Resettling the Borderlands

"The book explores resettlement policies conducted by Russian Empire and the Soviet Union in the South Caucasus in 1817-1953. The author investigates the state-managed population transfers concerning Germans, Russians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Farid Shafiyev offers insights on imperial tools to manage space and people in Muslim borderlands. The research seeks to find not only parallels and continuity between the resettlement policies of Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, but also aims at analyzing the modalities and complexities of empire-building in the borderlands under investigation. Among key findings is the nexus between foreign policy and religious factors in population transfers. The focus of the study is also the impact of demographical changes on the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict. The author presents newly available archival material from Azerbaijani deposits concerning the Soviet period."--