Alec (Alirza) Rasizade is a retired Soviet-American professor of history and political science, who specialized in Sovietology, primarily known for the typological model, which describes the impact of a drop in oil revenues on the process of decline in rentier states by stages and cycles of their general socio-economic degradation upon the end of an oil boom. He has also authored more than 200 studies on the history of international relations, Perestroika reforms and breakup of the USSR, oil diplomacy and contemporary politics in the post-Soviet states and autonomies of Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus.

Baku State University (BSU) is a public university located in Baku, Azerbaijan. Established on 1 September 1919 by the Parliament of Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, the university started with faculties of history and philology, physics and mathematics, and law and medicine, with an initial enrollment of 1094. The first rector of BSU was V.I.Razumovsky, a former professor of surgery at Kazan University.