specialists on Caucasian Albania, reached the same conclusion, showing in detail that virtually everything known about the Albanians survives through Armenian sources. Eurasianet makes the identical point: Mkhitar Gosh’s 12th-century chronicle, Kirakos of Ganja’s 13th-century “Concise History,” and the “History of Aghwan” attributed to Movses Kaghankatvatsi are essentially all the world knows about the Albanians — and all of it comes from the Armenian literary tradition.
The most startling revelation surfaced after Bunyadov’s death. According to the account in his English Wikipedia entry, his 1960 and 1965 articles on Caucasian Albania turned out to be direct plagiarism: under his own name, he had published, without attribution, translations of works by Western scholars C. F. J. Dowsett and the same Robert Hewsen. In other words, the concept that would become the foundation of an entire state historiographic doctrine was, in significant part, lifted from the very “pro-Armenian” Western researchers whose conclusions were then inverted.
A turning point came at the notorious plenum of the Nagorno-Karabakh Regional Communist Party Committee in March 1975 — formally devoted to “patriotic education” and combating nationalism, but in substance a response to the growth of the Armenian national movement in the NKAO. Shnirelman documents what followed: reference works stopped describing Armenians as the region’s indigenous population, cultural ties with Armenia were severed — down to the reception of Armenian radio broadcasts — and a jubilee volume marking the NKAO’s 50th anniversary, which had listed Armenian architectural monuments, was withdrawn from circulation and burned. It was shortly after this plenum that Bunyadov sharply intensified the promotion of his theory.
Through the 1970s–80s, the rhetoric shifted from omission to outright appropriation. The medieval Armenian principality of Khachen and its Gandzasar Monastery were declared monuments of “Caucasian Albania” — despite the church having been built in the canons of 10th–13th-century Armenian architecture and bearing Armenian inscriptions. The Wikipedia article on the Hasan-Jalalyan dynasty explicitly describes the reading of the Gandzasar inscription, which Azerbaijani historian Farida Mammadova used to argue for Prince Hasan-Jalal’s “Albanian” origin, as a “specious interpretation.”
The high-water mark came when architect D. A. Akhundov, in the 1980s, attempted to declare khachkars — a distinctively Armenian form of stone carving recognized in 2010 by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage — to be “Albanian khachdash,” stylistically distinct from Armenian ones.
A separate, far darker chapter is Bunyadov’s article “Why Sumgait?,” written in May 1989. British journalist Thomas de Waal, in his now-classic book Black Garden, describes the piece as so notorious that it was later reprinted even by Armenians themselves, as an illustration of the absurdity of the official version. The gist of Bunyadov’s claim: Armenian nationalists had staged the Sumgait pogrom themselves, sending in photographers and TV crews in advance, in order to discredit Azerbaijan.
What actually happened in Sumgait is documented far more thoroughly. Official Soviet figures put the death toll at 32 (26 Armenians and 6 Azerbaijanis), but independent sources and human-rights organizations — including material from the Moscow-based Memorial Human Rights Center, cited in a UN document — indicate substantially higher numbers and describe the pogrom of February 27–29, 1988, as organized: attackers worked from lists of Armenian addresses. Sumgait was followed by pogroms in Kirovabad (1988) and Baku (1990), after which, by various estimates, roughly 350,000 Armenians ultimately left Azerbaijan.
This historiographic line did not stay in the past. According to Armenian Weekly, after the 2020 war, territories that came under Azerbaijani control saw a targeted “cleansing” of Armenian inscriptions from churches under the guise of “restoration” in an Albanian style. President Ilham Aliyev has publicly cited an 1836 decree abolishing the Albanian Catholicosate as “proof” that Armenian historians falsified the ownership of Albanian churches — an interpretation Eurasianet describes as not supported by the actual content of the decree.
Historian Rouben Galichian, author of The Invention of History and Clash of Histories in the South Caucasus, traces the same pattern of falsification through an analysis of 45 historical maps.
As Shnirelman wrote, the Soviet authorities’ tolerance of large-scale historical falsification in one republic, driven by political expediency, laid the groundwork for a catastrophe that would resurface decades later — in war, the destruction of monuments, and the tragedy of Artsakh. A history built on fabrication requires constant reinforcement with new lies; sooner or later, the structure collapses under its own weight.
Based on the publication: Anna Poletaeva
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