History of Azerbaijan
General Information
Political Structure
History of Azerbaijan
Nature and Resources Of
Azerbaijan
Education
Culture
Traditions
Ecology and health
protection
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The first signs of a
human being in Azerbaijan appeared 1.5 million years ago. First state
formatons appeared in 3rd millennium BC (Arata, Lulubis,
Kutis), but broke up because of their weakness. In 4th
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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