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1870s, and participated as much as tsarist law allowed in the Russian State Duma (parliament) from 1906 to the fall of the Romanov dynasty. During the First World War, this stratum of intellectuals turned the cultural renaissance into a “national-liberation†movement and, after the fall of imperial Russia, established the Republic of Azerbaijan in May 1918.
A later generation of intellectuals, those working in the Brezhnev era, grew to maturity in an atmosphere in which the first republic was vilified, yet they followed a path similar to the intellectuals who created it. The writers, poets and other creative and scholarly figures wrote patriotic poetry and novels and, in time, historians |