Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Audrey Altstadt

• Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press / Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231801416
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política rusa

Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan follows a newly independent oil-rich former Soviet republic as it adopts a Western model of democratic government and then turns toward corrupt authoritarianism. Audrey L. Altstadt begins with the Nagorno-Karabagh War (1988–1994) which triggered Azerbaijani nationalism and set the stage for the development of a democratic movement. Initially successful, this government soon succumbed to a coup. Western oil companies arrived and money flowed in—a quantity Altstadt calls "almost unimaginable"—causing the regime to resort to repression to maintain its power. Despite Azerbaijan's long tradition of secularism, political Islam emerged as an attractive alternative for those frustrated with the stifled democratic opposition and the lack of critique of the West's continued political interference.

Altstadt's work draws on instances of censorship in the Azerbaijani press, research by embedded experts and nongovernmental and international organizations, and interviews with diplomats and businesspeople. The book is an essential companion to her earlier works, The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity Under Russian Rule and The Politics of Culture in Soviet Azerbaijan, 1920–1940.

1

A Starting Point: History and Geopolitics and What They Tell Us

If you have nothing to tell us but that one barbarian succeeds another on the banks of the Oxus, what benefit does the public derive from your history?

—Voltaire, 1769¹

Voltaire was right, of course. A simple catalog of facts, devoid of explanation and interpretation, is not beneficial or meaningful. It is not even good history. This book strives to be both good history and useful analysis in understanding Azerbaijan from the inside and from a Western policy perspective. The focus of this book is Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet path from a troubled but hopeful beginning of democracy-building to the reestablishment of authoritarianism behind a Western façade. Understanding how Azerbaijan’s path was shaped—by what events and human agency—and where the country may go in the coming decade is essential to informed policymaking. The following chapters examine selected facets of post-Soviet Azerbaijan’s experience to provide a meaningful context and critical foundation to lead a reader to that understanding. To create a frame of reference for the question of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet trajectory, this initial chapter will establish “snapshots” of the country, first as a newly independent state in 1991–92 and then after nearly twenty-five years of independence in 2014–15.

The dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 gave reality to the declarations of independence by the individual Soviet Socialist Republics (SSRs) during that year. Western analysts, like the noncommunist factions inside each new state, so fully expected that the former Soviet republics would transition to democracy that programs and publications dedicated to describing the process included the word “transition” in their titles.² A body of literature dubbed “transitology” tracked and analyzed the features of various postcommunist states. Though these publications were useful in identifying common challenges to “transition” and instances where political configurations of elites, resources, and public action met and turned at “contestation points,” they often suffered from the lack of in-depth knowledge of individual countries and cultures that made a difference in the hoped-for transitions to democracy. They were short on “ground truth.”

Most of the literature anticipated the existence of some factors that would facilitate the envisioned transition to democracy: a historical “legacy” that supported democracy, such as elite or societal consensus; some form of civil society; political competition and popular participation; institution-building efforts; and the development of a strong state that is separate from the ruling party. (This last factor stemmed from the consideration that weak states are associated with weak democratization.) These democratization factors relied upon the additional presupposed (and usually unstated) factors of peace, time, and a desire to democratize. By 2010, when democratization had foundered or failed in many postcommunist states, analysts added two more factors to the equation: the participation of the international system and, importantly for Azerbaijan, the role of domestic political leadership in the democratic transition.³ When looking at the effects of these new factors, analysts most often used the cases of Russia (for instance, the extent to which Russian leader Vladimir Putin quashed Russia’s democratic development) and Ukraine, but the example of authoritarian rulers could be applied to Azerbaijan as well. Western democracy-building programs, as external efforts, became more important in this analysis. The conclusions from these new evaluations seemed again to suggest that certain preconditions—namely, peace and prodemocracy leaders—had to exist before a formerly totalitarian state could transition successfully to a democratic one. Post-Soviet Azerbaijan lacked many of these conditions—significantly, peace.

Azerbaijan’s particular traits of history and geography made it a poor fit for many of the post-Soviet democratization paradigms because Azerbaijan is on the frontier between Asia and Europe, which therefore bestows on it a unique cultural legacy. For centuries, the area that is now the Republic of Azerbaijan has been part of a wide Turco-Persian Islamic cultural belt, into which Russia intruded early in the nineteenth century. Until the late twentieth century, its political models were almost entirely of despotic rule. Native elites developed a modernization movement decades before the Soviet period, making it unique among the future “Muslim” SSRs.⁴ Present-day Azerbaijan is wedged between Iran and Russia, and it shows the effects of having been ruled for centuries by first one state and then the other, sometimes brutally, sometimes loosely. Today, the Republic of Azerbaijan must maintain a balance between these neighbors and others—Armenia, Georgia, and Turkey—even as its politics, society, economy, and culture bear the marks of its former overlords.

Azerbaijan also has an alternative, if short-lived, democratic model with indigenous roots. In the 1870s, the beginning of a modern oil industry in Baku attracted foreigners—Russian entrepreneurs and workers, along with European investors, engineers, architects, and merchants. Foreigners brought the accoutrements of modernization, such as elevators and telephones. Cultural Westernization soon followed. Azerbaijani elites sought Western education for their sons, albeit cautiously at first, in Russia and Europe. By the start of the twentieth century, a second generation of secular reformers was sculpting a modern Islamic-Turkic culture with European elements. These reformers spearheaded education reform for boys and girls, campaigned against polygamy and the veiling of women, and supported a vibrant civil society with a surprisingly outspoken press. The intellectual elites who wrote poetry and opera were also contributors to the urban press, even as they earned a living as schoolteachers. Some of them ran for seats in the Baku City Council and later the Russian State Duma. These men and the few women among them forged a national identity that incorporated a reformed Islamic and ethnic Turkic consciousness. They gained a political education in the few legislative bodies that tsarist Russia created. This modern identity and the commitment to democracy were expressed in the arts and the founding of political parties such as the Müsavat (“Equality”) Party, which was founded in 1911 with a mixed Muslim and Turkic program. It became the dominant party in postwar political life.⁵

After the 1917 Bolshevik coup and World War I destroyed the Russian Empire, Azerbaijan’s nationally conscious elite formed a parliamentary republic, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR), in May 1918. Building on their prewar reform program, the leaders drafted a Constitution that guaranteed electoral rights and civil rights, including freedom of speech, and enfranchised women, the first Muslim society to do so. Their Turkic language supplanted Russian as the official language.⁶ Their national anthem, composed by the country’s most prominent composer and one of its major poets, blended folk and European themes. The tricolor flag in blue, green, and red represented the coexistence of Turkic national, Islamic, and socialist elements, the hallmark of politics in Baku with its industry and multinational population. The new republic’s political parties included an array of Russian, Armenian, and Azerbaijani national parties; socialist and nationalist parties; and Islamic, Jewish, and other smaller parties, including a Russian communist one. Each community had a newspaper, houses of worship, and schools. The ADR’s parliamentary system produced a series of coalition governments; the nascent communist movement worked against it. A weak coalition government fell to the combined forces of the Azerbaijani wing of the Bolshevik party and the Red Army in April 1920. Thus began Azerbaijan’s painful life as a Soviet Socialist Republic. The elite who had led the ADR fought to defend it. Many were killed, and others fled abroad to continue the war of ideas by publishing newspapers and anti-Bolshevik books, often in Istanbul and Paris. Still others remained in the country to try to retain the cultural and philosophical gains of their prewar movement. Most were purged in the ensuing years; their ideas were distorted, and they were vilified and condemned, to the extent that some of their names were obliterated from the historical record. Studying the prewar reformers and intellectuals and their ideas became “anti-Soviet,” and therefore dangerous.

Bolshevik conquest brought despotic rule back to Azerbaijan, but in a modern totalitarian incarnation that penetrated both the form and the content of national identity. The native Turkic language retained official status, though its alphabet was changed twice, from Arabic script to Latin in 1924 and then to Cyrillic in 1940. Each change made the literate population illiterate and cut off new readers from the literature and history of their own past. The substance of culture and the liberal national identity it bore was suppressed in favor of “socialist construction.”⁷ The authorities pressured schools to expand the teaching of Russian, which was the only language used for the study of technology and science, and required the use of Russian as the lingua franca. After the initial loss of life in the early 1920s, the Soviet regime carried out a nearly continuous purge of intellectuals and artists in the interwar period.

In the Gorbachev era of the later 1980s, patterns of overt dissent became visible. They were attributed to glasnost, the new policy of “openness” and transparency in Soviet government and society, and their appearance was a result of that policy. The origins of this dissent—initially moderate, sporadic, and exclusively in Azerbaijani-language journals and literature—went back to the Brezhnev era in the previous decade, when writers and scholars had begun to examine topics that were forbidden by the Soviet regime. In the 1980s, historians as well as journalists wrote openly and widely about the democratic precedent of Azerbaijan’s first republic. Most of the historical pieces were short biographies of people who had been declared “bourgeois nationalists” or other “enemies,” and had been purged in the great waves of Stalinist terror in the 1930s or the lesser-known purges of non-Russian leaders in the late 1920s.⁸ The ADR and its ideals were articulated as models for the Popular Front when it was formed in 1988–89 and for the other parties that branched off from it, particularly the Yeni (“New”) Müsavat Party, named for the original Müsavat Party that had been denounced under Soviet rule.

The Path to the “Second Republic”

The events that set the immediate political stage for the independent post-Soviet Azerbaijan were, unsurprisingly, the disintegration of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 and the war with neighboring Armenia over the territory of Mountainous Karabagh (Nagorno-Karabagh) from 1987 onward. Within that context, Baku’s intellectual elite in the Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences and Baku State (then Azerbaijan State) University formed the Azerbaijan Popular Front, an organization that gave voice to public anger over the Karabagh issue and many other points of political and social contention. The Popular Front struggled against the communist party, and eventually came to power. The rocky path to post-Soviet independence determined the challenges that the country’s first leaders would face.

The struggle over Mountainous Karabagh began in the winter of 1987–88 and galvanized Azerbaijani national consciousness in a way that no other event had done in almost seventy years. Although the impact of this conflict will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter, it is important to note here that the war itself, the paralysis of both Azerbaijan’s Soviet government and the Azerbaijan Communist Party (AzCP), the assistance that Russia and Iran provided to Armenia, and Azerbaijan’s poor showing on the battlefield all shaped the country’s political life and national consciousness in the years before and after the reestablishment of its independence. When the first Armenian demands to transfer control of the Nagorno-Karabagh Autonomous Region (NKAR) to Soviet Armenia were advanced in 1987–88, Azerbaijanis only gradually became aware of them. Outside academic circles, where scholars were familiar with conflicting historical claims to the land, most people were taken by surprise. They may have been aware that Armenians made up the majority of the population in the NKAR, but they always understood the land itself to be Azerbaijani. When the AzCP and the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan SSR failed to reject the Armenian claims to the land, popular outrage was immediate. This public anger buoyed resistance to Azerbaijan’s passive party and state institutions, and eventually spilled out into public demonstrations. The Azerbaijan Popular Front become the organization that voiced the Azerbaijani public’s frustration with the weakness of its Soviet leaders, articulated the counternarrative that asserted Azerbaijan’s historical claims, and finally led the resistance to both Armenian demands and communist rule in Azerbaijan.

The Popular Front was formed in secret meetings of academicians and literati during 1988–89. Some of its members were already known as dissidents, including the fifty-year-old Abulfez Aliyev, a historian who worked in the Academy of Sciences’ archives. He had formerly worked as a translator in Egypt and taught at Baku State University, then was jailed in the mid-1970s for anti-Soviet activity. He emerged as a leading personality in the Popular Front and was dubbed the “messenger” (elchi). His family name, a very common one, was later replaced with “Elchibey” (adding the honorific “bey” to the title). At the first congress of the Popular Front in 1989, Elchibey was elected the organization’s chairman. Among the other leaders were men and women in their mid-thirties, including Etibar Mamedov, Isa Gambar(ov), Leyla Yunus(ova), and Zardusht Alizade, all of whom later founded political parties.

The first big step toward independence was the November 1988 demonstration in front of the main government building on Lenin Square.⁹ Tens of thousands of people, perhaps half a million at times, gathered in the square, which they began to call “Azadlıq Meydani” (Freedom Square) to hear speakers denounce Azerbaijan’s government and communist party for its weakness in the face of Armenian demands and more broadly for failing to protect Azerbaijan’s environment, monuments, and culture. Thousands camped on the square night and day for over two weeks before attrition and pressure from the police gradually led to their dispersal and the arrest of several leaders on December 3.¹⁰ But public anger had been mobilized and the Popular Front had established itself as an alternative to the existing authorities.

The following summer, the Popular Front held its first congress. In its first official program, it called for full civil liberties and human rights for all citizens, equality for national minorities, return of collectivized land (from the early 1930s) to the peasantry, and the end to “barbaric” exploitation of natural resources. Finally, it demanded full “political, economic and cultural sovereignty for Azerbaijan within the USSR.”¹¹ Although the program did not call for secession, its terms effectively called for the dismantling of the Soviet system. Early in the fall of 1989, thanks to pressure exerted through a railway strike, AzCP first secretary Abdurrahman Vezirov was forced to allow the Front to register as a legal organization and agree to a protocol with a host of other demands, including amnesty for the strikers and the end to special military controls in major Azerbaijani cities.¹² The homegrown political movement that had been ridiculed by authorities in August had brought the AzCP leadership to its knees in October.

By late 1989, the reach of the Popular Front had become sufficiently great to frighten authorities in Baku and in Moscow. As its adherents always said, the Front was a movement, not a party. It was beginning to fracture by this time, partly because a few members believed that it was too willing to accommodate the authorities. Those who insisted on independence were dubbed “radicals” by authorities and by some later scholars. Actual radicals formed the factions that carried out violent attacks on Armenians or took over local AzCP offices against the orders of the Baku Popular Front leadership, as was the case earlier in 1989 in the southern Caspian port city of Lenkoran.¹³ In December, Moscow ended seventeen months of direct rule over the NKAR, in theory returning it to Azerbaijani rule, but the Armenian SSR seized the moment to declare that it would annex the NKAR and quickly included the region in its 1990 state budget. Disorders broke out throughout Azerbaijan, including some led by rogue chapters of the Popular Front despite the leadership’s call to maintain order.¹⁴ The AzCP had no meaningful response and seemed paralyzed. Moscow soon moved against the Popular Front.

On the weekend of January 13–14, 1990, “hooligan elements” tried to evict Armenians from their apartments in Baku. It was more than a few scattered attacks. Thomas de Waal wrote that “murderous anti-Armenian violence overwhelmed Baku.” Some Azerbaijanis, including police, were killed, but more than ninety Armenians w...