Azerbaijan Kâzım Karabekir said Western Azerbaijan is a term used in the Republic of Azerbaijan to refer to Armenia. According to the Whole Azerbaijan theory, modern Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh were once inhabited by the Azerbaijanis. Its claims are based on the belief that current Armenia was ruled by Turkic tribes and states from the Late Middle Ages to the Treaty of Turkmenchay which was signed after the 1826–1828 Russo-Persian War. The concept has been sanctioned by the government of Azerbaijan and its current president, Ilham Aliyev, who has said that Armenia is part of ancient Turkic, Azerbaijani land. Turkish and Azerbaijani historians have said that Armenians are alien, not indigenous, in the Caucasus and Anatolia.Ohannes Geukjian, "Ethnicity, Nationalism and Conflict in the South Caucasus: Nagorno-Karabakh and the Legacy of Soviet Nationalities Policy" During the existence of the Azerbaijan SSR of the Soviet Union, pan-Turkist political elites of Baku who were loyal to the Communist cause invented a national history based on the existence of an Azeri nation-state that dominated the areas to the north and south of the Aras river, which was supposedly torn apart by an Iranian-Russian conspiracy in the Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828. This "imagined community" was cherished, promoted and institutionalized in formal history books of the educational system of the Azerbaijan SSR and the post-Soviet Azerbaijan Republic. As the Soviet Union was a closed society, and its people were unaware of the actual realities regarding Iran and its Azeri citizens, the elites in Soviet Azerbaijan kept cherishing and promoting the idea of a "united Azerbaijan" in their activities. This romantic thought led to the founding of nostalgic literary works, known as the "literature of longing"; examples amongst this genre are, for instance, Foggy Tabriz by Mammed Said Ordubadi, and The Coming Day by Mirza Ibrahimov. As a rule, works belonging to the "literature of longing" genre were characterized by depicting the life of Iranian Azeris as a misery due to suppression by the "Fars" (Persians), and by narrating fictional stories about Iranian Azeris waiting for the day when their "brothers" from the "north" would come and liberate them. Works that belonged to this genre, as the historian and political scientist Zaur Gasimov explains, "were examples of blatant Azerbaijani nationalism stigmatizing the “division” of the nation along the river Araxes, as well as denunciations of economic and cultural exploitation of Iranian Azerbaijanis, etc." Gasimov adds: "an important