by-product of this literary genre was strongly articulated anti-Iranian rhetoric. Tolerance and even support of this anti-Iranian rhetoric by the communist authorities were obvious." Nationalist political elites in post-Soviet Azerbaijan, being the inheritors of this mentality created during the Soviet rule, forwarded this "mission" for achieving a "united Azerbaijan" as a political goal of utmost importance. Azerbaijani president Abulfaz Elchibey (1992–93) devoted his life to carrying out this mission, and he, in tandem with other pan-Turkist elites, went on a campaign for the ethnic awakening of Iranian Azeris. It may be due to these ideas that Elchibey was elected president in the new country's first presidential election in 1992. He and his government has been widely described as pursuing Pan-Turkic and anti-Iranian policies. Other than the pan-Turkist leadership, nationalist intellectuals and Azerbaijani media also stipulated the question of "Southern Azerbaijan" in their main political agenda's. In 1995-1996, according to one survey of the Azerbaijani press, the question of Iranian Azeris was covered more than any other topic by state-controlled and independent outlets in the young republic of Azerbaijan. Since 1918, political elites with Pan-Turkist-oriented sentiments in the area that comprises the present-day Azerbaijan Republic have depended on the concept of ethnic nationalism in order to create an anti-Iranian sense of ethnicity amongst Iranian Azeris. Iranian Azerbaijani intellectuals who have promoted Iranian cultural and national identity and put forth a reaction to early pan-Turkist claims over Iran's Azerbaijan region have been dubbed traitors to the "Azerbaijani nation" within the pan-Turkist media of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Ahmad Kazemi, the author of the book Security in South Caucasus, told Iran's Strategic Council on Foreign Relations in a 2021 interview that "Azerbaijan is seeking to establish the so-called pan-Turkish illusionary Zangezur corridor in south of Armenia under the pretext of creating connectivity in the region", arguing that "this corridor is not compatible with any of the present geopolitical and historical realities of the region". Russian views on Pan-Turkism In Tsarist Russian circles, pan-Turkism was considered a political, irredentist and aggressive idea. Turkic peoples in Russia were threatened by Turkish expansion, and I. Gasprinsky and his followers were accused of being Turkish spies. After the October Revolution, the Bolsheviks’ attitude to Türkism did not differ from the Russian Empire’s. At the 10th Congress of Bolshevik Communist Party in 1921, the party "condemned pan-Turkism as a slope to bourgeois-democratic nationalism". The emergence of a pan-Turkism