The narrative was created to justify the assimilation policy of the leadership of the Azerbaijan SSR towards the Talysh people and was distributed through various means, including encyclopedias, maps and textbooks.
[3] The leadership of the Azerbaijan SSR, according to Goff, used the census data in Soviet ethnography, creating a narrative about the "completely voluntary and natural assimilation" of the Talysh people.
It was followed by the production of a large amount of ethnographic, linguistic, historical-geographical and other material, developing and reproducing narratives designed, according to Goff, to justify the national “erasure” of the Talysh and strengthen the official myth of their “voluntary assimilation”.
So, for example, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia began to say that “in the USSR, the Talysh almost merged with the Azerbaijanis, who are very close in material and spiritual culture, therefore they were not singled out in the 1970 census”.
[5] This assimilation policy put great social, political and economic pressure on the Talysh and their daily life, stimulating them to "merge" with the titular Azerbaijani nation.
The census workers sat in the regional or village office and filled in the national composition of the population ahead of time based on orders from above.
[13] Obtaining accurate statistics is difficult due to the lack of reliable sources, mixed marriages and the decline in knowledge of the Talysh language.
He was arrested and sentenced to 10 years on charges of high treason after his newspaper published articles claiming that the poet Nizami and the leader of the anti-Arab uprising Bābak Khorramdin were Talysh (and not Azerbaijanis, as officially considered in Azerbaijan).
[21] The report of the "European Commission against Racism and Intolerance" (ECRI) noted that against the background of the cultivation of anti-Armenian sentiments in Azerbaijan, serious concerns are also expressed in connection with incitement of hatred towards the Talysh minority.
This is how the former editor-in-chief of the only Talish-language newspaper "Tolyshi Sado", human rights activist Hilal Mammadov, was arrested and charged with drug possession.