Journal of azerbaijani studies

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world may have been at war; but the best they could do was sing.

During the war, Moscow launched a campaign to promote "love for the motherland," not simply for the Soviet Union but for one's native republic as well. Movies depicted Russians and non-Russians fighting fascism together. Aleksandrov's serial, One Family, filmed in Baku during 1943 with the assistance of several Azerbaijani cinematographers and dedicated to one family's passage through the war, served as a broader metaphor for the big family of peoples in the USSR.⁷⁷ Yet other films also resurrected patriotic military heroes from the Transcaucasus to stir national pride. From Georgia came Georgir Saakadze (1943); from Armenia, David Bek (1943); and from Azerbaijan, Fatah Khan (1947). They covered the fabled exploits of three early modern warriors in defending their homelands against Persian hegemony, usually with the help of Russia's tsars and generals. Fatali Khan was the most controversial. Moscow sponsored it during one of the first crises of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union still occupied the ethnically Azerbaijani territories of northern Iran and was playing a delicate game of brinkmanship at keeping them, possibly even uniting them into a larger satellite state. To fulfill these designs, the Central Committee of the Azerbaijani Communist Party rejected the initial script, drafted by several Azerbaijani screenwriters, which painted Fatali Khan in rather sober and meditative tones. Instead, it charged the outsider, E. Dzigan, to center the film around an activist hero, with full attention to the fraternal alliance between the "elder brother" (Russia) and the subject peoples of the Transcaucasus in their "progressive" struggles against the "Iranian yoke."⁷⁸ At the end of the picture "Fatali Khan" may have failed in his bid to unite the Azerbaijani lands against the foreign aggressor to the south. But as the wind picked up against his back, he and his troops vowed to continue the struggle, with "the many millions of Azerbaijani people," until "the day when the sun shines on a united Azerbaijan." Unfortunately, that day had not yet come, the Soviet Ministry of Cinematography decided

in 1948. By then the Azerbaijani crisis had abated and the film's sharp irredentist message proved too inflammatory. It was stored away in a secret vault in Moscow. Unlike its neighbors, Azerbaijan was not yet ready for such a bold national hero.This is not life but the shadow of life and this is not movement but the soundless shadow of movement.⁷⁹