The Soviet Union And Iranian Azerbaijan

The Use Of Nationalism For Political Penetration

David B Nissman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000305845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Iranian Azerbaijan--an ideological battle-field between Moscow and Tehran--has been a target for Soviet takeover since the formation of the USSR. The effort gained impetus when the Red Army occupied northern Iran in 1941, bringing with it a special detachment of Soviet Azeri Communist Party activists whose goal was to stimulate a national liberatio

1
Introduction

Persia ceded roughly half of what is considered Azerbaijan today to Russia in 1828. Cross-order contacts between the Azeri Turks, who constitute Azerbaijan's core population, continued without interruption for almost a century. The Bolshevik victory in Russia in 1917 and the subsequent Soviet takeover in Baku in 1920 had the effect of breaking off these contacts; the major result of this was that the Azeris of the Soviet Union and their co-nationals in Iran have developed along two entirely different political and social systems for most of this century. In 1941 when the Red Army occupied northern Iran, including Iranian Azerbaijan, Moscow considered the Soviet Azeri political intelligentsia to be politically reliable enough to be used to lay the groundworks for their Southern compatriots' Marxist-Leninist future. Since the Azeri language is essentially the same on both sides of the border, Soviet Azeris were able to act as instruments in communicating the Soviet line, a role which they played very effectively then as now. The present study is basically an examination of the use by the Soviets of the national factor in manipulating political developments in Iran in the Soviet interest; hence, it is more about the Soviet Union, its tactics and propaganda, than about Iran.

The political aspirations nurtured by the Bolsheviks and their Soviet successors for Iranian Azerbaijan are perhaps the least studied aspect of the relations between the USSR and Iran. This gap in our knowledge is a result of the fact that cross-border relations between Soviet nationalities and their ethnolinguistic counterparts linked to them geographically but separate politically have only recently come to be considered of strategic, tactical and polititical significance. Thus, there is no body of literature which treats this matter either generally or specifically, either in Western or Soviet sources. It roust be added that this applies not only to the Azeris of the Soviet Union and those of Iran, but also to the Soviet Turkmens and their counterparts in Iran and Afghanistan, the Uzbeks of the Uzbek SSR and the Uzbeks of Afghanistan, the Uighurs of Kazakhstan SSR and the Uighurs of Sinkiang and others. The primary political factor which has made the relationship between Soviet nationalities and their perceived co-nationals across the border so important in recent years is the growing Soviet ideological and propagandistic emphasis on national liberation.

Of all Soviet-backed national liberation movements, that concerned with the national liberation of the Azeris of Iran is the oldest and the most significant: the 12 million Azeri Turks, the largest national minority in Iran, have been consistently exposed to Soviet propaganda for many years. The core of the Iranian Azeri population is in northwestern Iran, geographically contiguous with the Azerbaijan SSR and its population of some 6 million Azeri Turks. They share the same language, a continuity of culture and tradition and, to a great extent, history. A Soviet-sponsored national liberation movement during the Red Army's occupation of northern Iran (1941-1946) led to the establishment of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist Azerbaijan Democratic Party in 1945 (although it should be noted the current Soviet Azeri hagiographical works stress that the formation of this republic was a result of a hard-fought national-liberation struggle which began in 1941). In 1946, shortly after the Red Army's withdrawal from Iranian territory, Iranian Azerbaijan reverted to Iranian control, and prominent members and supporters of the Azerbaijan Democratic Party took refuge across the border in Soviet Azerbaijan.

The contemporary Soviet approach to Iranian Azerbaijan draws heavily on their experience there during the Second World War. In Soviet thinking, the period from 1946 to the present has been marked by the national oppression of the Azeris of Iran, the only remedy for which is a renewed national liberation struggle. Since 1955 the study and management of this movement has been orchestrated from Baku.

Moscow has considered Iran to be extremely vulnerable to Soviet pressure since the fall of the Shah. It is a multinational state in which national minorities had been deprived of all aspects of national rights, including the right to use there own languages, for most of the twentieth century. A Soviet success in controlling or manipulating Iran's minorities Azeris, Kurds, Baluch and Arabs -- will open the way for control over Iran's rich natural resources and the Soviet advance to the Persian Gulf.

Moscow was not surprised by the fall of the Shah, and state propaganda organs such as Radio Baku and the Azerbaijan Society for Friendship and Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries were well prepared to exploit the potentially revolutionary situation developing in Iran. Their primary efforts were directed at influencing the course of development in Iranian Azerbaijan by establishing dialogues with 'progressive' Iranian Azeri intelligentsia and cultural personalities: the purpose of these dialogues was, and is to emphasize the ethnolinguistic differences between Azeris and the other peoples of Iran and to promote the concept of Azeri autonomy. Accompanying and supporting these emphases were highlights of Azeri achievements under Soviet rule in order to prove the efficacy of the Soviet approach to the nationalities question. As this campaign evolved in the early 1980s, it became clear that Soviet analysts had failed to predict the appeal of Khomeini's policy of a return to Islamic values among the populace as a whole. As a consequence, overtly Soviet-backed factions within Iran found themselves isolated from mainstream politics.

Until the early 1980s the Soviet objective for the Azeris of Iran was the establishment of some kind of national and cultural autonomy which would not divorce them completely from the central government in Tehran. In 1981, however, Soviet tacticians shifted the stress from a basically Azeri cultural autonomy in the Iranian context to a call for 'One Azerbaijan': the idea of an inevitable unification of Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan in the 'near future' to form one nation-state. The Khomeini government's response to this was to gradually close down all 'progressive' Azeri-language media on Iranian language territory, despite guarantees embedded in the new Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran that Azeri would be recognized as a 'regional' language and that the publication of media in this language would no longer be forbidden as it had been under the Pahlavis. This move made it difficult for Soviet planners to receive feedback from their overtures to the Iranian Azeri political, literary and cultural community. A side effect to the 'One Azerbaijan' slogan was that under its influence Soviet Azeri writers were able to express a kind of nationalism which, if expressed in a purely Soviet context, would meet official censure.

The Soviet propaganda campaign has had a significant effect on post-Shahist Iranian Azeri thinking. It united 'progressives' and nationalists in a single Azeri cause; national awareness was stimulated to its highest level since the 1940s. At the same time, many pro-Soviet factions had been forced underground or into exile by 1983. An Iranian counterattack designed to revive Islam in the Soviet Muslim border republics began to have a perceptible effect. It is clear that both Iranian Azerbaijan and Soviet Azerbaijan have been turned into ideological battlefields in what is essentially a war between communism and religion.

Primary emphasis in the Soviet approach has been on the continuity of tradition, especially 'progressive' traditions shared by the Azeri Turks both north and south of the Araz River. This has involved a basic reconstruction and reinterpretation of the Azeri past, highlighting common origins through the application of linguistics and ethnology -- a scientific field known as ethnogenetics -- and stressing political and historical factors which have both unified and separated them as a people. An understanding of the contemporary Soviet manipulation of this mixture of historical reality and Soviet myth is central to an understanding of the Soviet approach and its longterm objectives.

The sources employed in this study are virtually all Soviet, mostly from the Azerbaijan SSR. Western historiography has never examined many of the events and movements which played a role in the evolution of the present situation: these include the movement of Sheykh Khiyabani in 1920, the role of the Soviet Azeris in the founding of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1945 and the Soviet use of Soviet nationalities in cross-border relations with their ethnolinguistic counterparts in Iran and Afghanistan. The most critical question of all, namely whether Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan can even be considered a single nation outside of a Marxist-Leninist context has never seriously been analyzed. Soviet scholarship, in fact, has only just begun to touch on these matters; as a Soviet historian recently remarked: "This question has never received official scientific recognition, neither in Western nor Soviet historiography"(1).

The lack of studies does not mean there is a paucity of sources, although they are of a disparate nature: Russian consular reports from the late XIXth and early XXth centuries reveal the extent of the cross-border contacts between the Azeris of the North and the South; the formation and activities of the Bolshevik organizations in Iran and the Caucasus is rather well documented in Soviet sources; the Soviet adventure which resulted in the establishment of the Soviet Gilan Republic has been the subject of a major monograph (2) and a number of Soviet post-mortems from the 1920s; Iranian Azerbaijan under Soviet occupation and the rise and fall of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic have been the subject of numerous memoirs written by those who participated in it; the postwar period, especially from 1979 to the present has been and is the subject of constant discussion in the pages of the Soviet Azeri media. Above all, the literature of "longing", i.e., the longing of the Soviet Azeris for their perceived conationals in Iran is a dominant school of literature in the Azerbaijan SSR(3).

The work is organized in a chronological manner so that events and developments which bear on the present situation are described in their proper place in history; it is hoped that this arrangement will aid readers who may not be specialists on Azerbaijan, the Soviet Union or Iran.

Notes

1. R. A. Seidov, "O natsional'nom formirovanii Azerbaydzhantsev v Irane", Voprosy natsional'no-osvoboditel'nogo dvizheniya na Blizhnem i Srednem Vostoka. (Baku, 1985), p. 36.

2. Schapour Ravasani. Sowjetrepublik Gilan: Die sozlalistische Bewequng im Iran seit Ende des 19.Jhdt. bis 1922. (Berlin, n.d.).

3. David Nissman, "The Origin and Development of the Literature of 'Longing' in Azerbaijan". Journal of Turkish Studies, VIII/1984, pp.199-207.

2
The Bolshevist Movement in Soviet and Iranian Azerbaijan from 1905–1921

Introduction

According to the 1979 Soviet census, the Azeri population totaled 5,477,000, the over-whelming majority of whom dwell in the Azerbaijan SSR or adjoining regions in other republics of the Caucasus, In Iran, the lack of any official census data since 1956 forces one to rely on estimates which vary considerably, depending on the sources employed. A recent Soviet estimate put their numbers in the two ostans provinces) of northwestern Iran at 5.8 million, with an unknown number of Azeris scattered throughout the rest of the country, primarily in Tehran, Kazvin, Hamadan and other urban centers(1). An Iranian Azeri scholar claims that there are some 14-15 million turcophones in Iran, the majority of whom are Azeris(2). It is safe to assume that there are approximately two Azeris in Iran for every one in the Soviet Union.

The historical background of the modern Soviet contention that the Azeris of Iran and the Soviet Union are one people and one nation is based on the generally accepted scholarly interpretation of the dating and impact of the waves of successive migrations into the area they presently occupy. During the later period of Pahlavi rule Iranian historians have attempted to systematically repudiate these Soviet claims on ideological and anti-Soviet grounds; these arguments were revived once again under the Khomeini regime and persist to the present. An understanding of the actual origins of the Azeri Turkic people is essential in following the developments in the Soviet interest in Iranian Azerbaijan as they have evolved since 1917.

Turkic tribes began to spread into the Caucasus from the north as the result of the expansion of two steppe confederacies, the Turgut and Khazar, in the Vllth century. As a consequence of this expansion Turkic Oghuz and Kipchak tribal units were forced into the North Caucasus, Arran, Shirvan and Caucasian Albania, the latter three of which constitute most of the territory of modern Soviet Azerbaijan. Undergoing a gradual conversion to Islam, these tribes began to move to the south and southwest. The first Muslim dynasty directly traceable to the antecedents of the modern Azerbaijanis, the Sajids, ruled in western Iranian Azerbaijan and northern Iraq from 889-929. During this period, the Turks began to interact ethnically and linguistically with other peoples, primarily Iranian and Caucasian, who occupied the same region.

While these early Turkic migrations began to leave an ethnolinguistic imprint on the region, it was not until the late Xth century that it took on its present ethnolinguistic character. Seljuk invaders (Oghuz Muslim Turks) who had penetrated as far as Armenia in the late Xth century occupied northwestern Iran and much of the Caucasus; in 1054 the qutba (the Muslim affirmation of secular dominion) was read in the name of the Seljuk ruler in both Ganja (now Kirovabad, AzSSR) and Tabriz. From this point onward the Oghuz ethnic element began to predominate over the Iranian and other ethnoses in the region. This was not, however, a one-sided process: the Seljukate had begun to use Persian as the language of the court? the Turkic language was used among the commoners.

The final wave of Turkic in-migration occurred from the late XIth-early XIIIh centuries, the late Khwarezmian period. During this time Turkic elements coming primarily from the Aral Sea and Syr Darya areas of Central Asia established new settlements throughout the southern Caucasus, Iran, Afghanistan and Anatolia; it has been suggested that the number of new arrivals totalled some 1,500,000. Subsequent population shifts and changes are explained by a combination of natural growth rates and the turkification of non-Turkic ethnoses which had been in the area prior to the Oghuz Turkic expansion(3).

Modern Azerbaijani is descended from the Oghuz group of languages brought in by the Seljuks. It is most closely related to modern Turkish and, to a lesser extent, Turkmen. Western and Soviet turkologists are in agreement of this classification(4). The contemporary language of Soviet and Iran Azerbaijan differ from each other in the sense that words have been added to or expelled from Soviet Azeri as a result of language reform and language standardization efforts made in the Azerbaijan SSR after 1920, processes which never took place in Iranian Azerbaijan. An additional factor in Iran is that Azeri was banned as an official tool of communication throughout most of the Pahlavi period. Even the name of the language differs: in the Azerbaijan SSR it is called "Azerbayjan dili" and in Iran "turk", "turk dili" o...