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BETWEEN TURKEY, RUSSIA, AND PERSIA: PERCEPTIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY IN AZERBAIJAN AND ARMENIA AT THE TURN OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
Emil Souleimanov
Gloria Center
http://www.gloria-center.org/2012/04/between-turkey-russia-and-persia-perceptions-of-national-identity-in-azerbaijan-and-armenia-at-the-turn-of-the-nineteenth-and-twentieth-centuries/
Global Research in International Affairs
April 27 2012
This article traces the emergence of the modern national identities of
Azerbaijanis and Armenians back to the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. In doing so, it emphasizes the ways national identities were
shaped by Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectual elites, reflecting
their historical heritage of being parts of Turkish, Persian, and
Russian empires. Accordingly, the evolution of mutual perceptions
of Azerbaijanis and Armenians vis-a-vis their imperial neighbors-and
vice versa-is highlighted. The article focuses on the period of the
second half of the nineteenth century until 1920/1921, when following
a two-year intermezzo of independent states in the South Caucasus,
both Armenia and Azerbaijan were effectively incorporated into the
emerging Soviet Union.
The ethnic conflicts that have dominated the political landscape of the
South Caucasus-a historical crossroads of many civilizations, empires,
cultures, and peoples-since the years following the Soviet Union's
collapse have generated strong ethno-nationalisms. They have played a
crucial role in determining inter-ethnic, and to a certain degree also
inter-state, relations in this post-Soviet area. Given the strategic
location of the South Caucasus-with its small populace historically
sandwiched between great powers-local ethno-nationalisms have been
considerably affected by the perceptions of neighboring states. These
states once used to be empires encompassing what are now Azerbaijan,
Armenia, and Georgia. In fact, modern nationalisms of contemporary
Azerbaijanis and Armenians have been significantly shaped in a complex
historical context of the second half of the nineteenth century and
the first two decades of the twentieth century. This reflects the
way local elites interpreted the ethno-linguistic, cultural, and
political legacy of three major empires-Turkey, Persia (Iran), and
Russia, of which Azerbaijan and Armenia had been part for centuries.
Focusing on the historical context, this article seeks to highlight
the evolution of perceptions toward Russia and the Russians, Turkey
and the Turks, Persia and the Persians. They developed themselves
in the milieu of Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectuals, as these
perceptions helped shape modern ethnic consciousness of the two South
Caucasian nations. The article hence focuses on the period of the
second half of the nineteenth century, tracing the developments up
until 1920/1921. This was when the two-year intermezzo of Armenian
and Azerbaijani independence came to an end following the occupation
of these territories by Communist Russia.
AZERBAIJAN
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Persia and Persians or
Turks and Turkey
Since the eleventh century, when Oghuz nomads entered the picture,
Iran's history can be regarded as a Persian-Turkic symbiosis, taking
cultural influences from both of these civilizations. Following
a coup d'état in 1925, the Pahlavà Dynasty, the first purely
Persian dynasty in Persia, was founded. Its power was not limited
to the borders of historical Persia. From the eleventh century[1]
until that point, tribes and clans of Turkic origin had ruled over
Persian lands, Azerbaijan, and the surrounding areas.[2] For nearly
ten centuries, Iran represented a peculiar conglomerate of Iranian
and Turkic nations; until relatively recently, the actual toponym
"Iran" carried much greater semantic weight than it does today.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Safavid ruler Shah
Isma'il I made Shi'i Islam the state religion. The spreading and
strengthening of his hold on the region rested on the military
elite of the Qizilbash[3] tribal union, which brought together the
Turkic tribes of Persia and the southern Caucasus. The majority of
Azerbaijanis and Persians adopted Shi'i Islam at that time. This
strengthened the devotion of Turkic tribes to the idea of Iranian
statehood and particularly intensified the Persianization of the
tribal elite. The new religion was a powerful impulse for territorial
expansion. Decades of so-called Persian-Turkish or Shi'i-Sunni
wars followed. The fortunes of war alternated, favoring one side
then the other. From the sixteenth century through the first third
of the nineteenth century, the khanates of northern and southern
Azerbaijan were either an integral part of Persia or were in a state
of war against Tabriz/Isfahan/Teheran. Successful attempts to gain
emancipation from its domination were, however, not uncommon.[4]
A definitive change did not arrive until the two Russo-Persian wars,
in which St. Petersburg was more successful. According to the peace
treaties of Gulistan (1813) and TurkmänÄ~May (1828) the territory of
the north-Azerbaijani khanates (north of the border on the river Arax)
was handed over to the Romanovs. Azerbaijan thus came to be divided
into northern and southern parts inhabited by one nationality that
spoke one language. From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards,
the idea of a divided homeland or severance (ayriliq in Azerbaijani)
was reflected in the ideological and political solidification of
Azerbaijani national consciousness. This influenced the beginnings
of nationalism.[5]
The formation of the Azerbaijani identity at first played out as a
contest between two ideological and political currents. The first
current stressed the primacy of culture and religion (société
persane), while the second emphasized origin derived from language.
The creation of a unified Azerbaijani identity was effectively
hindered not only by traditional clan/territorial differentiation,
but also by the existence of two widespread denominations within Islam.
While the preponderance of Azerbaijanis were adherents of Shi'i
Islam and were inclined toward the Persians, the strong Sunni
minority-inhabiting mainly the west and north of Azerbaijani
territory-identified more with their Turkish and Dagestani fellow
believers.[6]
As Tadeusz Swietochowski writes, "the depth of the sectarian split
was reflected in the nineteenth-century wars waged by Russia, when the
Tsardom was able to use Shi'ite volunteers against Turkey in 1828 and
1853-1856 as well as against Shamil's Ghazavat (holy war) in Dagestan.
By contrast, the Sunnis tended to support Shamil, sometimes taking up
arms, and showed restiveness at times of Russo-Ottoman conflicts."[7]
In the 1830s alone, there were three local uprisings in the northern
areas of contemporary Azerbaijan bordering on Dagestan, all connected
with Shamil's movement.
In the end, Turkish language and culture won out. In the early
twentieth century, the pro-Turkish or pro-Turkic orientation of
Azerbaijani identity was clearly profiled. In the meantime, the
role of religion in the emerging secular, pro-Western, modernistic
nationalism was limited. The result was the growing orientation
of the local elite toward the Ottoman Empire, which was regarded
as the flagship of the (pan-) Turkic movement and at the same time
as a leading Muslim country. It was to the Ottoman Empire that the
pan-Turanist revivalists from the Crimea to the Altai tied their hopes.
No less intensely felt was the rediscovery of "Turkic brotherhood"
in various parts of the Russian Empire-in the Volga-Ural region,
northern and southern Caucasus, Central Asia, and Crimea.[8]
Thanks to the developments in the first decades of the twentieth
century, the political forces that were behind the emergence of the
independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920) could declare:
"The Muslims of the Transcaucasus [i.e. Azerbaijanis] together
with the Turks constitute one nationality."[9] From the beginning
of the twentieth century, bourgeois circles in particular laid
claim ever more vocally to their Turkic identity. Still, not at all
uncommon among the aristocracy was a historically based orientation
toward Iranian statehood. Moreover, the apolitical countryside still
identified itself more on the basis of religious criteria as Muslims
or in accordance with family, clan, or territorial criteria, the
foundations had been laid for the Azerbaijani identity as a lingual
and territorial phenomenon.
This noteworthy change of identity was sealed during the last months
of World War I, when in the autumn of 1918, after the withdrawal of
the Bolshevik army and of Armenian revolutionary forces, the Ottoman
troops and the mostly Azerbaijani Army of Islam briefly occupied Baku.
The Turks were welcomed in Azerbaijan as rescuers and liberators
who, together with Azerbaijani militia units, rid them of the bloody
rampaging of Armenian militias, even at the cost of murdering thousands
of Armenian civilians in the capital. Until their withdrawal in the
fall of 1918, when they were replaced by British occupation forces,
Turkish troops were largely responsible for the creation of an
independent Azerbaijan. They also provided significant aid in the
fight against Armenian rebels in Karabakh.
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Russians and Russia
The relationship with Russians in the Muslim Caucasus has never been
unambiguous. By most of the population, Russians were regarded as
"infidels" who-as opposed to the Christian Armenians and especially
Georgians-exhibited almost no sympathy toward Azerbaijanis, especially
during the initial period of colonization. For St. Petersburg, the
Muslim Azerbaijanis represented a potentially treacherous element. At
the time of the wars against Russia in the nineteenth century in the
northern Caucasus, there was a threat several times that the conflict
could spill over into territory inhabited by Azerbaijanis. This was
potentially a very unpleasant scenario for the empire in view of the
local population's strong ties to Persia and Turkey.[10]
According to the Caucasian Calendar for 1853, Caucasian Tatars (i.e.
Azerbaijanis) are "fiery, impatient, predisposed to brutality,
preferring an itinerant way of life; when the government weakens they
cross over to a different government or to anarchy; they do not forgive
wrongs, but are vengeful, tenacious..."[11] About ten years earlier,
a Russian officer reported from Karabakh that with the Tatars, their
way of life and their morals were inconsistent: "According to their
customs and beliefs, lying, banditry and plundering are worthy of
praise," and to abduct a girl, and while doing so to kill "at least a
man or even her very own parents and then to marry her is praiseworthy,
youthful heroism." As a consequence, "they cannot be real supporters
of the Russian government, and in case of any political upheaval,
they will be prepared to rise up against us."[12]
Even sources that attribute to Azerbaijanis mostly positive qualities
("hard-working, manly, full of determination, not inclined toward
changes and novelties") do not fail to emphasize that "one cannot at
all rely on their peacefulness and loyalty."[13] Still, the number and
the extent of anti-colonial uprisings in Azerbaijani lands were small,
especially in comparison with other areas of the Muslim (northern)
Caucasus. Among other things, this was due to the fact that in its
regional policy, St. Petersburg relied on the established Azerbaijani
aristocracy, who were granted a certain degree of autonomy. At least
at first, this approach provided the appearance of continuity of power
and legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary farmers and herdsmen, for whom
the arrival of the Russians changed almost nothing. Occasional local
disturbances were generally suppressed by the armed forces of the local
feudal lords, khans, or beks, and not by mounted Cossacks or the army.
Existence within the framework of the Russian state provided
the inhabitants of the southern Caucasus with decades of stable
socioeconomic growth. However, it was primarily Russian, Armenian, and
foreign capital that profited from the oil wealth of Baku. Also playing
a considerable role was the long-term influence of Russian culture
and learning, especially for the formation of the local intellectual
elite, for whom the Russian language and culture served as a bridge
to Western culture and modernizing tendencies that (Western) Europe
was undergoing. This is another reason the Azerbaijani revivalists
of the nineteenth century, with their anticlerical tendencies, had
generally positive relations with Russia and Russian domination.
Although the Azerbaijanis, as a Muslim nationality, were relieved
of the duty of serving in the Russian army, some of the old feudal
elite regarded military service as an honorable privilege. Still,
there was noticeably less participation by Azerbaijani nobility in
the officer corps of the Russian army than by the nobility of Georgia
and Armenia, also corresponding to the degree of involvement of those
ethnic groups in the societal life of tsarist Russia.[14] Relatively
weak anti-Russian attitudes characterized the period after the
Russian revolutions of 1917. This can at least partially be explained
by the fact that the disappearance of the power of St. Petersburg
from the region left behind a power vacuum that both the Armenians
and Azerbaijanis tried to fill, striving for control over several
areas that they jointly populated. Armenians and not Russians were
perceived as the chief threat accompanying the brief existence of the
independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920). Even after the
South Caucasian republic had been occupied in April 1920 by divisions
of the eleventh Red Army, anti-Russian attitudes did not strengthen.
The armed resistance to the occupation in certain areas of the country
was not, however, definitively suppressed until 1924.
The period of Soviet domination was characterized by escalating
autonomy for Azerbaijan-especially after World War II, the newly
established local elite played an ever greater role-and by generally
calm Russian-Azerbaijani coexistence. Yet the ultimate outcome was
tragic. On January 20, 1990, Soviet Army units invaded Baku. Their
official goal was to prevent the mass murder of Armenian civilians,
being instigated by fanatical crowds, mainly refugees from Armenia.
The Soviet troops deployed in the capital city and its environs
had been following the events passively for more than a week. The
Azerbaijanis, however, clearly interpreted this brutal attack, which
led to the deaths of dozens of civilians and injury of hundreds more,
as punishment from Moscow for the increasingly emphatic demands
for independence heard at ongoing demonstrations by many tens of
thousands followers of the nationalist opposition in Baku. Their
original mission had been to prevent the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh
under the administration of Yerevan.
ARMENIA
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Turks and Turkey
>From the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451),[15] Armenia began to
view the West and Persia to the south) as a source of constant threat.
Since then, the geostrategic interests of Constantinople, which
strove to gain this important territory in its struggles with the
Persians and later the Arabs, combined with a religious effort to
bring the Armenian "heretics" to Orthodox Christianity. Although the
Armenians gave Byzantium a number of important statesmen and military
commanders, Greek-Armenian antagonism was so strong at that time,
that many Byzantine Armenians viewed the victorious breakthrough of
Seljuq Turks into Anatolia a thousand years ago as salutary. This
antagonism continued, and even seemed to have strengthened during
the Ottoman era.[16]
At first, the strengthening of the Turkish element in Asia Minor
actually brought Armenian communities in Anatolia more religious
freedom. The Muslim rulers granted this to the vassals of other faiths
in exchange for loyalty. This benevolence included the possibility
of maintaining their own faith and identity. The Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, like other "People of the Book" (Christians
and Jews), enjoyed the status of dhimmis or wards of the Muslim
community or state. They were regarded as an independent millet, i.e.,
political-religious community. While that formally determined their
lower social status,[17] they still had the guaranteed possibility
of stable development within the framework of communities under
autonomous administration.[18]
During the Balkan uprisings in the first half of the nineteenth
century, the Armenian community, unlike the other Christian subjects,
did not question the sultan's authority. As a result of their loyalty,
Armenians received the distinction of being called millet-i sadika or a
faithful nation. In the nineteenth century Turkey, the standing of the
Armenian urban community-generally the bourgeoisie and intellectual
elite-grew enormously. It reached its apex in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when Armenians were at the heart of
the economic, cultural, and-in a certain sense-political life of that
empire of multiple nationalities.
During this period, however, the Armenians of eastern Anatolia became
targets of ever more intensive attacks by the Ottoman army and Muslim
militias. From 1894 to 1896, there were massacres of the Armenian
population. According to various estimates between 80,000 and 300,000
Armenians were killed.[19] This sharp turnaround in Ottoman relations
with Armenians was caused by a whole series of factors.
Foremost among them was the new tax system introduced in Turkey in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet the higher taxes
had to be paid without the abolition of the old taxation system,
which existed in areas of Anatolia in parallel to the new one and
accommodated the traditionally high demands of feudal lords-landowners,
the Kurds generally and Armenians as well. This also left room for
ubiquitous corruption, cronyism, and anarchy. The situation further
deteriorated after thousands of so-called Muhajirs[20] or Balkan
Muslims were settled in the none too fertile regions inhabited by
Armenians. This was usually done to the detriment of the Armenian
and Syriac Christians.
As if that were not enough, at the same time Istanbul gave approval for
ever larger numbers of nomadic Kurdish tribes to migrate farther to the
north and northeast, i.e., into territory that had traditionally been
populated by the Armenian element. "The Kurds, nomads and semi-nomads,
would winter in the regions of Mush, Van, and around Ararat, occupying
upkeep and tribute from the Armenian peasants, forcing them to purchase
their protection (hafir), pillaging with impunity, and carrying off
women and flocks. The usual reactions of the Armenian peasant and
artisans were flight and emigration toward Constantinople, Smyrna,
and Transcaucasia."[21]
In response to these developments, in the mid-nineteenth century
in some areas of Anatolian Armenia, armed divisions began to appear
spontaneously. Their main goal was to resist Kurdish raiders. The first
Armenian rebellions (in 1862 in Zeitun and in 1863 in Van and Erzurum)
were anti-Kurdish in character. As with the earlier Balkan uprisings,
Christian farmers initially asked for the sultan's protection. Yet
"[l]ocal Turkish officials ran the towns with little regard to central
authority, and Kurdish beys held much of the countryside under their
sway. Often the only way Istanbul could make its will felt was by
sending in the army."[22]
These events, which took place in the Anatolian countryside, coincided
with an emancipation movement that was gaining strength among Armenian
intellectual circles in Russia and Europe as well as in the major
Ottoman cities. Once the "Armenian question" had entered the stage
of grand European diplomacy at the Congress of Berlin (1878), it
was politicized once and for all. The initial efforts of a handful
of Armenian revivalists to improve the situation of the Armenian
population in the Ottoman Empire were soon taken up by St. Petersburg
as part of its foreign policy agenda. This was an excellent tool for
meddling in the internal affairs of the "sick man of the Bosporus."
The publicly declared goal of protecting Ottoman Christians was a
convenient excuse for expansion into the interior of Anatolia.
The disconsolate state of Armenian farming in Anatolia became the
center of attention for several Armenian revivalist organizations.
This included the three oldest and largest Armenian socialist
revolutionary parties, whose members did not hesitate to use terrorist
or diversionary-terrorist means of armed resistance during certain
periods. These were the revolutionary group Protectors of the Homeland,
founded in 1882, and the three aforementioned socialist revolutionary
parties-Armenakan (meaning "Armenian" in the Armenian language),
founded in 1885; Hnchak (Armenian for "bell"), founded two years later;
and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Haykakan heghaphokhakan
dashnaktsutiun), also known by the shorter name Dashnaktsutiun,
founded in 1890.
In various stages of their existence, these parties aspired for the
founding of an independent Armenian state or the incorporation of
eastern areas of Anatolia, regarded as an integral part of western
Armenia,[23] into the empire of the Romanovs. Before long, it came to
clashes with Kurds in several east-Turkish areas. Attacks were also
launched against Ottoman military units and police. Sometimes the
targets of the attacks were even Muslim civilians. It was generally
believed that St. Petersburg was supporting these activities. The
revivalist organizations thus helped to mobilize originally apolitical
Armenian villagers, leading to the formation of an armed resistance
movement.
In a relatively short time, Ottoman Muslims began to view the Armenians
as a homogenous ethnic-religious community, a "fifth column," trying
to undermine the state's integrity with the support of foreign
powers. In any case, after a series of uprisings and wars-which
cost the humiliated Ottoman sultanate extensive territory in the
Black Sea region and the Balkans while also causing the arrival of
hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees to an economically devastated
country-the seeds of distrust of the Ottomans toward their Christian
fellow citizens had now been sown.
The High Porte was entirely deaf to the desires of its Anatolian
vassals. Wherever possible, it resolved attempts at separatism in the
standard manner-through military intervention. This was also confirmed
by the suppression of several local rebellions of Kurdish tribes in
Anatolia before the 1860s by army units. Sultan Abdul Hamid II (in
power from 1876 to 1909), nicknamed "the Butcher" (not only among
Ottoman Christians), ruled during a period of Ottoman fears of the
destructive activity of European powers trying to break up the empire.
The efforts toward emancipation of the Armenian community were thus
a priori interpreted in the light of this global Christian conspiracy
against the caliphate.
At the same time, Istanbul was becoming more and more concerned with
the increasing cooperation between certain Kurdish tribal chiefs with
ideas of autonomy and the Russians. These fears were confirmed during
the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). Turkey was defeated in 1891. Soon
after, on the basis of an analogy with mobile Cossack regiments, whose
deployment in the previous war had proven extraordinarily successful,
Abdul Hamid II authorized the formation of the Kurdish militia
divisions (hamidiye), to which he lent his name. Besides, "it was
important to stiffen the resolve of Kurds as part of the empire."[24]
The Kurdish tribes from which members of the hamidiye were recruited
were exempt from paying taxes. Their only duty was military service
to the sultan, for which they received regular pay. Nonetheless,
"when the government could not afford to pay hamidiye officers,
it offered them tax-collecting rights on local Armenian villages,
causing further hardship for the latter."[25]
Before long, the armed Kurdish tribes, given broad authority for
protection of the border with Russia in the eastern provinces, began
engaging in battles over the region's limited resources. This occurred
both among individual hamidiye divisions and between those divisions
and the local population, whether Kurdish, Turkish or Christian.
"Local commanders did not differentiate between enemies of their tribe
qua tribe, and enemies of the hamidiye cavalry."[26] Eastern Anatolia
thus became an arena of regular armed conflicts of a local character,
in which the Christian population suffered the most.[27]
The Armenians' calls on Istanbul to intervene in the name of
protecting its Christian vassals and in order to stabilize the
remote East-Anatolian vilayets were in vain. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Istanbul generally avoided armed intervention
in the area, partly in order not to incur the wrath of the populous
and powerful Kurdish tribes, and partly because the Kurdish-Armenian
antagonism seemed to have suited Istanbul. Given this situation, the
aforementioned massacres of 1894-1896 took place with the participation
of local police forces and especially of hamidiye units and ordinary
local Muslims.[28]
The tragic climax of the deepening crisis was the so-called Armenian
Genocide[29] (1915). The circumstances of this event have not been
satisfactorily brought to light to this day. The Young Turk regime
appears to have decided in part for the liquidation of the Armenian
population and in part for its expulsion, in order to prevent the
feared penetration into the interior of Anatolia.[30] The result
was the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, the greater part
of the Armenian population of Anatolia, by Ottoman divisions and
hamidiye units; others were subjected to fatal conditions during
deportation.[31] The remaining Armenian survivors were then Kurdified
of Turkified, and tens of thousands of others managed to escape to
the disintegrating Russian Empire, the West (to France or the United
States), Syria, Lebanon, or other Arab areas of the sultanate (which
before long came under the mandate of France or the United Kingdom).
Massacres also recurred during the assault of the Turkish army across
the entire newly-created Armenian Democratic Republic in 1918 as well
as during the brief Turkish-Armenian War (1920). In response, there
were extensive ethnic cleansing and murders of thousands of people
belonging to the Turkish and Azerbaijani population, who constituted
approximately one third of the population of independent Armenia. Used
as an excuse for this was the fact that Turkish farmers and herdsmen
had largely taken the side of the Turks.
It was during the period of the tragic events at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that the view of
Turks as a "nation of murderers and ruffians" became definitively
sealed in the Armenian national consciousness. This was further
strengthened by conflicts with the Azerbaijanis of the southern
Caucasus.[32] The interpretation of the catastrophic year 1915 fit in
thematically with the religiously imbued self-image of Armenians as a
nation of martyrs. This seems to be the source of the ease with which
the events became an integral part of the Armenian national myth. Even
before 1915, literary and musical works had spoken of the suffering
of Armenian women and children, the courage of Armenian partisans,
and the boundless brutality of the Turks.[33]
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Russians and Russia
Russia's penetration of the Caucasus was welcomed by the Armenian
intellectual and especially clerical elite, as well as by ordinary
people. Their common religion played no small role in this. Divisions
of Armenian volunteers had existed beginning with the two Russo-Persian
Wars (1804-1813, 1826-1828), during which the territory of eastern
Armenia became part of the empire of the Romanovs, and in nearly all of
St Petersburg's Turkish campaigns in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia
(1806-1812, 1828-1829, 1877-1878, 1914-1917).
The Russians were perceived by the Armenian revivalists, whose ideas
had a significant cultural/religious component, as liberators from
the thousand-year yoke of the "heathen." In the first half of the
nineteenth century, some Armenians even believed St. Petersburg would
allow the restoration of a sort of Armenian tsardom, as an autonomous
entity under the protectorate of the Romanovs' empire. Although for
various reasons such optimistic hopes were never fulfilled, Armenian
migration to the Caucasus from the Ottoman Empire and Persia was
supported by Russian authorities in every possible way. Between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Armenian
refugees founded numerous prospering communities all over the Caucasus
as well as in the southern parts of Russia itself.[34]
As far as the Russian view of Armenians is concerned, these attitudes
underwent certain changes during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Until 1917, hatred toward the "Jews of the Caucasus,"
as Armenians were often called for their business talent, was not
uncommon among "Greater Russian" chauvinists. Unlike the Azerbaijanis,
who were generally distrusted by the Russian authorities and who were
sometimes seen as having the character of noble savages,[35] Armenians
were regarded more as a religiously and politically kindred element.
According to the Russian opinion of the day, Armenians "without any
doubt take first place among the inhabitants of the Transcaucasus
for their ability, industriousness and effort to educate themselves"
and "have always been regarded as the most industrious workers of
the East."[36] Russian authorities accounted them as "peaceable,
gentle, cautious, calculating, diligent, tied to their families,
industrious, delicate, quiet, obedient, trying to act [in compliance
with] the law..."[37] Besides their talent at business, many documents
underscored the unquestionable loyalty of the Armenians, who were
viewed as "devoted to the Russian government and could not betray
us."[38]
>From the early 1900s, with elements in the Armenian elite becoming
revolutionary, the Russian attitude began to regard Armenians as a
potentially dangerous "nation of revolutionaries and conspirators."
According to the daily Russkoe slovo, "any Armenian in the Caucasus
is regarded as a revolutionary just for being Armenian."[39] The
Armenians were the most politically conscious inhabitants of the
Transcaucasus at the time and offered the stiffest resistance to the
Russification campaign that St. Petersburg had begun in the 1880s.
Russian relations to the Christian Armenians during this period could
be best characterized as condescending accommodation.
In spite of occasional disappointment with the policies of St.
Petersburg in the affairs of eastern Anatolia or the none too
pro-Armenian approach of the colonial authorities regarding the
so-called Armenian-Tatar War of 1905,[40] the Armenians were always
sympathetic toward Russians. This was the result of the Armenians'
increasing concerns for their own safety. They saw themselves as "an
island of Christendom in a hostile (i.e., Turkic-Muslim) environment."
In direct proportion to the deterioration of Armenian relations with
their immediate neighbors (the Turks and Azerbaijanis) over time, the
orientation of Armenia's elite toward Russia strengthened. Russia was
seen as the only power willing and able to provide sparsely populated
Armenia with a guarantee of existence in a situation of geopolitical
stalemate.[41]
In spite of the country's occupation by the Eleventh Red Army
(1920)[42] and the end of Armenian independence, during the following
decades this consciousness served for the consolidation of the
nationality both in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and among
nationalistically oriented Armenians in the diaspora. The 70 years of
existence within the USSR further strengthened Armenia's orientation
toward Russia. Also contributing to this was the significant social
role played by Armenia in the Soviet state. These factors also help
explain why in Armenia-unlike in neighboring countries-the breakup of
the Soviet Union was accompanied by almost no anti-Russian sentiment.
CONCLUSION
During the Soviet and post-Soviet period, a modern national
self-awareness for Azerbaijanis and Armenians arose. This reflected
the process of self-identification that afflicted small peoples of the
borderland areas at the crossroads of empires. In case of Azerbaijanis
and Armenians, that process involved Russia, Turkey, and Persia.
The Azerbaijani intellectual elites in the nineteenth century
considered "Persianness" and "Turkishness" as two identity options
for themselves. The first principle mentioned reflected the existence
of a highly Persianized culture and common Shi'i religion of the
predominant part of the Azerbaijani populace that had been part of
Persia for centuries. The second phenomenon emphasized the primacy of
language and thus ethnic origin, which was thought to cement Turkophone
Azerbaijanis with Anatolian (or Ottoman) Turks. The primacy of language
eventually prevailed as Azerbaijanis overwhelmingly began to identify
themselves with neighboring Turkey-and their Turkic roots.
Over time, their nationalism obtained strongly Turkic intonations.
This was amplified as early as 1918, when Azerbaijanis found themselves
in a bloody armed conflict with neighboring Armenians. It was the aid
provided by the Turkish forces in the Caucasus that helped Azerbaijanis
eliminate the Armenian threat and lay the foundations of independent
Azerbaijani statehood. In the meantime, a once close relationship
to Persia gradually diminished. This was conditioned by the strongly
secular character of Azerbaijani nationalism and the overall decline
of religiosity during the Soviet period. The Russians and Armenians
were also considered as adversarial cultures.
While the perceptions of Persia played a rather marginal role in the
development of Armenian self-consciousness of the last centuries, the
dramatic events of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century
that took place in eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus laid the
ground for modern Armenian nationalism. Since then, anti-Turkic
sentiments have been the core of that ethno-nationalism as they
established themselves during the last decade of the existence of
the Ottoman Empire. This period was marked by a series of massive
Armenian pogroms and massacres culminating in the 1915-1916 events
in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.
The negative perceptions of Turkey and the Turks were further magnified
during what came to be known as the Armenian-Tatar War of 1905,
as well as during the 1918-1920 wars waged by independent Armenia
with neighboring Azerbaijan and Turkey. Importantly, Azerbaijanis
began to become increasingly identified with Anatolian Turks, which
helped refocus anti-Turkic sentiments toward Turkophone Azerbaijanis
as well. In the meanwhile, the image of Russia was sealed as the only
ally-a Christian nation that was able and willing to provide Armenians
with the necessary assistance for the latter to secure their physical
survival in the unfriendly environment of Turkic (Muslim) neighbors.
*Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian
and East European Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles
University in Prague, Czech Republic. This study has been carried
out in the framework of the Center for the Study of Collective Memory
(UNCE 204007) at Charles University in Prague.
NOTES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Something of an exception was the period of the domination of the
Mongolian dynasty of the Jalairids (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries),
which followed the occupation of Iran by Mongolian troops in the
mid-13th century and the annexation of its territory to Pax Mongolica.
[2] These were Seljuqids, Timurids, Qara Qoyunlu, Aq Qoyunlu, Safavi,
Afshars, and Qajars. All of these dynasties or ruling tribes with
the exception of the Timurids, who were related to the Uzbeks, were
descendents of Oghuz Turks.
[3] In Azerbaijani, Qizilbash (QızılbaÅ~_) means "golden-haired"
(qizil - "gold", bash - "head").
[4] In contemporary Azerbaijani historiography, there is a tendency to
regard state entities established by Turkic dynasties not as Persian
or Iranian, but as Azerbaijani, a typical tendency of post-colonial
nations.
[5] For more on the history of the Iranian Azerbaijanis, see,
in particular, Brenda Shaffer, Borders and Brethren: Iran and the
Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 1-77.
[6] Referring to contemporary Russian sources, Tadeusz Swietochowski
states that at the moment of the Russian occupation of the Azerbaijani
khanates, the number of adherents to Sunni Islam was roughly equal to
the number of Shi'a. The number of rebellious and more politically
active Sunnis gradually declined because of their migration to the
Ottoman Empire. Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920.
The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 8.
[7] Tadeusz Swietochowski, "National Consciousness and Political
Orientations in Azerbaijan, 1905-1920," in Ronald G. Suny (ed.),
Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change. Essays in the History
of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 1996), pp. 211-12.
[8] These were mainly Transcaucasian Azerbaijanis and Kazan and
Crimean Tatars (the most politically active Muslims in the empire
of the Romanovs) who were behind the emergence of Pan-Turkism and
who promoted it the most. Only afterwards did it spread to the west,
to the Ottoman Empire, where after the collapse of the Pan-Islamic
and Pan-Ottoman project, it soon became a constructive ideology. From
there, during World War I, it also began to be promoted back in the
direction of the "Russian Turks."
[9] Azärbaycan, September 25, 1918.
[10] In the end, the Caucasian wars did not spread to Azerbaijani
areas, with the exception of the northernmost, mountainous parts
of Azerbaijan. This was particularly thanks to the fact that the
resistance north of the Caucasian Mountains was fought under the
banner of Sunni Islam, strongly influenced by Islamic mysticism
(Sufism). Occasionally, the north-Caucasian highlanders were supported
by Azerbaijani Sunnis inhabiting the mountainous areas bordering on
Dagestan, which, together with Chechnya and the Cherks lands of the
northwestern Caucasus, was a hotbed of anti-colonial resistance.
[11] Kavkazskiy kalendar na 1854 god (Tiflis: 1853), pp. 352-53.
[12] Attributed to Capt. Pruzhanovsky, representing the Russian
colonial administration in Shusha, Karabakh, 1845, in Kolonialnaja
politika Rossijskogo carizma v Azerbajdžane v 20-60ie gody XIX v.
(Moscow: 1936), Vol. 2, p. 21.
[13] Ibid., pp. 306-07.
[14] Ordinary Azerbaijanis have fought on the side of the Russians,
for example in World War I. At that time, the ranks of the legendary
Caucasian Homeland Cavalry Division (formed in 1914 and known to
its contemporaries as the Savage Division because of its tenacity
and the exotic appearance of the horsemen (Caucasian Muslims)) also
consisted of a Tatar (Azerbaijani) regiment. The regiment was deployed
in fighting against German and Austrian divisions in the western
areas of the Russian Empire. In this connection, it is interesting
that Azerbaijani volunteers from the ranks of the Shi'a joined the
Russian army during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), while some of
their Sunni countrymen allied with the Turks, even going to battle.
[15] As a consequence of this council, the Armenian Apostolic Church
or Gregorian Church (though not the Monophysites) split away from
Byzantine Orthodoxy.
[16] In this regard, the most telling historical document is the
account of the twelfth-century Armenian chronicler Matevos Urhayetsi
(Matthew of Edessa/Urha). The seventeenth-century historian Simon
Lehatsi has interesting things to say about the now nearly forgotten
Armenian-Greek antagonism.
[17] This concerned the ban on carrying weapons, riding a horse,
owning land, holding a position in the state administration, etc. Over
time, however, the restrictions eased. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, it was relatively commonplace to encounter Armenians at the
highest levels of state administration-especially in Ottoman cities.
[18] In an effort to limit the influence of the more numerous Greeks,
especially in the towns of Asia Minor and in Constantinople/Istanbul,
the Ottoman sultans did not hesitate to support Armenians (as well
as Jews), who before long began to push the Greeks out of activities
that had traditionally been regarded as the Greeks' domain-trade
and finance.
[19] For more details, see Arman Kirakosian (ed.), The Armenian
Massacres, 1894-1896: U.S. Media Testimony (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2004).
[20] These were immigrants from the ranks of the rebellious Cherkes
(Circassians or Adyghes), Abkhazians, and Abazins who had been
forced by St. Petersburg to emigrate from the northern Caucasus to
the Ottoman Empire.
[21] Anahide Ter Minassian, "Nationalism and Socialism in the
Armenian Revolutionary Movement (1887-1912)," in Ronald G. Suny (ed.),
Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History
of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 1996), p. 146.
[22] Ronald G. Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.
104.
[23] Until 1915, western Turkish or Anatolian Armenia was the home of
the vast majority of the Armenian population. According to a census of
the Ottoman Empire in 1914, it had 1,295,000 inhabitants of Armenian
nationality. See Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi
(Istanbul: Belge Yayinlari, 1988), p. 142. According to a count
made by the Armenian Patriarchate in 1913, the number of Armenian
inhabitants in the empire was 1,914,000. See Raymond H. Kevorkian and
Paul B. Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l'Empire Ottoman a la vielle
du génocide (Paris: ARHIS, 1992), p. 22. This difference of more than
half a million in the data on the size of the Armenian population of
Turkey on the eve of World War I makes it more difficult to determine
the precise number of Armenian victims.
[24] David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: IB Tauris,
2007), p. 58.
[25] Ibid., p. 60.
[26] Ibid.
[27] The conflict between Armenians and Kurds at the end of the 1890s
turned into an ethnic conflict. Also playing a role was the fear
among Kurdish tribal chiefs of the desire for autonomy or irredentist
aspirations of Armenians who, with the declared support of Russia
and Western countries, were striving for control over territories
that the Kurds themselves claimed.
[28] Attempts at conciliation between Christians and Muslims ended
definitively after the fiasco of the Young Turk Revolution (1908).
While it originally promoted giving the country's Muslim and
Christian communities equal rights, before long-after the failure of
the Pan-Ottoman project-it led to the strengthening of Pan-Turkism
(and partially Pan-Islamism as well) as a state ideology.
[29] This study does not aim to deal with the question of whether
the tragic events of 1915-1916 were or were not a genocide in terms
of international law. Terms such as "genocide" and "massacres" are
used interchangeably and without any prior hidden agenda.
[30] After the debacle of Enver Pasha's Third Army on the Caucasian
front, the tsar's troops reached well into the Anatolian interior. In
early April 1915, on the route of the Russian army in the province
of Van (inhabited by many Armenians), there was a massive uprising.
Thousands of Muslim civilians were murdered. What disturbed Istanbul
even more, however, was the threat that the Van rebellion could spread
to the vast territory of eastern Anatolia, making it relatively easy
for the Russian army to advance farther into the west.
[31] Armenian sources usually cite figures of up to 1.5 million
people. See Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide:
Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus
(Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995).
[32] It is not without interest that Armenians regarded Azerbaijanis as
"Turks" (in light of the ethnic-lingual affinity with Anatolian Turks)
long before Azerbaijanis had largely assumed an ethnic-lingual identity
and began to regard themselves as "Turks" or "Azerbaijani Turks."
[33] Works by chroniclers who do not fit in with this image
are virtually unknown in Armenia. Only selected episodes of
Turkish-Armenian coexistence have been accepted. Likewise, there is no
talk of the large role of Kurdish tribes in the massacres and genocide.
[34] The Russo-Turkish Wars in particular were an impulse for
powerful waves of Armenians migrating to Russia. While in 1873, the
Armenian population of the Caucasus was 333,242, in 1886, it stood at
690,615, and by 1916, it had reached 1,211,145. See Svod materialov
dlya issledovaniya ekonomicheskogo byta gosudarstvennykh krestyan
Zakavkazskogo kraya (Tbilisi: 1886), Vol. 2, pp. 234-36.
[35] This Russian view of the inhabitants of the Caucasus is largely
based on a very stereotyped image of the North Caucasian highlander.
[36] Jury Gagemejster, Zakavkazskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: 1845),
pp. 14-15.
[37] Kavkazskiy kalendar na 1854 god (Tiblisi: 1853), p. 360.
[38] In 1845, Captain Pruzhanovsky, a representative of the Russian
colonial administration in the Karabakh city Shusha, quoted from
Kolonialnaya politika Rossijskogo tsarizma v Azerbayjane v 20-60ie
gody XIX v. (Moscow: 1936), Vol. 2, pp. 21-23.
[39] Russkoe slovo, February 1905.
[40] The so-called Armenian-Tatar (Back in Tsarist times, modern-day
Azerbaijanis were called Tatars) War broke out in 1905 as communal
fighting involving Azerbaijanis and Armenians. It hit oil-rich Baku
first and then spread across many regions of the South Caucasus with
mixed Azerbaijani and Armenian populace. According to the dominant
version of these events, the masses of poor Azerbaijanis-provoked by
Russian governors pursuing a classical divide-and-rule policy-attacked
their neighbours, prosperous Armenian craftsmen and traders, whom
they perceived to be unscrupulous exploiters. The first hostilities
between the two ethnic groups claimed nearly 10,000 victims.
[41] In addition to class considerations, this played a decisive role
for Armenian Communists as well as for Armenian nationalists. After
Armenia's defeat in the Turkish-Armenia War (1920), the Armenians
were aware of the structural imbalance of Turkish and Armenian forces
and the inability to avoid a repeat of the Armenian massacres. Thus,
in late 1920, they caused an uprising in Armenia in order to annex
the country to the Soviet state. The Russians were then regarded as
the "lesser of evils." There was also a strong feeling, forcefully
supported during Soviet rule, of having been betrayed by the Western
powers, who had promised Armenia significant territorial gains in
eastern Anatolia at the expense of the defeated Ottoman Empire under
the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), but who never came to the defense of
Armenian interests.
[42] In reality, the entire territory of Armenia was not occupied
until 1921, after the Russian and Armenian Bolsheviks managed to crush
the nationalist uprising in the Zangezur Mountains in the south of
the country, with the cooperation of units of the local Azerbaijani
home defense.
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http://www.gloria-center.org/2012/04/between-turkey-russia-and-persia-perceptions-of-national-identity-in-azerbaijan-and-armenia-at-the-turn-of-the-nineteenth-and-twentieth-centuries/
Global Research in International Affairs
April 27 2012
This article traces the emergence of the modern national identities of
Azerbaijanis and Armenians back to the last quarter of the nineteenth
century. In doing so, it emphasizes the ways national identities were
shaped by Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectual elites, reflecting
their historical heritage of being parts of Turkish, Persian, and
Russian empires. Accordingly, the evolution of mutual perceptions
of Azerbaijanis and Armenians vis-a-vis their imperial neighbors-and
vice versa-is highlighted. The article focuses on the period of the
second half of the nineteenth century until 1920/1921, when following
a two-year intermezzo of independent states in the South Caucasus,
both Armenia and Azerbaijan were effectively incorporated into the
emerging Soviet Union.
The ethnic conflicts that have dominated the political landscape of the
South Caucasus-a historical crossroads of many civilizations, empires,
cultures, and peoples-since the years following the Soviet Union's
collapse have generated strong ethno-nationalisms. They have played a
crucial role in determining inter-ethnic, and to a certain degree also
inter-state, relations in this post-Soviet area. Given the strategic
location of the South Caucasus-with its small populace historically
sandwiched between great powers-local ethno-nationalisms have been
considerably affected by the perceptions of neighboring states. These
states once used to be empires encompassing what are now Azerbaijan,
Armenia, and Georgia. In fact, modern nationalisms of contemporary
Azerbaijanis and Armenians have been significantly shaped in a complex
historical context of the second half of the nineteenth century and
the first two decades of the twentieth century. This reflects the
way local elites interpreted the ethno-linguistic, cultural, and
political legacy of three major empires-Turkey, Persia (Iran), and
Russia, of which Azerbaijan and Armenia had been part for centuries.
Focusing on the historical context, this article seeks to highlight
the evolution of perceptions toward Russia and the Russians, Turkey
and the Turks, Persia and the Persians. They developed themselves
in the milieu of Azerbaijani and Armenian intellectuals, as these
perceptions helped shape modern ethnic consciousness of the two South
Caucasian nations. The article hence focuses on the period of the
second half of the nineteenth century, tracing the developments up
until 1920/1921. This was when the two-year intermezzo of Armenian
and Azerbaijani independence came to an end following the occupation
of these territories by Communist Russia.
AZERBAIJAN
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Persia and Persians or
Turks and Turkey
Since the eleventh century, when Oghuz nomads entered the picture,
Iran's history can be regarded as a Persian-Turkic symbiosis, taking
cultural influences from both of these civilizations. Following
a coup d'état in 1925, the Pahlavà Dynasty, the first purely
Persian dynasty in Persia, was founded. Its power was not limited
to the borders of historical Persia. From the eleventh century[1]
until that point, tribes and clans of Turkic origin had ruled over
Persian lands, Azerbaijan, and the surrounding areas.[2] For nearly
ten centuries, Iran represented a peculiar conglomerate of Iranian
and Turkic nations; until relatively recently, the actual toponym
"Iran" carried much greater semantic weight than it does today.
In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Safavid ruler Shah
Isma'il I made Shi'i Islam the state religion. The spreading and
strengthening of his hold on the region rested on the military
elite of the Qizilbash[3] tribal union, which brought together the
Turkic tribes of Persia and the southern Caucasus. The majority of
Azerbaijanis and Persians adopted Shi'i Islam at that time. This
strengthened the devotion of Turkic tribes to the idea of Iranian
statehood and particularly intensified the Persianization of the
tribal elite. The new religion was a powerful impulse for territorial
expansion. Decades of so-called Persian-Turkish or Shi'i-Sunni
wars followed. The fortunes of war alternated, favoring one side
then the other. From the sixteenth century through the first third
of the nineteenth century, the khanates of northern and southern
Azerbaijan were either an integral part of Persia or were in a state
of war against Tabriz/Isfahan/Teheran. Successful attempts to gain
emancipation from its domination were, however, not uncommon.[4]
A definitive change did not arrive until the two Russo-Persian wars,
in which St. Petersburg was more successful. According to the peace
treaties of Gulistan (1813) and TurkmänÄ~May (1828) the territory of
the north-Azerbaijani khanates (north of the border on the river Arax)
was handed over to the Romanovs. Azerbaijan thus came to be divided
into northern and southern parts inhabited by one nationality that
spoke one language. From the turn of the nineteenth century onwards,
the idea of a divided homeland or severance (ayriliq in Azerbaijani)
was reflected in the ideological and political solidification of
Azerbaijani national consciousness. This influenced the beginnings
of nationalism.[5]
The formation of the Azerbaijani identity at first played out as a
contest between two ideological and political currents. The first
current stressed the primacy of culture and religion (société
persane), while the second emphasized origin derived from language.
The creation of a unified Azerbaijani identity was effectively
hindered not only by traditional clan/territorial differentiation,
but also by the existence of two widespread denominations within Islam.
While the preponderance of Azerbaijanis were adherents of Shi'i
Islam and were inclined toward the Persians, the strong Sunni
minority-inhabiting mainly the west and north of Azerbaijani
territory-identified more with their Turkish and Dagestani fellow
believers.[6]
As Tadeusz Swietochowski writes, "the depth of the sectarian split
was reflected in the nineteenth-century wars waged by Russia, when the
Tsardom was able to use Shi'ite volunteers against Turkey in 1828 and
1853-1856 as well as against Shamil's Ghazavat (holy war) in Dagestan.
By contrast, the Sunnis tended to support Shamil, sometimes taking up
arms, and showed restiveness at times of Russo-Ottoman conflicts."[7]
In the 1830s alone, there were three local uprisings in the northern
areas of contemporary Azerbaijan bordering on Dagestan, all connected
with Shamil's movement.
In the end, Turkish language and culture won out. In the early
twentieth century, the pro-Turkish or pro-Turkic orientation of
Azerbaijani identity was clearly profiled. In the meantime, the
role of religion in the emerging secular, pro-Western, modernistic
nationalism was limited. The result was the growing orientation
of the local elite toward the Ottoman Empire, which was regarded
as the flagship of the (pan-) Turkic movement and at the same time
as a leading Muslim country. It was to the Ottoman Empire that the
pan-Turanist revivalists from the Crimea to the Altai tied their hopes.
No less intensely felt was the rediscovery of "Turkic brotherhood"
in various parts of the Russian Empire-in the Volga-Ural region,
northern and southern Caucasus, Central Asia, and Crimea.[8]
Thanks to the developments in the first decades of the twentieth
century, the political forces that were behind the emergence of the
independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920) could declare:
"The Muslims of the Transcaucasus [i.e. Azerbaijanis] together
with the Turks constitute one nationality."[9] From the beginning
of the twentieth century, bourgeois circles in particular laid
claim ever more vocally to their Turkic identity. Still, not at all
uncommon among the aristocracy was a historically based orientation
toward Iranian statehood. Moreover, the apolitical countryside still
identified itself more on the basis of religious criteria as Muslims
or in accordance with family, clan, or territorial criteria, the
foundations had been laid for the Azerbaijani identity as a lingual
and territorial phenomenon.
This noteworthy change of identity was sealed during the last months
of World War I, when in the autumn of 1918, after the withdrawal of
the Bolshevik army and of Armenian revolutionary forces, the Ottoman
troops and the mostly Azerbaijani Army of Islam briefly occupied Baku.
The Turks were welcomed in Azerbaijan as rescuers and liberators
who, together with Azerbaijani militia units, rid them of the bloody
rampaging of Armenian militias, even at the cost of murdering thousands
of Armenian civilians in the capital. Until their withdrawal in the
fall of 1918, when they were replaced by British occupation forces,
Turkish troops were largely responsible for the creation of an
independent Azerbaijan. They also provided significant aid in the
fight against Armenian rebels in Karabakh.
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Russians and Russia
The relationship with Russians in the Muslim Caucasus has never been
unambiguous. By most of the population, Russians were regarded as
"infidels" who-as opposed to the Christian Armenians and especially
Georgians-exhibited almost no sympathy toward Azerbaijanis, especially
during the initial period of colonization. For St. Petersburg, the
Muslim Azerbaijanis represented a potentially treacherous element. At
the time of the wars against Russia in the nineteenth century in the
northern Caucasus, there was a threat several times that the conflict
could spill over into territory inhabited by Azerbaijanis. This was
potentially a very unpleasant scenario for the empire in view of the
local population's strong ties to Persia and Turkey.[10]
According to the Caucasian Calendar for 1853, Caucasian Tatars (i.e.
Azerbaijanis) are "fiery, impatient, predisposed to brutality,
preferring an itinerant way of life; when the government weakens they
cross over to a different government or to anarchy; they do not forgive
wrongs, but are vengeful, tenacious..."[11] About ten years earlier,
a Russian officer reported from Karabakh that with the Tatars, their
way of life and their morals were inconsistent: "According to their
customs and beliefs, lying, banditry and plundering are worthy of
praise," and to abduct a girl, and while doing so to kill "at least a
man or even her very own parents and then to marry her is praiseworthy,
youthful heroism." As a consequence, "they cannot be real supporters
of the Russian government, and in case of any political upheaval,
they will be prepared to rise up against us."[12]
Even sources that attribute to Azerbaijanis mostly positive qualities
("hard-working, manly, full of determination, not inclined toward
changes and novelties") do not fail to emphasize that "one cannot at
all rely on their peacefulness and loyalty."[13] Still, the number and
the extent of anti-colonial uprisings in Azerbaijani lands were small,
especially in comparison with other areas of the Muslim (northern)
Caucasus. Among other things, this was due to the fact that in its
regional policy, St. Petersburg relied on the established Azerbaijani
aristocracy, who were granted a certain degree of autonomy. At least
at first, this approach provided the appearance of continuity of power
and legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary farmers and herdsmen, for whom
the arrival of the Russians changed almost nothing. Occasional local
disturbances were generally suppressed by the armed forces of the local
feudal lords, khans, or beks, and not by mounted Cossacks or the army.
Existence within the framework of the Russian state provided
the inhabitants of the southern Caucasus with decades of stable
socioeconomic growth. However, it was primarily Russian, Armenian, and
foreign capital that profited from the oil wealth of Baku. Also playing
a considerable role was the long-term influence of Russian culture
and learning, especially for the formation of the local intellectual
elite, for whom the Russian language and culture served as a bridge
to Western culture and modernizing tendencies that (Western) Europe
was undergoing. This is another reason the Azerbaijani revivalists
of the nineteenth century, with their anticlerical tendencies, had
generally positive relations with Russia and Russian domination.
Although the Azerbaijanis, as a Muslim nationality, were relieved
of the duty of serving in the Russian army, some of the old feudal
elite regarded military service as an honorable privilege. Still,
there was noticeably less participation by Azerbaijani nobility in
the officer corps of the Russian army than by the nobility of Georgia
and Armenia, also corresponding to the degree of involvement of those
ethnic groups in the societal life of tsarist Russia.[14] Relatively
weak anti-Russian attitudes characterized the period after the
Russian revolutions of 1917. This can at least partially be explained
by the fact that the disappearance of the power of St. Petersburg
from the region left behind a power vacuum that both the Armenians
and Azerbaijanis tried to fill, striving for control over several
areas that they jointly populated. Armenians and not Russians were
perceived as the chief threat accompanying the brief existence of the
independent Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918-1920). Even after the
South Caucasian republic had been occupied in April 1920 by divisions
of the eleventh Red Army, anti-Russian attitudes did not strengthen.
The armed resistance to the occupation in certain areas of the country
was not, however, definitively suppressed until 1924.
The period of Soviet domination was characterized by escalating
autonomy for Azerbaijan-especially after World War II, the newly
established local elite played an ever greater role-and by generally
calm Russian-Azerbaijani coexistence. Yet the ultimate outcome was
tragic. On January 20, 1990, Soviet Army units invaded Baku. Their
official goal was to prevent the mass murder of Armenian civilians,
being instigated by fanatical crowds, mainly refugees from Armenia.
The Soviet troops deployed in the capital city and its environs
had been following the events passively for more than a week. The
Azerbaijanis, however, clearly interpreted this brutal attack, which
led to the deaths of dozens of civilians and injury of hundreds more,
as punishment from Moscow for the increasingly emphatic demands
for independence heard at ongoing demonstrations by many tens of
thousands followers of the nationalist opposition in Baku. Their
original mission had been to prevent the transfer of Nagorno-Karabakh
under the administration of Yerevan.
ARMENIA
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Turks and Turkey
>From the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon (451),[15] Armenia began to
view the West and Persia to the south) as a source of constant threat.
Since then, the geostrategic interests of Constantinople, which
strove to gain this important territory in its struggles with the
Persians and later the Arabs, combined with a religious effort to
bring the Armenian "heretics" to Orthodox Christianity. Although the
Armenians gave Byzantium a number of important statesmen and military
commanders, Greek-Armenian antagonism was so strong at that time,
that many Byzantine Armenians viewed the victorious breakthrough of
Seljuq Turks into Anatolia a thousand years ago as salutary. This
antagonism continued, and even seemed to have strengthened during
the Ottoman era.[16]
At first, the strengthening of the Turkish element in Asia Minor
actually brought Armenian communities in Anatolia more religious
freedom. The Muslim rulers granted this to the vassals of other faiths
in exchange for loyalty. This benevolence included the possibility
of maintaining their own faith and identity. The Armenians in
the Ottoman Empire, like other "People of the Book" (Christians
and Jews), enjoyed the status of dhimmis or wards of the Muslim
community or state. They were regarded as an independent millet, i.e.,
political-religious community. While that formally determined their
lower social status,[17] they still had the guaranteed possibility
of stable development within the framework of communities under
autonomous administration.[18]
During the Balkan uprisings in the first half of the nineteenth
century, the Armenian community, unlike the other Christian subjects,
did not question the sultan's authority. As a result of their loyalty,
Armenians received the distinction of being called millet-i sadika or a
faithful nation. In the nineteenth century Turkey, the standing of the
Armenian urban community-generally the bourgeoisie and intellectual
elite-grew enormously. It reached its apex in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when Armenians were at the heart of
the economic, cultural, and-in a certain sense-political life of that
empire of multiple nationalities.
During this period, however, the Armenians of eastern Anatolia became
targets of ever more intensive attacks by the Ottoman army and Muslim
militias. From 1894 to 1896, there were massacres of the Armenian
population. According to various estimates between 80,000 and 300,000
Armenians were killed.[19] This sharp turnaround in Ottoman relations
with Armenians was caused by a whole series of factors.
Foremost among them was the new tax system introduced in Turkey in
the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet the higher taxes
had to be paid without the abolition of the old taxation system,
which existed in areas of Anatolia in parallel to the new one and
accommodated the traditionally high demands of feudal lords-landowners,
the Kurds generally and Armenians as well. This also left room for
ubiquitous corruption, cronyism, and anarchy. The situation further
deteriorated after thousands of so-called Muhajirs[20] or Balkan
Muslims were settled in the none too fertile regions inhabited by
Armenians. This was usually done to the detriment of the Armenian
and Syriac Christians.
As if that were not enough, at the same time Istanbul gave approval for
ever larger numbers of nomadic Kurdish tribes to migrate farther to the
north and northeast, i.e., into territory that had traditionally been
populated by the Armenian element. "The Kurds, nomads and semi-nomads,
would winter in the regions of Mush, Van, and around Ararat, occupying
upkeep and tribute from the Armenian peasants, forcing them to purchase
their protection (hafir), pillaging with impunity, and carrying off
women and flocks. The usual reactions of the Armenian peasant and
artisans were flight and emigration toward Constantinople, Smyrna,
and Transcaucasia."[21]
In response to these developments, in the mid-nineteenth century
in some areas of Anatolian Armenia, armed divisions began to appear
spontaneously. Their main goal was to resist Kurdish raiders. The first
Armenian rebellions (in 1862 in Zeitun and in 1863 in Van and Erzurum)
were anti-Kurdish in character. As with the earlier Balkan uprisings,
Christian farmers initially asked for the sultan's protection. Yet
"[l]ocal Turkish officials ran the towns with little regard to central
authority, and Kurdish beys held much of the countryside under their
sway. Often the only way Istanbul could make its will felt was by
sending in the army."[22]
These events, which took place in the Anatolian countryside, coincided
with an emancipation movement that was gaining strength among Armenian
intellectual circles in Russia and Europe as well as in the major
Ottoman cities. Once the "Armenian question" had entered the stage
of grand European diplomacy at the Congress of Berlin (1878), it
was politicized once and for all. The initial efforts of a handful
of Armenian revivalists to improve the situation of the Armenian
population in the Ottoman Empire were soon taken up by St. Petersburg
as part of its foreign policy agenda. This was an excellent tool for
meddling in the internal affairs of the "sick man of the Bosporus."
The publicly declared goal of protecting Ottoman Christians was a
convenient excuse for expansion into the interior of Anatolia.
The disconsolate state of Armenian farming in Anatolia became the
center of attention for several Armenian revivalist organizations.
This included the three oldest and largest Armenian socialist
revolutionary parties, whose members did not hesitate to use terrorist
or diversionary-terrorist means of armed resistance during certain
periods. These were the revolutionary group Protectors of the Homeland,
founded in 1882, and the three aforementioned socialist revolutionary
parties-Armenakan (meaning "Armenian" in the Armenian language),
founded in 1885; Hnchak (Armenian for "bell"), founded two years later;
and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Haykakan heghaphokhakan
dashnaktsutiun), also known by the shorter name Dashnaktsutiun,
founded in 1890.
In various stages of their existence, these parties aspired for the
founding of an independent Armenian state or the incorporation of
eastern areas of Anatolia, regarded as an integral part of western
Armenia,[23] into the empire of the Romanovs. Before long, it came to
clashes with Kurds in several east-Turkish areas. Attacks were also
launched against Ottoman military units and police. Sometimes the
targets of the attacks were even Muslim civilians. It was generally
believed that St. Petersburg was supporting these activities. The
revivalist organizations thus helped to mobilize originally apolitical
Armenian villagers, leading to the formation of an armed resistance
movement.
In a relatively short time, Ottoman Muslims began to view the Armenians
as a homogenous ethnic-religious community, a "fifth column," trying
to undermine the state's integrity with the support of foreign
powers. In any case, after a series of uprisings and wars-which
cost the humiliated Ottoman sultanate extensive territory in the
Black Sea region and the Balkans while also causing the arrival of
hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees to an economically devastated
country-the seeds of distrust of the Ottomans toward their Christian
fellow citizens had now been sown.
The High Porte was entirely deaf to the desires of its Anatolian
vassals. Wherever possible, it resolved attempts at separatism in the
standard manner-through military intervention. This was also confirmed
by the suppression of several local rebellions of Kurdish tribes in
Anatolia before the 1860s by army units. Sultan Abdul Hamid II (in
power from 1876 to 1909), nicknamed "the Butcher" (not only among
Ottoman Christians), ruled during a period of Ottoman fears of the
destructive activity of European powers trying to break up the empire.
The efforts toward emancipation of the Armenian community were thus
a priori interpreted in the light of this global Christian conspiracy
against the caliphate.
At the same time, Istanbul was becoming more and more concerned with
the increasing cooperation between certain Kurdish tribal chiefs with
ideas of autonomy and the Russians. These fears were confirmed during
the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878). Turkey was defeated in 1891. Soon
after, on the basis of an analogy with mobile Cossack regiments, whose
deployment in the previous war had proven extraordinarily successful,
Abdul Hamid II authorized the formation of the Kurdish militia
divisions (hamidiye), to which he lent his name. Besides, "it was
important to stiffen the resolve of Kurds as part of the empire."[24]
The Kurdish tribes from which members of the hamidiye were recruited
were exempt from paying taxes. Their only duty was military service
to the sultan, for which they received regular pay. Nonetheless,
"when the government could not afford to pay hamidiye officers,
it offered them tax-collecting rights on local Armenian villages,
causing further hardship for the latter."[25]
Before long, the armed Kurdish tribes, given broad authority for
protection of the border with Russia in the eastern provinces, began
engaging in battles over the region's limited resources. This occurred
both among individual hamidiye divisions and between those divisions
and the local population, whether Kurdish, Turkish or Christian.
"Local commanders did not differentiate between enemies of their tribe
qua tribe, and enemies of the hamidiye cavalry."[26] Eastern Anatolia
thus became an arena of regular armed conflicts of a local character,
in which the Christian population suffered the most.[27]
The Armenians' calls on Istanbul to intervene in the name of
protecting its Christian vassals and in order to stabilize the
remote East-Anatolian vilayets were in vain. At the end of the
nineteenth century, Istanbul generally avoided armed intervention
in the area, partly in order not to incur the wrath of the populous
and powerful Kurdish tribes, and partly because the Kurdish-Armenian
antagonism seemed to have suited Istanbul. Given this situation, the
aforementioned massacres of 1894-1896 took place with the participation
of local police forces and especially of hamidiye units and ordinary
local Muslims.[28]
The tragic climax of the deepening crisis was the so-called Armenian
Genocide[29] (1915). The circumstances of this event have not been
satisfactorily brought to light to this day. The Young Turk regime
appears to have decided in part for the liquidation of the Armenian
population and in part for its expulsion, in order to prevent the
feared penetration into the interior of Anatolia.[30] The result
was the murder of hundreds of thousands of people, the greater part
of the Armenian population of Anatolia, by Ottoman divisions and
hamidiye units; others were subjected to fatal conditions during
deportation.[31] The remaining Armenian survivors were then Kurdified
of Turkified, and tens of thousands of others managed to escape to
the disintegrating Russian Empire, the West (to France or the United
States), Syria, Lebanon, or other Arab areas of the sultanate (which
before long came under the mandate of France or the United Kingdom).
Massacres also recurred during the assault of the Turkish army across
the entire newly-created Armenian Democratic Republic in 1918 as well
as during the brief Turkish-Armenian War (1920). In response, there
were extensive ethnic cleansing and murders of thousands of people
belonging to the Turkish and Azerbaijani population, who constituted
approximately one third of the population of independent Armenia. Used
as an excuse for this was the fact that Turkish farmers and herdsmen
had largely taken the side of the Turks.
It was during the period of the tragic events at the end of the
nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries that the view of
Turks as a "nation of murderers and ruffians" became definitively
sealed in the Armenian national consciousness. This was further
strengthened by conflicts with the Azerbaijanis of the southern
Caucasus.[32] The interpretation of the catastrophic year 1915 fit in
thematically with the religiously imbued self-image of Armenians as a
nation of martyrs. This seems to be the source of the ease with which
the events became an integral part of the Armenian national myth. Even
before 1915, literary and musical works had spoken of the suffering
of Armenian women and children, the courage of Armenian partisans,
and the boundless brutality of the Turks.[33]
A Historical Perspective of Relations with Russians and Russia
Russia's penetration of the Caucasus was welcomed by the Armenian
intellectual and especially clerical elite, as well as by ordinary
people. Their common religion played no small role in this. Divisions
of Armenian volunteers had existed beginning with the two Russo-Persian
Wars (1804-1813, 1826-1828), during which the territory of eastern
Armenia became part of the empire of the Romanovs, and in nearly all of
St Petersburg's Turkish campaigns in the Caucasus and eastern Anatolia
(1806-1812, 1828-1829, 1877-1878, 1914-1917).
The Russians were perceived by the Armenian revivalists, whose ideas
had a significant cultural/religious component, as liberators from
the thousand-year yoke of the "heathen." In the first half of the
nineteenth century, some Armenians even believed St. Petersburg would
allow the restoration of a sort of Armenian tsardom, as an autonomous
entity under the protectorate of the Romanovs' empire. Although for
various reasons such optimistic hopes were never fulfilled, Armenian
migration to the Caucasus from the Ottoman Empire and Persia was
supported by Russian authorities in every possible way. Between the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, hundreds of thousands of Armenian
refugees founded numerous prospering communities all over the Caucasus
as well as in the southern parts of Russia itself.[34]
As far as the Russian view of Armenians is concerned, these attitudes
underwent certain changes during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Until 1917, hatred toward the "Jews of the Caucasus,"
as Armenians were often called for their business talent, was not
uncommon among "Greater Russian" chauvinists. Unlike the Azerbaijanis,
who were generally distrusted by the Russian authorities and who were
sometimes seen as having the character of noble savages,[35] Armenians
were regarded more as a religiously and politically kindred element.
According to the Russian opinion of the day, Armenians "without any
doubt take first place among the inhabitants of the Transcaucasus
for their ability, industriousness and effort to educate themselves"
and "have always been regarded as the most industrious workers of
the East."[36] Russian authorities accounted them as "peaceable,
gentle, cautious, calculating, diligent, tied to their families,
industrious, delicate, quiet, obedient, trying to act [in compliance
with] the law..."[37] Besides their talent at business, many documents
underscored the unquestionable loyalty of the Armenians, who were
viewed as "devoted to the Russian government and could not betray
us."[38]
>From the early 1900s, with elements in the Armenian elite becoming
revolutionary, the Russian attitude began to regard Armenians as a
potentially dangerous "nation of revolutionaries and conspirators."
According to the daily Russkoe slovo, "any Armenian in the Caucasus
is regarded as a revolutionary just for being Armenian."[39] The
Armenians were the most politically conscious inhabitants of the
Transcaucasus at the time and offered the stiffest resistance to the
Russification campaign that St. Petersburg had begun in the 1880s.
Russian relations to the Christian Armenians during this period could
be best characterized as condescending accommodation.
In spite of occasional disappointment with the policies of St.
Petersburg in the affairs of eastern Anatolia or the none too
pro-Armenian approach of the colonial authorities regarding the
so-called Armenian-Tatar War of 1905,[40] the Armenians were always
sympathetic toward Russians. This was the result of the Armenians'
increasing concerns for their own safety. They saw themselves as "an
island of Christendom in a hostile (i.e., Turkic-Muslim) environment."
In direct proportion to the deterioration of Armenian relations with
their immediate neighbors (the Turks and Azerbaijanis) over time, the
orientation of Armenia's elite toward Russia strengthened. Russia was
seen as the only power willing and able to provide sparsely populated
Armenia with a guarantee of existence in a situation of geopolitical
stalemate.[41]
In spite of the country's occupation by the Eleventh Red Army
(1920)[42] and the end of Armenian independence, during the following
decades this consciousness served for the consolidation of the
nationality both in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and among
nationalistically oriented Armenians in the diaspora. The 70 years of
existence within the USSR further strengthened Armenia's orientation
toward Russia. Also contributing to this was the significant social
role played by Armenia in the Soviet state. These factors also help
explain why in Armenia-unlike in neighboring countries-the breakup of
the Soviet Union was accompanied by almost no anti-Russian sentiment.
CONCLUSION
During the Soviet and post-Soviet period, a modern national
self-awareness for Azerbaijanis and Armenians arose. This reflected
the process of self-identification that afflicted small peoples of the
borderland areas at the crossroads of empires. In case of Azerbaijanis
and Armenians, that process involved Russia, Turkey, and Persia.
The Azerbaijani intellectual elites in the nineteenth century
considered "Persianness" and "Turkishness" as two identity options
for themselves. The first principle mentioned reflected the existence
of a highly Persianized culture and common Shi'i religion of the
predominant part of the Azerbaijani populace that had been part of
Persia for centuries. The second phenomenon emphasized the primacy of
language and thus ethnic origin, which was thought to cement Turkophone
Azerbaijanis with Anatolian (or Ottoman) Turks. The primacy of language
eventually prevailed as Azerbaijanis overwhelmingly began to identify
themselves with neighboring Turkey-and their Turkic roots.
Over time, their nationalism obtained strongly Turkic intonations.
This was amplified as early as 1918, when Azerbaijanis found themselves
in a bloody armed conflict with neighboring Armenians. It was the aid
provided by the Turkish forces in the Caucasus that helped Azerbaijanis
eliminate the Armenian threat and lay the foundations of independent
Azerbaijani statehood. In the meantime, a once close relationship
to Persia gradually diminished. This was conditioned by the strongly
secular character of Azerbaijani nationalism and the overall decline
of religiosity during the Soviet period. The Russians and Armenians
were also considered as adversarial cultures.
While the perceptions of Persia played a rather marginal role in the
development of Armenian self-consciousness of the last centuries, the
dramatic events of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century
that took place in eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus laid the
ground for modern Armenian nationalism. Since then, anti-Turkic
sentiments have been the core of that ethno-nationalism as they
established themselves during the last decade of the existence of
the Ottoman Empire. This period was marked by a series of massive
Armenian pogroms and massacres culminating in the 1915-1916 events
in which hundreds of thousands of Armenians were murdered.
The negative perceptions of Turkey and the Turks were further magnified
during what came to be known as the Armenian-Tatar War of 1905,
as well as during the 1918-1920 wars waged by independent Armenia
with neighboring Azerbaijan and Turkey. Importantly, Azerbaijanis
began to become increasingly identified with Anatolian Turks, which
helped refocus anti-Turkic sentiments toward Turkophone Azerbaijanis
as well. In the meanwhile, the image of Russia was sealed as the only
ally-a Christian nation that was able and willing to provide Armenians
with the necessary assistance for the latter to secure their physical
survival in the unfriendly environment of Turkic (Muslim) neighbors.
*Emil Souleimanov is assistant professor at the Department of Russian
and East European Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles
University in Prague, Czech Republic. This study has been carried
out in the framework of the Center for the Study of Collective Memory
(UNCE 204007) at Charles University in Prague.
NOTES
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Something of an exception was the period of the domination of the
Mongolian dynasty of the Jalairids (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries),
which followed the occupation of Iran by Mongolian troops in the
mid-13th century and the annexation of its territory to Pax Mongolica.
[2] These were Seljuqids, Timurids, Qara Qoyunlu, Aq Qoyunlu, Safavi,
Afshars, and Qajars. All of these dynasties or ruling tribes with
the exception of the Timurids, who were related to the Uzbeks, were
descendents of Oghuz Turks.
[3] In Azerbaijani, Qizilbash (QızılbaÅ~_) means "golden-haired"
(qizil - "gold", bash - "head").
[4] In contemporary Azerbaijani historiography, there is a tendency to
regard state entities established by Turkic dynasties not as Persian
or Iranian, but as Azerbaijani, a typical tendency of post-colonial
nations.
[5] For more on the history of the Iranian Azerbaijanis, see,
in particular, Brenda Shaffer, Borders and Brethren: Iran and the
Challenge of Azerbaijani Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 1-77.
[6] Referring to contemporary Russian sources, Tadeusz Swietochowski
states that at the moment of the Russian occupation of the Azerbaijani
khanates, the number of adherents to Sunni Islam was roughly equal to
the number of Shi'a. The number of rebellious and more politically
active Sunnis gradually declined because of their migration to the
Ottoman Empire. Tadeusz Swietochowski, Russian Azerbaijan, 1905-1920.
The Shaping of National Identity in a Muslim Community (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 8.
[7] Tadeusz Swietochowski, "National Consciousness and Political
Orientations in Azerbaijan, 1905-1920," in Ronald G. Suny (ed.),
Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change. Essays in the History
of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 1996), pp. 211-12.
[8] These were mainly Transcaucasian Azerbaijanis and Kazan and
Crimean Tatars (the most politically active Muslims in the empire
of the Romanovs) who were behind the emergence of Pan-Turkism and
who promoted it the most. Only afterwards did it spread to the west,
to the Ottoman Empire, where after the collapse of the Pan-Islamic
and Pan-Ottoman project, it soon became a constructive ideology. From
there, during World War I, it also began to be promoted back in the
direction of the "Russian Turks."
[9] Azärbaycan, September 25, 1918.
[10] In the end, the Caucasian wars did not spread to Azerbaijani
areas, with the exception of the northernmost, mountainous parts
of Azerbaijan. This was particularly thanks to the fact that the
resistance north of the Caucasian Mountains was fought under the
banner of Sunni Islam, strongly influenced by Islamic mysticism
(Sufism). Occasionally, the north-Caucasian highlanders were supported
by Azerbaijani Sunnis inhabiting the mountainous areas bordering on
Dagestan, which, together with Chechnya and the Cherks lands of the
northwestern Caucasus, was a hotbed of anti-colonial resistance.
[11] Kavkazskiy kalendar na 1854 god (Tiflis: 1853), pp. 352-53.
[12] Attributed to Capt. Pruzhanovsky, representing the Russian
colonial administration in Shusha, Karabakh, 1845, in Kolonialnaja
politika Rossijskogo carizma v Azerbajdžane v 20-60ie gody XIX v.
(Moscow: 1936), Vol. 2, p. 21.
[13] Ibid., pp. 306-07.
[14] Ordinary Azerbaijanis have fought on the side of the Russians,
for example in World War I. At that time, the ranks of the legendary
Caucasian Homeland Cavalry Division (formed in 1914 and known to
its contemporaries as the Savage Division because of its tenacity
and the exotic appearance of the horsemen (Caucasian Muslims)) also
consisted of a Tatar (Azerbaijani) regiment. The regiment was deployed
in fighting against German and Austrian divisions in the western
areas of the Russian Empire. In this connection, it is interesting
that Azerbaijani volunteers from the ranks of the Shi'a joined the
Russian army during the Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878), while some of
their Sunni countrymen allied with the Turks, even going to battle.
[15] As a consequence of this council, the Armenian Apostolic Church
or Gregorian Church (though not the Monophysites) split away from
Byzantine Orthodoxy.
[16] In this regard, the most telling historical document is the
account of the twelfth-century Armenian chronicler Matevos Urhayetsi
(Matthew of Edessa/Urha). The seventeenth-century historian Simon
Lehatsi has interesting things to say about the now nearly forgotten
Armenian-Greek antagonism.
[17] This concerned the ban on carrying weapons, riding a horse,
owning land, holding a position in the state administration, etc. Over
time, however, the restrictions eased. In the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, it was relatively commonplace to encounter Armenians at the
highest levels of state administration-especially in Ottoman cities.
[18] In an effort to limit the influence of the more numerous Greeks,
especially in the towns of Asia Minor and in Constantinople/Istanbul,
the Ottoman sultans did not hesitate to support Armenians (as well
as Jews), who before long began to push the Greeks out of activities
that had traditionally been regarded as the Greeks' domain-trade
and finance.
[19] For more details, see Arman Kirakosian (ed.), The Armenian
Massacres, 1894-1896: U.S. Media Testimony (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2004).
[20] These were immigrants from the ranks of the rebellious Cherkes
(Circassians or Adyghes), Abkhazians, and Abazins who had been
forced by St. Petersburg to emigrate from the northern Caucasus to
the Ottoman Empire.
[21] Anahide Ter Minassian, "Nationalism and Socialism in the
Armenian Revolutionary Movement (1887-1912)," in Ronald G. Suny (ed.),
Transcaucasia, Nationalism and Social Change: Essays in the History
of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia (Ann Arbor: Michigan University
Press, 1996), p. 146.
[22] Ronald G. Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.
104.
[23] Until 1915, western Turkish or Anatolian Armenia was the home of
the vast majority of the Armenian population. According to a census of
the Ottoman Empire in 1914, it had 1,295,000 inhabitants of Armenian
nationality. See Esat Uras, Tarihte Ermeniler ve Ermeni Meselesi
(Istanbul: Belge Yayinlari, 1988), p. 142. According to a count
made by the Armenian Patriarchate in 1913, the number of Armenian
inhabitants in the empire was 1,914,000. See Raymond H. Kevorkian and
Paul B. Paboudjian, Les Arméniens dans l'Empire Ottoman a la vielle
du génocide (Paris: ARHIS, 1992), p. 22. This difference of more than
half a million in the data on the size of the Armenian population of
Turkey on the eve of World War I makes it more difficult to determine
the precise number of Armenian victims.
[24] David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: IB Tauris,
2007), p. 58.
[25] Ibid., p. 60.
[26] Ibid.
[27] The conflict between Armenians and Kurds at the end of the 1890s
turned into an ethnic conflict. Also playing a role was the fear
among Kurdish tribal chiefs of the desire for autonomy or irredentist
aspirations of Armenians who, with the declared support of Russia
and Western countries, were striving for control over territories
that the Kurds themselves claimed.
[28] Attempts at conciliation between Christians and Muslims ended
definitively after the fiasco of the Young Turk Revolution (1908).
While it originally promoted giving the country's Muslim and
Christian communities equal rights, before long-after the failure of
the Pan-Ottoman project-it led to the strengthening of Pan-Turkism
(and partially Pan-Islamism as well) as a state ideology.
[29] This study does not aim to deal with the question of whether
the tragic events of 1915-1916 were or were not a genocide in terms
of international law. Terms such as "genocide" and "massacres" are
used interchangeably and without any prior hidden agenda.
[30] After the debacle of Enver Pasha's Third Army on the Caucasian
front, the tsar's troops reached well into the Anatolian interior. In
early April 1915, on the route of the Russian army in the province
of Van (inhabited by many Armenians), there was a massive uprising.
Thousands of Muslim civilians were murdered. What disturbed Istanbul
even more, however, was the threat that the Van rebellion could spread
to the vast territory of eastern Anatolia, making it relatively easy
for the Russian army to advance farther into the west.
[31] Armenian sources usually cite figures of up to 1.5 million
people. See Vahakn Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide:
Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus
(Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995).
[32] It is not without interest that Armenians regarded Azerbaijanis as
"Turks" (in light of the ethnic-lingual affinity with Anatolian Turks)
long before Azerbaijanis had largely assumed an ethnic-lingual identity
and began to regard themselves as "Turks" or "Azerbaijani Turks."
[33] Works by chroniclers who do not fit in with this image
are virtually unknown in Armenia. Only selected episodes of
Turkish-Armenian coexistence have been accepted. Likewise, there is no
talk of the large role of Kurdish tribes in the massacres and genocide.
[34] The Russo-Turkish Wars in particular were an impulse for
powerful waves of Armenians migrating to Russia. While in 1873, the
Armenian population of the Caucasus was 333,242, in 1886, it stood at
690,615, and by 1916, it had reached 1,211,145. See Svod materialov
dlya issledovaniya ekonomicheskogo byta gosudarstvennykh krestyan
Zakavkazskogo kraya (Tbilisi: 1886), Vol. 2, pp. 234-36.
[35] This Russian view of the inhabitants of the Caucasus is largely
based on a very stereotyped image of the North Caucasian highlander.
[36] Jury Gagemejster, Zakavkazskie ocherki (St. Petersburg: 1845),
pp. 14-15.
[37] Kavkazskiy kalendar na 1854 god (Tiblisi: 1853), p. 360.
[38] In 1845, Captain Pruzhanovsky, a representative of the Russian
colonial administration in the Karabakh city Shusha, quoted from
Kolonialnaya politika Rossijskogo tsarizma v Azerbayjane v 20-60ie
gody XIX v. (Moscow: 1936), Vol. 2, pp. 21-23.
[39] Russkoe slovo, February 1905.
[40] The so-called Armenian-Tatar (Back in Tsarist times, modern-day
Azerbaijanis were called Tatars) War broke out in 1905 as communal
fighting involving Azerbaijanis and Armenians. It hit oil-rich Baku
first and then spread across many regions of the South Caucasus with
mixed Azerbaijani and Armenian populace. According to the dominant
version of these events, the masses of poor Azerbaijanis-provoked by
Russian governors pursuing a classical divide-and-rule policy-attacked
their neighbours, prosperous Armenian craftsmen and traders, whom
they perceived to be unscrupulous exploiters. The first hostilities
between the two ethnic groups claimed nearly 10,000 victims.
[41] In addition to class considerations, this played a decisive role
for Armenian Communists as well as for Armenian nationalists. After
Armenia's defeat in the Turkish-Armenia War (1920), the Armenians
were aware of the structural imbalance of Turkish and Armenian forces
and the inability to avoid a repeat of the Armenian massacres. Thus,
in late 1920, they caused an uprising in Armenia in order to annex
the country to the Soviet state. The Russians were then regarded as
the "lesser of evils." There was also a strong feeling, forcefully
supported during Soviet rule, of having been betrayed by the Western
powers, who had promised Armenia significant territorial gains in
eastern Anatolia at the expense of the defeated Ottoman Empire under
the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), but who never came to the defense of
Armenian interests.
[42] In reality, the entire territory of Armenia was not occupied
until 1921, after the Russian and Armenian Bolsheviks managed to crush
the nationalist uprising in the Zangezur Mountains in the south of
the country, with the cooperation of units of the local Azerbaijani
home defense.
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