Azerbaijan
My view of the history of Azerbaijan
Russian and Persian Azerbaijans (1828-1917).
(Eastern Transcaucasia/Transaraxia).
Azerbaijan
My view of the history of Azerbaijan
Russian and Persian Azerbaijans (1828-1917).
(Eastern Transcaucasia/Transaraxia).
The Turkic-speaking Muslims of Russian-held Azerhaijan, known as Shirvanis and sometimes even by the medieval name Arranis, differed from their ethnic siblings south of the Araxes in one essential respect: 50% of them belonged to the Sunni branch of Islam. While the sectarian distribution did not correspond with the territorial divisions of the khanates, the Sunnis tended to concentrate in the northern and western parts of the country, subject to religious influences from the mountainous citadel of Sunnism, the Caucasus. Only in 1860s, after the final suppression by Russia of the armed struggle of the Caucasian mountaineers the proportion of the Sunnis started substantially declining mostly as a result of their migrations to Turkey.
The conquest altered not only the sectarian but also the ethnic makeup of the population of Transcaucasia. In 1834 an imperial decree established the Armenian district comprising territories of the former Erevan and Nakhichevan khanates. The population of the Armenians of this area changed from 20% to 50% as a result of the Russian annexation, when 35,000 Sunni Muslims emigrated and 57,000 Armenian immigrants arrived from Persia and the Ottoman Empire. Another destination of Armenian immigration was Qarabagh where they had formed for centuries a substantial part of the population of the mountainous part of the former khanate. In 1836 the imperial decree thansferred the Albanian Church property to Armenian Grigorian Church. In the XIX century the influx of the Armenians to Transcaucasia experienced major increases after each of Russo-Turkish wars, as well as after the 1895 massacre by Kurds under the Abdulhamid II (1876-1909) regime of the Ottoman Empire.
With the conquest of Transcaucasia, Russia became the first European power to extend its rule over a part of the Middle East. Initially, the conquest made only minor changes to the region's traditional forms of government. But gradually khanate regimes began being disposed altogether as potentially pro-Iranian forces. During the 1820s seven Russian provinces were created - Baku, Derbent, Sheki, Karabagh, Shirvan, Talysh, and Kuba, each one in essence a khanate without a khan. Their government, which was staffed by native officials, was based on local laws and customs. Persian was retained as the official language of the local administration, and justice was dispensed by the Sharia courts.
The first sign of the Russification policy was the Baron P.V. Hahn reform of 1841 which in place of the khanate system introduced the system of division into uezds with their boundaries drawn without regard to the khanates' territories. This act, which ended the age-old fragmentation of Azerbaijan in one stroke, also led to a massive dismissal of native officials. Land grants awarded to bays and aghas were confiscated for the redistribution of them to Russian settlers.
In 1845, however those reforms were considered as 'going too far' and all military and civil responsibilities for the region passed from the central government to the Viceroy. First Viceroy Count (later Prince) Mikhail S. Vorontsov's preferred policy was co-optation of the native elites to Russification and integration. In 1846 Transcaucasia was divided into four gubernia - Tiflis, Kutais, Shemakha, and Derbent - an arrangement that greatly increased the number of civil service vacancies, for which all sons of bays and aghas were considered qualified. A native class of professional bureaucrats was educated in Russo-Tatar schools, a new element in the traditional society.
After Vorontsov's retirement in 1865 Transcaucasia again saw a transition toward the policy of 'organic merger' with Russia and was divided in four gubernias, with the Azeri, or Caucasian Tatars population of 75% in Elizavetpol (Ganja), 58% in Baku, 42% in Erevan and 11% in Tiflis gubernias.
For all the built-in pitfalls in Russian administrative reforms, it was also apparent that these reforms had enhanced the internal consolidation of Azerbaijan in at least two important respects: the dismantling of the khanates weakened deeply rooted local particularisms, and the formation of the Baku and Elisavetpol gubernuas of Eastern Transcaucasia resulted in a territorial block that the 'Shirvanis' or 'Arranis' would regard as the core of their homeland. Even the term Azerbaijan, although seldom used for the territory north of Araxes, began to appear in the works of European scholars or journalists. Administrative integration was in turn reinforced by economic and social changes that came, albeit at a slower pace, in the wake of the conquest.
The coming of the industrial age to the Russian-held part created essential differences between the two Azerbaijans. After a long period of stagnation, during which the extraction of crude oil hovered at a minuscule level, production began to gain momentum in 1859, with the building of the first kerosene refineries in Baku. The turning point came when in 1872 the practice of granting oil concessions on state lands was changed to long-term leasing to the highest bidder. The door was thrown open wide to native, Russian, and foreign investors, with substantial capital, and the readiness to engage in large-scale mechanized production. Within a year of the reform, the first successful drilling replaced the old method of well-digging, and a spectacular gusher inaugurated the ascent of Baku to the position of a major world oil producing center.
Among the foreign investors, foremost was the Nobel Brothers Company, which would come to control more than half of the Baku oil output. Their chief competitors became the Paris Rothschilds, who in 1883 completed the construction of the Batum-Baku railroad, a feat that brought the oil to the Western markets.
As the Baku oil fields continued to throw up fountains, the extraction and processing of oil grew on an unparalleled scale, with Baku's 1898 output surpassing that of the United States.42 But the ways that the oil industry was allowed to operate soon began to claim prohibitive costs, the perennial feature for all the period of the Russian rule. Chaotic or sloppy drilling and extraction led to decline in productive capacity, and after 1905 Baku ceased to be a major factor in the world oil production.
But the effects of this growth had led to virtually revolutionary transformations, albeit confined geographically to the Baku oil belt. It generated employment for tens of thousands of non-agricultural workers, it produced such attributes of economic modernization as labor migrations and railroad and steamship transportation, and it brought about the rise of an urban metropolis of Baku. In the 1870s Baku turned into bustling boom city with the highest rate of population increase in the Russian Empire. The number ofinhabi rants rose from 14,000 in 1863 to 206,000 in 1903, making it the largest city in Transcaucasia. The overall result of the 'oil revolution" was a dichotomy not uncommon in a colonial situation: a generally traditional economy, with a single rapidly growing industry based on mineral resources rather than on manufacturing, geared to external markets, owned largely by foreign investors, and operated by non-native skilled labor. Typical also was the contrast between the city rising out of the industrialization and the countryside unshaken from its timeless pattern of existence.
Baku grew into a polyglot urban center in which no single ethnic element predominated. The three largest groups were the Russians, the Armenians, and the Muslims. The latter often held a plurality oscillating between 35 and 45 percent, although their statistical designation included the natives of Eastern Transcaucasia as well as the immigrants from northern Iran, Daghestan, and even the Volga region. Most of the Muslims retained close links to their villages and adjusted poorly to urban life. They accounted for more than half of the labor force in the oil industry, and their unskilled labor commanded correspondingly low pay. The better jobs, requiring skills or training, were held by Russians and Armenians.
Baku turned not only into the virtual capital of Azerbaijan but also into the fountainhead of the rising native entrepreneurial class. However, although88 percent of all wells in 1870 were in the hands of the Moslems, their small operations accounted for only half the oil output in Baku. As soon as the regulation on bidding for oil leases went into effect, Moslem entrepreneurs began to lose out to their non-native competitors, not only to the big Russian and even bigger Western European companies, but also to smaller Armenian investors.
Increasingly, the Azeri capitalists made their impact felt on the community's life outside of strictly business activity. In this respect, the figure of Zeynal Abdin Taghiyev stood out. A quintessential self-made man, Taghiyev was reputed to be the richest man in Transcaucasia. Starting with a small oil-bearing plot of land, he multiplied his fortune by investments in kerosene refining and branched out into extensive land and stock market speculations. With time he extended his interests beyond the oil industry: he founded the first cotton mill in Azerbaijan and invested in tobacco and cotton plantations. Although barely literate, Taghiyev financially supported a wide range of educational and philanthropic ventures, among them schools, scholarships, newspapers, and theater, in Azerbaijan as well as in other Moslem centers of Russia, and even in Tabriz.
A signal manifestation of the growing divergence between Russian and Iranian Azerbaijans was the rise of the intelligentsia north of the Araxes. A social force as well as a cultural phenomenon, it emerged from the contact of the two civilizations - the traditional Islamic and the comparatively modern European, as represented by Russia. The very term intelligentsia in the context of Azerbaijan's history carries a somewhat different meaning from that in European languages. In Russia, where the word gained wide currency, its classic definition was that of a group formed of individuals from various social classes and held together by ideas, not by a shared common profession or economic status. Indeed, intellectuals, with their inclination to skepticism, did not easily fit this description, though they were not excluded. In the languages of Moslem peoples in Russia it also referred to those who had acquired the ways of the infidel and therefore were no longer entirely a part of us. The intelligentsia was thus a foreign body issued from the fabric of the native community, and its traditionalist opponents criticized its members by such labels as assimilators and even renegades.
In striking disproportion to its number, intelligentsia was destined to have an increasingly greater impact on the course of Azerbaijani history. Initially, the Azeri intelligentsia was comprised of those few who had acquired a familiarity with the Russian environment, for the most part by way of military or civil service. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when the civil service was largely purged of the native element, the intelligentsia came to be dominated by graduates of Russian universities and of the Transcaucasian teacher's seminaries in Gori and Tiflis. In fact, by the end of the century, schoolteachers, some of whom took to journalism or other literary endeavors, became one of the intelligentsia's largest profession.
In a stroke of good fortune the intelligentsia produced in its early stages a man of intellectual brilliance and artistic accomplishment, who expressed the group's typical concerns for the future. Mirza FathAli Akhundzada (Akhundov, l812-1878), a translator in the Chancellery of the Viceroy of the Caucasus, gained fame primarily as the author of the first European-style plays in Azeri. The 'Tatar Moliere', as Vorontsov fondly called Akhundzada, wrote a series of comedies between 1850 and 1855 that satirized the ills and flaws he saw in the contemporary society, which were rooted in ignorance or superstition.
To be continued.
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