Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Frustrated Democracy in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Audrey L. Altstadt

Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Washington, D.C.

Columbia University Press

New York

Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Washington, D.C.

www.wilsoncenter.org

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

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Copyright © 2017 Audrey L. Altstadt

All rights reserved

EISBN 978-0-231-80141-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Altstadt, Audrey L., 1953– author.

Title: Frustrated democracy in post-Soviet Azerbaijan / Audrey L. Altstadt.

Description: Washington, D.C. : Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; New York : Columbia University Press, 2017 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016040500 (print) | LCCN 2016041722 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231704564 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231801416 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Azerbaijan—Politics and government—1991– | Post-communism—Azerbaijan—History. | Democracy—Azerbaijan—History. | Political corruption—Azerbaijan—History. | Authoritarianism—Azerbaijan—History. | Islam and politics—Azerbaijan—History. | Petroleum industry and trade—Political aspects—Azerbaijan—History. | Geopolitics—Azerbaijan—History.

Classification: LCC DK697.68 .A48 2017 (print) | LCC DK697.68 (ebook) | DDC 947.54086—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040500

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

Cover photo: Riot policemen stand in line in front of opposition members during a rally in Baku, June 4, 2005. Reuters / David Mdzinarishvili CVI/MAD

Cover design: Naylor Design

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Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet independence, 1991–2016

Dedicated to all those who struggle for a democratic Azerbaijan

Contents

List of Maps and Tables

Preface

Acknowledgments

Notes on Languages and Spelling

List of Acronyms and Abbreviations

Introduction

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

2.  The Open Wound: Mountainous Karabagh and National Consciousness

3.  Azerbaijan’s Best and Brightest: The Rise, Decline, and Renewal of the Democratic Opposition

4.  Oil Lifts All Boats? Social and Economic Repercussions and the Rise of Corruption

5.  Jail for the Donkey Bloggers: Crushing Youth Activism, Human Rights, and a Free Media

6.  Allah-u Akbar: Islam in Azerbaijan—Piety, Politics, and the Future

7.  What’s Next? The Choices Ahead

Notes

Selected Bibliography of Major Sources

Index

Maps and Tables

Maps

I.1. Azerbaijan

I.2. The South Caucasus Region

Tables

3.1. OSCE/ODIHR Assessment of Polling and Counting Stations

4.1. Work Permits of Azerbaijanis in Russia and Money Transferred from Russia to Azerbaijan, 2006–11

4.2. Income from Exports and SOFAZ Assets, 1999–2014

6.1. The Increase in Believers in Post-Soviet Azerbaijan

Preface

With the reestablishment of independence in 1991, Azerbaijan seemed like a viable, even strong, candidate for developing into a vibrant free market economy with a democratic system of governance. Its oil wealth lay untended, but its people, though poor, enjoyed high levels of literacy and education. They exhibited an entrepreneurial impulse in the sale of goods in local markets and even in the Soviet-era black market which supplied flowers and fruit to Russia. An anticommunist popular front movement had emerged and gained popularity since 1988. Azerbaijan faced a secessionist movement in the Armenian-populated region of Nagorno-Karabagh, which was supported by neighboring Armenia. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet military contributed to the spread of weapons throughout the Caucasus, making the conflict even more lethal. Yet the anticommunist leaders managed to hold a presidential election in 1992 and bring the Popular Front to power. Its leadership lasted one year, but then fell to a coup, followed by the return of a former communist party boss.

As Azerbaijan commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of its independence, the Karabagh conflict remains unresolved. Economic development surged to amazing levels, and corruption along with it. The political system became authoritarian under the rule of one family. Opposition groups, even those that had been strong, have been marginalized, co-opted, or crushed, and the civil society that developed in the 1990s and early 2000s has been suppressed. Youth movements, a next-generation opposition, came under attack and their leadership quashed. Yet these groups persist, and express their criticisms and their vision for the future on social media.

Many post-Soviet states have sunk into authoritarianism. Despite some similarities, often resulting from shared Soviet legacies, each had a distinctive trajectory. Why did Azerbaijan follow its particular path seemingly toward and then away from democratization? How did the war, the economy, and the choices made by politically active individuals shape this outcome? And what lies ahead for this energy-rich country on the Caspian Sea, which borders Russia, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, and Armenia (with which it remains at war)? What are the implications of Azerbaijan’s choices for US interests in this strategically sensitive region? Can the United States have meaningful impact on events there, especially in protecting human rights and fostering democracy, and if so, by what means?

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse, the time seemed right for a retrospective that could create a foundation for analysis and forecasting for the coming years. Each chapter examines a key area: geopolitical imperatives, the Karabagh war; electoral politics and the role of political opposition; the socioeconomic impact of oil wealth, foreign investment, and corruption; civil society, dissent, and repression; and the possibilities of a new role for political Islamism. I analyze these factors within Azerbaijan’s historical-cultural context, and end with a prognosis for Azerbaijan and considerations for US policy for the coming five to ten years.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to the many individuals and institutions who, over the past twenty-five years, have made this book possible. I cannot possibly name all those with whom I spoke in that time, nor would they all wish to be named—students, scholars, officials, workers, taxi drivers, newspaper or water sellers, and others. Thanks go to Western specialists, including reporters and scholars who worked or lived in post-Soviet Azerbaijan: Svante Cornell, Thomas de Waal, Nadia Diuk, Fiona Hill, and especially Thomas Goltz. Politically prominent Azerbaijanis who shared their experiences and insights include the late Abulfez (Aliyev) Elchibey, Ramiz Aboutalibov, the late Suleyman Aliyarli, Isa Gambar, Tofiq Gasymov, Iskendar Hamidov, Jamil Hasanli, Ali Kerimli, Jeyhun and Asim Mollazade, Nasib Nasibli, Ambassador (Ret.) Hafiz Pashayev, Sabir Rustemxanli, Dilare Seidzade, Ambassador Elin Suliemanov, the late Bahtiyar Vahabzade, and Leyla Yunus. I wish to thank the many US Foreign Service officers (and several spouses) and other US government officials who allowed me to interview them, including Ambassador (Ret.) Richard Miles, Ambassador (Ret.) Robert Finn, Ambassador (Ret.) Philip Remler, Ambassador (Ret.) Richard and Mrs. Anne Kauzlarich, Ambassador (Ret.) Ross Wilson, Ambassador (Ret.) Reno Harnish, Ambassador (Ret.) Anne Derse, Ambassador (Ret.) Richard and Mrs. Faith Morningstar, Wayne Merry, David J. Kramer, and Jan Kalicki, as well as senior staff adviser Michael Ochs of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.

During the year of writing of this book, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars was a wonderfully supportive institution for intellectually stimulating discussion, feedback, and challenges in the work-in-progress seminars and informal exchanges, especially from Matthew Rojansky and William Pomeranz of the Kennan Institute, and Robert Litwak of the International Security Studies program and the scholars’ office. Thanks also to my research assistants, Andrew Clinton at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and my Wilson Center research assistants, Ella McElroy and Michael Kohler. I thank most sincerely those who read one or more chapter drafts: Bayram Balci, Robert Cekuta, Cathy Cosman, Robert Finn, Reno Harnish, Richard Kauzlarich, Rajan Menon, Emin Milli, Philip Remler, and Thomas de Waal. Sincere thanks also go to the Woodrow Wilson Center Press and its publishing committee, especially to Joe Brinley and Shannon Granville, and to Anne Routon and Brad Hebel at Columbia University Press. Shortcomings and errors are my own responsibility.

I also wish to thank Julie Candler Hayes, the dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as my department colleagues, especially department chair Professor Joye Bowman and professors David Glassberg, Daniel Gordon, and Jennifer Heuer. My deepest debt of gratitude is to my dear friends Bob Fradkin and Goedele Gulikers for their daily support and multilingual good cheer through broken bones and football season during the initial writing of this book, to my amazing daughter Elizabeth, who enthusiastically supported this project and all my work, and to my selfless husband, the Reverend Bruce T. Arbour, who graciously tolerated my long absences and cheered me on during the writing, rewriting, fretting, and soul-searching that accompanied this project: The Spirit helps us in our weakness.

Notes on Languages and Spelling

In the text, all names and places are spelled to approximate English-language pronunciation or common usage in English; for instance, Jamil, not Cemil. In the case of personal names that are less familiar in English, I have used Azerbaijani Latin alphabet spelling, hence Ilqar and Tofiq rather than Ilgar or Tofik. Place names are given according to accepted English spelling conventions (Baku, not Baki), or follow Azerbaijani and not Russian spelling (Nakhjivan, rather than Nakhichevan).

In the endnotes, Russian is transliterated according to the Library of Congress system. Azerbaijani (from all alphabets) is spelled according to the post-1991 Latin alphabet, which has several characters not found in English, including ə, ı, ö, ü, ç, and ş.

In Azerbaijan, individuals are often known or called by their first names partly because the use of family names became universal only in the Soviet period and some family names are very common (e.g., Aliyev, Huseinov, Mammedov). Therefore, the use of a person’s first name in this book follows common Azerbaijani practice and is not necessarily a sign of familiarity or affection. The polite form of address for women is xanim (khanim) following the first name (e.g., Leyla xanim). For men, two variations are in use: from the Soviet period is muellim, meaning teacher, which replaced the prerevolutionary bey, a title for a landowner and used in Turkey. Since independence, bey has been used (i.e., Yusif Muellim or Yusif Bey), but is often associated with pro-Turkish views.

Acronyms and Abbreviations

Map I.1. Azerbaijan

Map I.2. The South Caucasus Region

Introduction

In his poem Hap, the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy laments his misfortunes. He declares that he could tolerate them if he knew that he was the victim of a vengeful god, against whom he is powerless. But he knows that this is not the case. The tragedies of his life, he concludes, were happenstance. In frustration, he asks, How arrives it joy lies slain, / And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? This book similarly begins with Azerbaijan’s best hopes for independence and democratic society, and explores their unblooming. In contrast to Hardy’s poem, this book is not about chance, but about choice. It examines contextual circumstances—geography, history, culture, institutional constraints—but it focuses on decisions and the people who made them during crucial moments in the trajectory of Azerbaijan’s post-Soviet independence.

Azerbaijan’s culture, history, and politics are enormously complex and subtle. Analysis is difficult; forecasting perilous. A resource-rich country, Azerbaijan is wedged between Russia and Iran. The region has been ruled by both, sometimes brutally, sometimes loosely. The present-day Republic of Azerbaijan bears the marks of its former overlords in politics, economy, society, and culture. Until the twentieth century, Azerbaijan’s models of governance were entirely of despotic rule. Long known for its oil deposits, the county’s modern production began outside the Caspian port city of Baku in the 1870s, drawing foreign investors and local wealth. The result was the Westernization of the built environment; the population; and many of its economic, cultural, political, and social components. Its culture was Islamic, mostly Shi’ite with a mix of Iranian and Turkic elements, though the latter aspects came to dominate Azerbaijan by the early twentieth century. A secular, Turkic-speaking Azerbaijani elite led reforms in education and social practices, and also forged the underlying ethnoreligious identity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which gradually reoriented the populace away from Iran and toward modernizers in Turkey. This same elite led the republic that emerged from World War I with a Constitution and a parliament. A weak coalition government fell to Bolshevik pressure and the Red Army in 1920. Thus began Azerbaijan’s painful life as a Soviet socialist republic.

In the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s, a new generation of intellectuals studied and publicly discussed their forebears of the first republic. The origins of that exploration, initially timid and sporadic, went back to the Brezhnev era of the 1960s and 1970s, when writers and historians began to explore such forbidden topics. These scholars and writers moved from research to politics under the pressure of the armed conflict, as their predecessors had done during World War I.

Apart from the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the process that most set the stage for post-Soviet political life in Azerbaijan was the war with neighboring Armenia over the territory of Mountainous Karabagh—commonly known with the Russian prefix for mountainous, Nagorno-Karabagh. The war began in the winter of 1987–88 and galvanized Azerbaijani national consciousness. It is no exaggeration to say that the war itself, the assistance that both Russia and Iran gave to Armenia, and Azerbaijan’s own poor showing on the battlefield affected every aspect of life in Azerbaijan. In this context, opposition politics was born. Scholars and the artistic community organized an anticommunist Popular Front, which created mass politics in the Soviet republic in 1988 and introduced an anticommunist, then postcommunist language of discourse. The Popular Front spawned new opposition parties, and was elected to power a mere four years later in the country’s first democratic elections in June 1992. Its fall was equally abrupt, before it could celebrate its first anniversary in government. Since then, the democratic opposition parties increasingly have been marginalized in the face of the overwhelming power of the ruling Aliyev family and its inner circle.

With Azerbaijan’s independence, oilmen flooded into Baku, outpacing the diplomats. The increasing presence of foreigners was perhaps the most visible indicator to the population that independence was real. The influx of money, mainly to the energy sector and supporting infrastructure, was transformative, and from the mid-1990s to the present it paid for public works and enriched the segment of the population linked to oil and to the foreign community. It was also used to influence the policies of foreign states and international organizations that dealt with Azerbaijan. Many people were left in poverty. Old skills became obsolete; inflation and currency reforms trivialized Sovietera pensions and savings. Corruption blossomed and grew in the twenty-first century to astonishing proportions, driving down Azerbaijan’s ratings in a number of corruption and democratic governance indices, such as those of Transparency International.

With the growth of central power and constraints on open debate, dissent grew. The regime of Ilham Aliyev (2003–present) did not tolerate criticism or even the free exchange of ideas. Prodemocracy parties and protesters were suppressed with increasing severity, and in 2010 all genuine opposition parties lost representation in the Milli Majlis (National Assembly) in yet another in a series of fixed elections. Dissenters were fined or jailed; investigative journalists were increasingly pressured, beaten, or imprisoned. The fine for unauthorized demonstrations increased tenfold. A new generation of activists was nurtured by established opposition parties but found its own voice through social media and informal organizations. Fearful of youth activism like that found in the color revolutions of the 2000s and the 2011 Arab Spring, the Aliyev regime lured some young women and men into state jobs and meted out harsh repression against the critics of the generation of twenty-somethings. By the end of the summer of 2014, nearly all prominent human rights and civil society activists were in jail, as President Aliyev asserted that Azerbaijan was a democracy and critics of the regime were traitors.

Islam, suppressed under Soviet rule, appealed to many Azerbaijanis who were seeking a new identity in the post-Soviet world. The Soviet-era version of Azerbaijan’s history had been discredited, and people had ceased to believe the old regime’s claim to have promoted communist morality. For many, interest in Islam was a matter of historic identity or piety. For others, it was a moral compass or even a political guide. The secular Aliyev regime, which fears Islam for its potential political uses, has claimed to find radical Sunni Salafi or Wahhabi groups in the country, especially along the Russian border with Dagestan. Believers have been arrested; alleged Islamist groups have been quashed. The Juma mosque in Baku, led by an Iran-trained Shi’ite mullah with human rights credentials, was closed down in 2004, but the mullah was able to start a successful organization with an Internet presence and young followers. Arrests and labels of extremism have kept Islam in the shadows, making its power hard to assess. The emergence of the Islamic State in 2014 has raised the specter of extremism among the Sunni minority in Azerbaijan.

Beyond the examination of Azerbaijan’s experience, this analysis addresses broader themes that political leaders and diplomats repeatedly have argued. Western, particularly US, policy in Azerbaijan is built on a tripod of energy, security, and democratization. Cooperation in the first two areas has been positive, but the worsening record in the third has become a source of growing tension. Baku has responded to Western criticism by framing its own policies as the product of a stark choice: it must guard its own security, stability, and independence by the means it chooses, or else fall to enemies who can manipulate its open society. As a Muslim majority society with a secular state, Azerbaijan may be vulnerable to Islamist appeals, especially as the regime has reduced the space for the politically moderate opposition. These are strategic and philosophical, even moral questions that touch on rule by the consent of the governed, the rule of law, and human rights. The US response raises the same concerns with its tripod. These and related issues are implicit in each chapter and are addressed explicitly in the final one, What’s Next?

This book is possible because of the training I received first as a master’s degree student in international relations and then as a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Chicago from 1975 to 1983, when I completed my PhD. At Chicago, I honed the Russian language skills I had developed in high school and as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), and began learning modern Turkish and Azerbaijani. As a doctoral student, I first went to Baku in 1980–81, where I developed my language skills to study pre–World War I Azerbaijani culture and politics, navigate the streets and bazaars of Baku, and learn the ground truth of Brezhnev-era Azerbaijan. I met colleagues who later became politically active in the Gorbachev era. As an historian, I write about the past, but as a researcher and observer, I live in the present. Through many subsequent research trips to Azerbaijan in 1984 and the post-Soviet decades, I watched the transformation of politics, social and economic life, and the city of Baku itself. I was privileged to watch my peers manage the new conditions and speak more openly to a foreign friend. Finally I was able to meet a younger generation of dynamic Azerbaijanis who knew more of the world but less of the Soviet (or pre-Soviet) past than the previous generation.

The present work is grounded in my many unpublished presentations, briefings, and classes for and with nongovernmental organizations and US government groups since 1990. Drawing on my own experiences and research, I made use of the scholarly work of US, Azerbaijani, and European scholars; and reports from US, European, and Azerbaijani governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and the press. I have spoken with Azerbaijani activists; local and Western journalists; and diplomats from the United States, Azerbaijan, other countries, and international organizations. I could not include every story, and surely participants in events will challenge some of my choices. I respect their views. In the process of writing each chapter, I explored topics and whole areas that were not on my initial to do list, but which I investigated because I wanted to give as full a picture as possible while maintaining a coherent narrative and reasonable length.

This project was completed in 2014–15, thanks to the intellectual and financial support I received as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. As we approach the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, and given the economic and strategic significance of Azerbaijan, the time seemed ripe for a retrospective analysis not only of the road that Azerbaijan has traveled in over two decades but also of the choices and the human agency at work and the meaning of its pathway for Azerbaijan and US interests now and in the years to come.

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,