Azerbaijan
| Author | Joseph Serio |
| Pages | 181-188 |
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Official country name: Republic of Azerbaijan (Azarbaycan Respublikasi)
Capital: Baku (Baki)
Geographic description: Shares borders with Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Iran (Azerbaijan proper, and Azerbaijan-Naxcivan exclave), and Armenia (Azerbaijan proper, and Azerbaijan-Naxcivan exclave). Azerbaijan is also adjacent to the Caspian Sea.
Population: 7,911,974 (est. 2005)
Oil wealth precipitated a prolonged power struggle in Baku following the Russian Revolution of 1917. The nationalists initially seized control and enlisted the support of the British, who allegedly authorized the execution, in 1918, of 26 leading local communists (the "Baku Commissars"), in an unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Bolshevik power base in the oil industry.
Eventually, a mainly Russian and Armenian group of Baku Bolsheviks declared a Marxist republic in Azerbaijan. Muslim nationalists separately declared the establishment of the Azerbaijan People's Democratic Republic in May 1918 and formed the "Army of Islam," with substantial help from the Ottoman Turkish army, to defeat the Bolsheviks in Baku. The Army of Islam marched into the capital in September 1918, meeting little resistance from the Bolshevik forces. After some violence against Armenians still residing in the city, the new Azeri government, dominated by the Musavat Party, moved into its capital. Azerbaijan was occupied by Ottoman Turkish troops until the end of World War I in November 1918. British forces then replaced the defeated Turks and remained in Azerbaijan for most of that country's brief period of independence.
Facing imminent threat from the Red Army, Azerbaijan attempted to negotiate a union with Persia, but this effort was moot when the Red Army invaded Azerbaijan in April 1920. Russian leader Vladimir Lenin justified the invasion because of the importance of the Baku region's oil to the Bolsheviks, who were still embroiled in a civil war. The Red Army met little resistance from Azeri forces because the Azeris were heavily involved in suppressing separatism among the Armenians that formed a majority in the Nagorno-Karabakh area of south-central Azerbaijan. In September 1920, Azerbaijan signed a treaty with Russia unifying its military forces, economy, and foreign trade with those of Russia, although the fiction of Azeri political independence was maintained.
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The Soviet invasion began a seventy-one-year period under total political and economic control of the state. The borders and formal status of Azerbaijan underwent a period of change and uncertainty in the 1920s and 1930s, and then they remained stable through the end of the Soviet period in 1991.
In late 1921, the Russian leadership dictated the creation of a Transcaucasian federated republic, composed of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, which in 1922 became part of the newly proclaimed Soviet Union as the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (TSFSR). In this large, new republic, the three subunits ceded their nominal powers over foreign policy, finance, trade, transportation, and other areas to the unwieldy and artificial authority of the TSFSR. In 1936 the new "Stalin Constitution" abolished the TSFSR and the three constituent parts were proclaimed separate Soviet republics.
The first communist president of Azerbaijan was the activist and writer Nariman Narimanov. In the "honeymoon" period of the Soviet state, Narimanov became a popular leader, despite the fact that he was responsible for numerous killings and deportations. In the end, Narimanov was murdered by Stalin's agents in 1925.
The German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe mounted great pressure on the Caucasus region in order to make more resources available to the oil-thirsty German war machine. During World War II, Germany managed to push the Soviets eastward. By the summer of 1941 they occupied Grozny in Chechnya, leaving only a thin corridor along the Caspian to link Azerbaijan with the rest of the USSR. The Germans, however, were pushed out of the region by the harsh Russian winter and Soviet bullets.
During Stalin's regime, Azerbaijan suffered, as did other Soviet republics, from forced collectivization and far-reaching purges. Yet, during the same period, Azerbaijan also achieved significant gains in industrialization and literacy levels that were impressive in comparison with those of other Muslim states of the Middle East at that time.
After Stalin, Moscow's intrusions were less sweeping, but nonetheless authoritarian. In 1959 Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), moved to purge leaders of the Azeri Communist Party (ACP) because of corruption and nationalist tendencies. Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev's successor, also removed ACP leaders for nationalist leanings, naming Heydar Aliyev in 1969 as the new ACP leader.
Aliyev emerged as the most influential Azeri politician during the postwar years and was, successively, head of the Azeri KGB (1967), head of the republic itself (1969), and then a full member of the Soviet Politburo (1982) and first deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. However, Mikhail Gorbachev removed him in 1987, ostensibly for health reasons, although Aliyev was later accused of corruption.
In the fall of 1989, the nationalist opposition Azeri Popular Front (APF) led a wave of protest strikes expressing growing political opposition to ACP rule. Under this pressure, the ACP authorities bowed to opposition calls to legalize the APF and proclaim Azeri sovereignty.
In January 1990 Soviet tanks were brought into Baku, ostensibly to prevent programs against the Armenians which were taking place in the city. The exercise, in the course of which more than 100 Azeris were killed, was actually aimed at restoring Communist power in the republic. In this it was successful, but in the long term, the episode proved decisive in turning the populace against Moscow, becoming known as Black January and a reference for Azeri independence. The Communist Party retained power in multiparty elections, but parliament faced opposition for the first time.
Azerbaijan declared itself independent from the USSR in August 1991, and became a member of the Commonwealth of Independent States. In 1992 Abulfaz Elchibey, leader of the Popular Front Party, was elected president, but he was ousted by the Parliament a year later, after a military mutiny. Aliyev, leader of the Azerbaijan Communist Party from 1969 to 1982, assumed power and was confirmed in office by an election.
Aliyev promoted exploitation of the country's oil resources through agreements with Russia and several Western oil companies for development of oil fields in the Caspian Sea. In the November 1995 elections, which were condemned by international observers as rigged, voters elected a new parliament that was dominated by Aliyev's party and approved constitutional changes that expanded his power.
Aliyev was reelected in 1998, and his New Azerbaijan Party retained power in the November 2000 parliamentary elections. In August 2003 the ailing president appointed his son, Ilham Aliyev, as the country's prime minister. The president withdrew from the October 2003 election in favor of his son, who was elected by a landslide; the balloting was criticized by independent observers as neither free nor fair. The elder Aliyev died two months after the election.
Under the Police Act of 1999, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of National Security are responsible for internal security and report directly to the President. The MIA oversees the local police forces in the capital, Baku, and in the regions; it also maintains internal troops trained in civil
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