ABSTRACT
“The Communist International wants to unite under its banners speakers of all the languages of the world,” Grigorii Zinov’ev observed in his introductory remarks to the First Congress of the Peoples of the East, convened in the Azerbaijani city of Baku from 1–8 September 1920. This was the first mass meeting of representatives of West European, US, and Russian Communist parties with communist and nonparty delegates of countries ranging from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia to Afghanistan, India, and China. Directed by the chairman of the Baku Congress’s Council for Propaganda and Action, Michael P. Pavlovich, Vsesoiuznaia Nauchnaia Assotsiatsiia Vostokovedeniia (VNAV) played a key role in the linguistic engineering of Turkic languages in the 1920s. The comparative literature of the next decade might let such work guide it toward the imagination of a literary and linguistic common, and a literary and linguistic communism, marked by the linguistic multiplicity of the First Congress of the Peoples of the East.
