Azerbaijan

Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran

Suha Bolukbasi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857737625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Europe de l'Est

Azerbaijan's Soviet and post-Soviet political history has been tumultuous and varied, particularly with regard to the struggle for independence, democracy and sovereignty. Suha Bolukbasi here illustrates how post-Stalin resilience, the tolerance shown toward subtle nationalist expression and Gorbachev's relaxation of central control from Moscow were all-in-part responsible for the initial emergence of a more liberal atmosphere in Azerbaijan. As a result, issues such as Moscow's responsibility for environmental degradation, the depletion of Azerbaijan's oil, and unfavourable terms of trade have all begun to be freely discussed. However, the Azerbaijan-Armenia dispute over Karabagh has had a dramatic impact on the political discourse. The dispute has become not only an international conflict, but one which involves the lives of more than one million refugees. This book shows how Azerbaijan's recent political history - both domestic and international - has influenced the development of the country and the history of the surrounding region.

1

Pre-Soviet Era and Sovietization

Atropatanes, Medes, Albanians and Turks

Contemporary Azerbaijan has been invaded, ruled by, and exposed to the various influences of numerous civilizations since earliest times. Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, captured the land – called Media then – in the sixth century BCE, and Alexander the Great, two centuries later. The Roman legions, under the command of Pompey, also were to seize the region during the first century BCE. During the Byzantine era Caucasia was an object of dispute between the constantly-warring Byzantine and Sassanian (Persian) forces, while various Turkic tribal groups who roamed the northern Caucasian steppes frequently sided with the Byzantine against Persia.¹

Since ancient and medieval times speakers of eastern Iranian dialects, some nomadic Turkic tribes and the Caucasian Albanians inhabited Transcaucasia. The latter lived in what is now northern Azerbaijan and converted to Christianity in the fourth century. The Armenian-speaking community, however, gradually absorbed them culturally and linguistically.² Although Albania vanished as a socio-political entity it survived as a geographical term for southern Caucasus, especially when referring to Nagorno-Karabagh.³

During the fourth century BCE two states ruled the region: while Caucasian Albania existed on roughly the territory of today’s Republic of Azerbaijan, a second political entity, called “Aturpatkan”, “Atropaten” or “Atropatenes” ruled southern or Iranian Azerbaijan.⁴ Atropatenes was a Persian satrap during the time of Alexander the Great, lending his name to the state. One theory of the etymology of Azerbaijan suggests that it is a derivation from Atropatenes. A more popular version traces its origin to the word “azer” or fire, from which Azerbaijan, “the land of fire” might have been drawn, in reference to the various Zoroastrian temples whose fires were fed by the abundant sources of natural gas in the area.⁵

Azerbaijani scholars consider both Atropaten and Albania precursors of contemporary Azerbaijan and suggest that the name Azerbaijan has been in use for more than two millennia.⁶ Zia Buniatov, a prominent Azeri historian, suggested that Albanians were one of the three ethno-linguistic communities who served as progenitors of the modern Azerbaijani nation. He claimed that the former survived well into the modern era but Armenians suppressed their church.⁷

However, some non-Azerbaijani scholars argue that Azerbaijan is a recent and fictional term, which emerged with the arrival of the Turks in the region in the last millennium. This latter group has inadvertently supported Armenian nationalists’ arguments, which have claimed that Azeris are recent newcomers to the region and whose claim to the disputed territories is indefensible.⁸ Azeri scholars, however, respond by contending that contemporary Azerbaijan dates back to the Albanian and Atropaten states. No matter how the name of Azerbaijan as a concept of a unique country emerged in the sixth century BCE, it seems that north and south Azerbaijan came to be known by the name of Azerbaijan by the eighth century.⁹

The region was also influenced by the reign of the Arsacids in Iran (249 BCE – 226 AD), members of whose royal family married Caucasian nobles. During the first century BCE Iranian political and military influence competed with that of Rome with current Armenia becoming a battleground between the Roman and Iranian Arsacid empires. The spread of Christianity was haphazard and Christian converts looked to Rome rather than to Iran for guidance and cultural influence.¹⁰ In the face of Roman expansion and conflicts with Christian neighbors, for Muslims, reliance on various Muslim khanates seemed necessary and unavoidable.

The successors of the Genghisid order, the Ilkhanid and the Timurid empires, expanded their rule to the region between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, which further contributed to the population acquiring Turkic traits. During the Ilkhanid era, Azerbaijan became the center of the empire extending from Amu Darya to Syria with the khans residing in Tabriz. Throughout the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, Azerbaijan was a lively center of trade and cultural activity.¹¹ The Turkic Karakoyunlu and the Akkoyunlu states, based in Iranian Azerbaijan, ruled the area of contemporary Azerbaijan in the fifteenth century.

The Seljuk invasions in the eleventh century changed the composition of the local population and produced the linguistic dominance of the Oghuz Turkic dialects. And yet, unlike the Ottoman Turks who ruled to the west of the Caucasus, the Caucasian Muslims in the early sixteenth century began to adopt in large numbers the Shi’a faith that set them apart from Sunni Ottomans. It was Safavid Iran’s zealous proselytizing that made Azerbaijanis’ conversion to the Shi’a sect a prudent and necessary choice. Joining the ranks of the Shi’a made the Azeris more receptive to Persian social and cultural influence. Yet a significant portion of the Azeris chose to remain Sunni.¹²

The Safavid rule (1502–1722) over contemporary Azerbaijan was interrupted for short durations by Ottoman rule (1578–1603) and by Russia under Peter I during the early eighteenth century. The Safavids divided Azerbaijan into four beklerbekliks or large administrative zones. These beklerbekliks included Tabriz (center: Tabriz), Shukur Saada (center: Nakhichevan), Shirvan (center: Shemakhi), and Karabagh (center: Ganja).¹³

With the assassination of Nadir Shah, who had resuscitated the Safavid rule beyond its formal collapse in 1722 until 1747, Iran’s central authority ended and khans and tribal leaders asserted themselves.¹⁴ Muslim khans continued to rule, among others, Karabagh, Sheki, Baku, Ganje Derbent, Kuba, Nakhichevan, Talysh, and Yerevan in the north, and Tabriz, Urmi, Ardabil, Khoi, Maku, Maragin and Karadagh in the south; often engaging in intra-khanate warfare, destabilizing each other. The population was multi-ethnic and multi-confessional.

Yet most khanates consisted of individual mahals or regions, inhabited by homogeneous tribes, illustrating that tribalism was still strong.¹⁵ Land ownership was arranged according to the iqta system, distributing state lands as non-hereditary grants to beys and aghas (local notables) for services rendered to the ruler, the khan.¹⁶ The khanates contributed to a lack of unity and the failure to establish an independent state until the twentieth century. Another legacy of the khanates was yerbazlik or regionalism, which meant that local allegiances preceded national or multi-regional loyalties.¹⁷ As we shall see later, this legacy proved to be an important facet of Azerbaijani life to be reckoned with. The largest component of the population was the Turcoman tribes, some nomadic, some sedentary. In the 1830s the numbers of Sunnis in northern (former Soviet, now independent) Azerbaijan were almost equal to the Shi’a, with the Shi’a being only slightly in the majority. The Sunnis lived in the northernmost part of the country near Daghestan, a major region of concentration of the Sunnis.

The Sunnis began to emigrate to Turkey after the Russian suppression of the rebellion of the Daghestanis led by the charismatic Imam Shamil from 1834 to 1859.¹⁸ Afterwards, the Sunni–Shi’a ratio became 1:2. The Sunni– Shi’a conflict had always been there, yet Turco–Armenian antagonism muted it toward the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ Armenian and Georgian populations often appealed to Russia to capture the southern Caucasus and put an end to the Turco-Muslim khanates which many of them apparently frowned on.²⁰

For Russia, Azerbaijan was important as a source of raw materials such as silk, cotton, and copper and also as a place to settle Russian colonists. It was, however, its perceived strategic significance that tempted the Czarist Empire. The Russian involvement dates back to the ill-fated Persia expedition of Peter the Great in 1722, which was aimed at expanding Russia’s power toward the Indian Ocean. By 1735 the expedition had failed and Nadir Shah drove out the remaining Russian troops.²¹

Under Catherine the Great (1763–1796) Russia resumed the expansion toward the south but clashed in 1796 with the new Qajar dynasty of Iran, which by then had extended its rule to most of the former Safavid lands south of the Araz River.²² In 1801, Czar Alexander I made Georgia a Russian province and during the first quarter of the nineteenth century Czarist Russia expanded further either by treaty or by force. At the end of the 1804–1812 Russo-Persian War Fath ‘Ali Shah of Iran agreed to the Treaty of Gulistan and to the Russian predominance in the northern portion of today’s Republic of Azerbaijan. At the end of the second Russo-Persian War (1826–1828) Iran signed the Treaty of Turkmenchai, which transferred sovereignty over the khanates of Yerevan, Nakhichevan and Ordubad to Russia.²³

As a result of these treaties one-third of Azerbaijani lands came under Russian rule while the rest remained within Iran up to the present time. The khans accepted Russia’s prerogative in foreign policy and defense and agreed to the deployment of Czarist troops. Another consequence of the Turkmenchai Treaty was Czar Nicholas I’s decree providing for the formation of an Armenian oblast (district) comprising the territories of the khanates of Yerevan and Nakhichevan.²⁴

At first, Russian rule in the Caucasus was military and the former khanates were reorganized into provintsii (provinces) and administered by army officers who ruled by a combination of local and Russian imperial law. In 1841, civil imperial administration replaced military rule and Transcaucasia was divided into a Georgian-Imeritian gubernia (province) with its center in Tblisi and a Caspian oblast (region) centered in Shemakhi. Ganja (Elizavetpol) and Nakhichevan were incorporated into the Georgian gubernia.

In 1846 Viceroy M. S. Vorontsov (1844–1854) introduced the empire’s administrative and legal institutions and drew new administrative boundaries by abolishing the former borders and creating instead four gubernii: Tblisi, Kutais, Shemakhi, and Derbent. Ganja remained under Tblisi’s jurisdiction while Nakhichevan was transferred to the Yerevan gubernia created in 1849. Whereas Azeris and Georgians were the most compact populations, Armenians were the most urbanized yet scattered community. Nevertheless, the new borders paid no attention to the ethnic structure of the population or to the already existing loyalties.²⁵

These reforms placed southern Caucasus more fully under Russian control but they also facilitated the region’s economic integration by removing divisions, which spawned local peculiarities.²⁶ Soon most of the waqf (Muslim pious foundations) lands and properties were confiscated and the jurisdiction of the Muslim courts was curtailed. Many mosques and madrassahs (religious schools) were closed and the clerical establishment was required to show loyalty to Russia.²⁷

A major outcome of the Treaty of Turkmenchai was that Armenians living in Iran were granted permission to resettle in the Russian Empire. As a result, 8,249 Armenian families (approximately 50,000 people) moved into the gubernia of Yerevan, the province of Karabagh and the Shemakhi district, the latter two being part of modern Nagorno-Karabagh.²⁸ A second wave of Armenian immigrants followed during and after the Crimean War and a third wave came in the wake of the relocation of Ottoman Armenians in Turkey in 1915.²⁹

Armenian immigration created Armenian majorities also in some rural areas. The earliest data on the population of Transcaucasia came from the imperial census of 1897. Accordingly, in the 1860s the Baku gubernia (province) had grown from 486,000 to 826,716, of which nearly 60 percent were Azeris, 11 percent Tats (Persian speakers), nearly 10 percent Russians and a little over 6 percent Armenians. The latter two communities lived mostly in Baku city.³⁰

Azeris comprised a large majority in four of the six uezdy (districts) in the Baku gubernia and a smaller majority in the other two districts. Azeris also constituted the most numerous communities in the Elizavetpol gubernia (the western portion of the contemporary Republic of Azerbaijan). In seven out of the eight uezdy of the Elizavetpol gubernia, they made up 52– 74 percent of the population. In the Yerevan gubernia, however, the Azeris comprised 37 percent of the population whereas the Armenian community amounted to 63 percent.³¹

The Azeri community also suffered unequal treatment in other ways. Except for the vice-royalty of Prince Grigorii Golitsyn (1896–1904), which addressed some of the grievances of the Azerbaijani community, the viceroys as a rule adopted pro-Armenian and anti-Muslim postures. Muslim mullahs were brought under direct state control and were subject to state regulations, which designated their rank, qualifications, privileges, and responsibilities and proscribed their adherence to Sufi orders.³²

The legal and administrative reforms of the Alexander II era (1855–1881) are considered major steps in the modernization of Russia but they were applied to the Muslims of Caucasia with various restrictions. One celebrated example is the restricted implementation of the Urban Reform Act of 1870 according to which suffrage was based on property ownership. Although the Azeris of Baku constituted 80 percent of people with p...