History of Azerbaijan

The first signs of a human being in Azerbaijan appeared 1.5 million years ago. First state formatons appeared in 3^rd millennium BC (Arata, Lulubis, Kutis), but broke up because of their weakness. In 4^th century BC after collapse of the power of Alexander The Great some states sprang up on the territory of modern Azerbaijan and Northen Iran (Atrapatena, Caucasian Albania).

Azerbaijan maintained its national character after its conquest by the Arabs in the mid-seventh century AD and its subsequent conversion to Islam. Only in the 11th century, when Oghuz Turkic tribes under the Seljuk dynasty entered the country, did Azerbaijan acquire a significant number of Turkic inhabitants. After the Mongol invasions in the 13th century, Azerbaijan became a part of the empire of Hulagu and his successors in 1256. In the 15th century it passed under the rule of the Turkmens who founded the rival Qara Qoyunlu (in 1410) and Aq Qoyunlu (in 1467) confederations. Concurrently, the native Azerbaijani state of the Shirvan-Shahs flourished. At the end of the 15th century, Azerbaijan became the power base of another native dynasty, the Safavids, who through a series of conquests and a vigorous centralization policy built a new Persian kingdom. Shah Ismail I (r. 1502-1524), whose capital was at Tabriz, made the Shi' a branch of Islam the official religion of his domain, thus setting the Azerbaijanis firmly apart from the Ottoman Turks. Under the Safavids, Azerbaijan was frequently a battleground in the wars between Persia and Sunni Muslim Turkey. Safavid rule, which gradually lost its Azerbaijani character, lasted for more than two centuries, finally ending in 1722.

In 1747 Nadir Shah was assassinated in a palace coup and his kingdom disintegrated. Local centers of power north of the Araks emerged in the form of khanates, such as Sheki, Garabagh, Shirvan, Baku, Ganc, Quba, Nakhichevan, Derbent, and Erivan.

Of the political associations that emerged after the revolution of 1905, the longest-lived and the one to gain the largest following was the Musavat (Equality) Party. Founded clandestinely in 1912, it expanded rapidly in 1917, after the overthrow of tsarism in Russia. The most essential components of the Musavat ideology were secular nationalism and federalism, or autonomy within a broader political structure. The party's right wing and left wing differed on few issues, most notably land distribution. The leader of the party was the left- leaning Mammad Amin Rasulzada.

A Soviet government was established at Baku on Nov. 15, 1917. However, on May 28, 1918, an anti-Soviet Azerbaijani National Council proclaimed the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic at a meeting in Ganc, its provisional capital. The hitherto rarely used geographical term ``Azerbaijan'' became the name of the state of a people who had previously been called Caucasian Tatars, Transcaucasian Muslims, or Caucasian Turks. The republic existed for 23 months, but it was under Turkish occupation from May to October 1918 and under British occupation from November 1918 to August 1919. The Turkish occupation authorities tended to regard Azerbaijan as a territory to be absorbed by Turkey. However, Turkey, which had joined the Central Powers in World War I in 1914, surrendered to the Allies at the end of October 1918. The Turkish occupation forces were replaced by British forces, which had occupied Baku in August and had ousted the Baku Soviet in September, killing its leaders, the so-called 26 Baku commissars. The British military occupation provided anti-Communist Azerbaijanis with temporary security from the conflagration of the Russian Civil War; indirectly, it encouraged the political development of Azerbaijan along the lines of a parliamentary regime. The republic was governed by five cabinets, all formed by coalition of the Musavat and other parties, including the Socialist bloc, the Independents, the Liberals, the social-democratic Himmat (Endeavor) Party and--in one case--the conservative Ittihad (Union) Party. The premier in the first three cabinets was Fath Ali Khan Khoiski; in the last two, Nasib Yusufbayli. The president of the parliament, Ali bay Mardan Topchbashi, was recognized as the head of state. In this capacity he represented Azerbaijan at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919.

The period of full independence, following the British withdrawal in August 1919, was clouded by a growing sense of weakness and insecurity. The survival of Azerbaijani independence hinged on a stalemate in the Russian Civil War that might keep both the Red and the White armies preoccupied elsewhere. By the spring of 1920, the Red Army had achieved victory, and its troops stood menacingly at the northern frontier of the republic. Aided by dissension in the Azerbaijani government, the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan on Apr. 28, 1920. It met with almost no resistance since the bulk of the Azerbaijani army was engaged in putting down an Armenian bandit uprising that had just broken out in Garabagh. The same day a Soviet government was formed under Nariman Narimanov. Before the year was over, the same fate had befallen Armenia, and in 1921 came the turn of Georgia.

The history of Soviet Azerbaijan began with the suppression of armed uprisings in various parts of the country. In December 1922, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia were joined together in a loose regional grouping, the Transcaucasian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic (T.S.F.S.R. ), which became part of the Soviet Union on December 30. The problem of territories disputed between Armenia and Azerbaijan was dealt with in 1923, when Nagorno-Karabakh (Qarabag) was made an autonomous region within Azerbaijan and the region of Nakhichevan, which is separated from Azerbaijan by a strip of Armenian territory, Zangezur, given from the Azerbaijani land in 1920, was made an autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic under Azerbaijani jurisdiction. The effect of the territorial arrangements was to create a checkerboard pattern, a condition that boded ill for the prospects of intercommunal harmony.

Under the official Soviet policy of indigenization (korenizatsia) in the 1920's, ethnic Azerbaijanis were given preference in appointments to positions in the government of Azerbaijan and the national intelligentsia was given the opportunity to pursue its favorite programs of enlightenment and education. However, the Center, Moscow, was always watching every step of the local government and always had the second important person in Azerbaijan being Russian. Armenians also occupied high positions, especially in Garabagh. With the cooperation of the intelligentsia the process of Azerbaijani national consolidation continued. By the late 1920's, intolerant atheism had become a state policy, leading to such measures as the closing of mosques, a ban on religious education, and the imprisonment of clerics. While Islam was greatly weakened as a religion, it remained strong as a way of life--a system of traditions, customs, and prohibitions. The brutal campaign against Islam was but a prelude to an even more violent upheaval, the Great Terror of the 1930's.

Of all the Soviet republics, only Georgia suffered losses proportionately comparable to those of Azerbaijan in terms of deportations, imprisonments, and mass killings during the purges of the 1930's. Directing the purges in Azerbaijan was Mir Jafar Baghirov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, who was as ruthless a dictator as Stalin. His special target was the intelligentsia, but he also purged Communist leaders who had sympathized with the opposition or who might have once leaned toward Pan-Turkism or had contacts with the revolutionary movements in Iran or Turkey. In 1936, in the midst of the purges, the T.S.F.S.R. was dissolved and the Azerbaijan S.S.R. was made a separate constituent republic of the Soviet Union. The period of the purges also marked the beginning of a vigorous assimilation to the Russian language and culture, in an effort to strengthen Soviet unity in face of the coming World War II.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 reached the Greater Caucasus in July 1942, but the Germans never crossed into the territory of Azerbaijan. While many Azerbaijanis fought well in the ranks of the Soviet Army (about 600-800,000), at least 35,000 prisoners of war joined (not all voluntarily) the German forces and were used both in combat and in the rear. About 400,000 Azeris died in WWII, number equal to the loses of USA in WWII. The Germans made a vain effort to enlist the cooperation of emigre political figures, most notably Rasulzada.

An event that shook Azerbaijan from its inward-looking nationalism was the Soviet occupation of Iranian Azerbaijan in the summer of 1941. The Soviet military presence south of the Araks led to a revival of Pan-Azerbaijani sentiments. During the Soviet occupation a revival of the Azerbaijani literary language, which had largely been supplanted by Persian, was promoted with the help of writers, journalists, and teachers from Soviet Azerbaijan. In November 1945, with Soviet backing, an autonomous ``Azerbaijan People's Government'' was set up at Tabriz under Sayyid Jafar Pishevari, the leader of the Azerbaijani Democratic Party. Cultural institutions and education in Azerbaijani blossomed throughout Iranian Azerbaijan, and speculation grew rife about a possible unification of the two Azerbaijans, under the Soviet aegis. As it turned out, the issue of Iranian Azerbaijan became one of the first conflicts of the Cold War, and under pressure by the Western powers, the Soviet army was withdrawn. The Iranian government regained control over Iranian Azerbaijan by the end of 1946, and Democratic Party leaders took refuge in Soviet Azerbaijan. Pishevari, who was never fully trusted by Stalin, soon died under mysterious circumstances.

The postwar era saw first a continuation of Stalin's brutal policies, then a ``thaw'' under Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev. The ``Khrushchev Thaw'' (1955-1964) was a period of relaxation of controls over literature, the press, and scholarship. At the same time the ``thaw'' brought a new anti-Islamic drive and a return of Russification under the policy of Sblizhenie (``Rapprochment''), which was supposed to lead to the eventual merger of all the peoples of the U.S.S.R. into a new Soviet nation.

In the 1960's, signs of a structural crisis in the Soviet colonial system began to emerge. Azerbaijan's crucial oil industry lost its relative weight in the Soviet economy, partly because of a shift of oil production to other regions of the Soviet Union and partly because of depletion of the oil resources. The decline of the oil industry led to reduced investments in Azerbaijan by Moscow. In the 1960's, Azerbaijan had the lowest rate of growth in productivity and economic output among the Soviet republics, and it also had a high rate of population growth. White-collar workers had high expectations that could not be fulfilled. Ethnic tensions, particularly between Armenians and ethnic Azerbaijanis, began to grow, but violence was still suppressed. In an attempt to end the growing structural crisis the government in Moscow appointed Heidar Aliyev as the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan in 1969. In 1982 Aliyev was made a member of the Communist Party's Politburo in Moscow.

The Islamic revolution in neighboring Iran in 1978 stimulated a religious revival, to which the Soviet answer was the slogan ``One Azerbaijan' '--promoted in literature and scholarship rather than in political action. Azerbaijan lagged behind other Soviet republics in the development of a dissident movement. A political awakening, comparable to that of the 1905-1907 period, came in February 1988 with the renewal of the ethnic conflict, which centered on Armenia's demands for the unification of Nagorno-Karabakh with Armenia. The ethnic strife revealed the weakness of the Communist Party as a champion of national interests, and, in the spirit of glasnost, independent publications and political organizations began to emerge. Of these organizations, by far the strongest was the People's Front of Azerbaijan (PFA), which by the fall of 1989 seemed to be poised to take power from the Communist Party. The PFA soon experienced a split between a conservative-Islamic wing and a moderate wing. The split was followed by an outbreak of anti-Armenian violence in Baku and intervention by Soviet troops in January 1990. (More information on this subject is to be included).

The January Days deepened the disarray within the PFA, especially after many of its leaders were arrested. The Communist Party seemed to be reviving; in elections held in September 1990 the Communists won close to 90 percent of the votes in some contests, leading to accusations of rigged elections. After the failed conservative coup of Aug. 19-21, 1991, in Moscow, the Communist-dominated supreme soviet proclaimed Azerbaijan an independent republic on Aug. 30, 1991. The declaration of independence was followed by the dissolution of the Communist Party, although its members usually retained their positions in the government or the economy. The last party chief, Ayaz N. Mutalibov, was elected president of the republic in September 1991, and the supreme soviet formally implemented the declaration of independence on October 18. Meanwhile, the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh continued despite efforts to negotiate a settlement. Early in 1992 the region' s Armenian leaders proclaimed an independent republic. In what was now a war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the Armenians gained the upper hand because of their better training from the Soviet Army, which had used Azerbaijanis mostly in construction battalions. Mutalibov' s failure to build up an adequate army, over which he feared he would not have had enough control, brought about his downfall. In March 1992 the supreme court forced him to resign. New presidential elections were held in June 1992. The former Communist power elite failed to present a viable candidate, and Abulfaz Elchibay, the leader of the PFA and a former dissident and political prisoner, was elected president with more than 60 percent of the vote. His program included opposition to Azerbaijan's membership in the Commonwealth of Independent States, close relations with Turkey, and a desire for extended links with the Azerbaijanis in Iran.

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