His father, originally from Bibiheybat village of Baku, was a customs officer and, due to his work, the Bunyadov family changed their residence several times.

Though the official state investigation placed the responsibility on a group of Islamic extremists, many of whom received life sentences, the culprits and circumstances of Bunyadov's murder remained mysterious.

According to John W. Parker, chief of the Division for Caucasus and Central Asia within the U.S. State Department, Bunyadov's murderers were trained in Iran.

Bunyadov researched ancient and medieval Azerbaijani historiography, specializing in Caucasian Albania and Azerbaijan during the Arab caliphate rule, concentrating on events from the 7th–19th centuries AD.

According to Russian historian Victor Schnirelmann, Bunyadov "purposefully tried 'to clear' the territories of modern Azerbaijan from the presence of Armenian history".

[6] Soviet academic Igor Diakonoff wrote that Bunyadov become infamous for a scientific edition of "a historical source from where all mentions on Armenians have been carefully eliminated".

[7] Historians Willem Floor and Hasan Javadi charged Bunyadov for making "an incomplete and defective Russian translation of Bakikhanov's text [Gulistan-i Iram].

This is in particular disturbing because he suppresses, for example, the mention of territory inhabited by Armenians, thus not only falsifying history, but also not respecting Bakikhanov's dictum that a historian should write without prejudice, whether religious, ethnic, political or otherwise".

[9] As part of the Soviet Union's nation-building efforts, the Iranian Babak Khorramdin, who followed the teaching of the Iranian Zoroastrian priest Mazdak with its pseudo-Communist and socialist themes, was proclaimed a national hero in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic; Bunyadov, within this context, claimed that "Babak was a national hero of Azerbaijani people".