Book Review 103 

Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition 

By Tadeus::: Swietochowski, Columbia Uni,•ersi(v Press, /995. 

The last centuries of human history bear witness to the generation of havoc 
and carnage brought about by the disintegration of world empires and super­
power that ruled vast areas inhabited by people of different ethnic. religious, 
and national backgrounds. One such event took place in the early period of this 
century: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its downfall left a power vacuum 
in many areas of the Balkan . North Africa and the Middle East. Out of the ashes 
of its ruin, new and independent states emerged. 

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the Soviet Union totally di integrat­
ed and suddenly di appeared from the international scene in a relatively short 
time. As mentioned. history has recorded the gradual decline and final fall of 
great empires. The collapse of the Soviet Union differs from other older 
empires. We will draw a comparison between its disintegration and the fall of 
the older Ottoman Empire. 

There are abundant scholarly and literary analyses indicating that the Ottoman 
Empire underwent a process of gradual dismantling from it initial decline to its 
final collap. e. The Soviet Union, however, underwent an abrupt end to its reign 
and. entered ultimate oblivion without experiencing a prolonged los of vitality. 
This abrupt fall and quick end may be auributed to various factors, from the fail­
ure of economic policies to the yearning for freedom. including the revival of 
ethnic, religious. and national identities. These are the points emphasized by 
Swietochowski's timely book on Russia and Azerbaijan. 

The current wave of world events exerts itself nor only upon the political elite 
but also within academic quarters and on publi hing trends. As the I 979 Iranian 
revolution drew greater attention to Islam and wa followed by the establish­
ment of new departments of Islamic studies and the publication of hundreds of 
books on lhe subject, the collapse of the Soviet Union generated a significant 
amount of in1eres1 and, accordingly, academician and publishing houses 
responded to the growing search to know more about the region. 
Swietochowski's lOOk should be considered a significant contribution to these 
effons. 

It is a widely held observation Lhal the disintegration of Lhe Soviet Union dra­
matically changed and trauma1ized the geopolitical and geocullural landscape of 
the area. Swietochowski's book concentrate specifically on Azerbaijan by 
examining closely the la. t two centuries of this unknown land's history. As the 
title Russia and A:erhaijan: A Borderland in T ransition suggests, the author 
deals with a people whose land is divided between nonh and soud1. He uses 
archival sou,ces, official documents, and numerous books and articles wrillen in 
various languages to inform readers about a land and a people about which Iii­
tie was known before the Soviet Union's downfall. Swietochowski's work 



104 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 14:3 

informs us that Azerbaijan was for centuries of continuous concern to Turkey, 
Iran, and the Russian empire. The influx of Oghuz Turkic tribes to the region in 
the eleventh century resulted in a significant proportion inhabitants being 
Turkic-speaking, which, in turn, caused the gradual replacement of Persian by 
Azeri Turkish. The history of Azerbaijan is one of mixtures and complexities: 
coming under Turkish Muslim rule in the mid-seventh century, succumbing to 
the Mongol invasions during the thirteenth century, and becoming a power base 
for the Shi’ah Safavids with the coming of Shah Ismail to power at the end of 
the fifteenth century (thereby changing the religious map of the region). With 
the Treaty of Gulistan (1812) the Russians began to play a lasting role in 
Azerbaijan. They exploited the Sunni-Shi‘ah tension among Azeris through the 
use of Shi‘ah volunteers (p. 10) against Turkey in 1828-29 and against Shamil’s 
anti-Russian j i f i d  in Daghestan. 

Russian imperialism proved to be very effective in oil-rich Azerbaijan (p. lo), 
which received almost no Russian investment until the mid-nineteenth century. 
Russians extracted huge amounts of oil in Baku; in 1898, Baku’s oil production 
surpassed that of the United States. However, after 1905 this region ceased to be 
a major factor in the oil market as a result of irreversible damage caused by oil 
production and the exhaustion of resources. 

The review asserts that Azerbaijani identity is marked by the values to which 
people of this land surrender (p. 60), as Rasulzade, a leading Azeri intellectual, 
is quoted to have said explicitly: 

With regard to language we are Turks, Turkism is our nationality. With regard to 
religion we are Muslims. Every religion creates among its followers a particular civ- 
ilization, and this civilization generates some form of internationalism. As Muslims 
and Turks we are part of the International of Islam. 
Swietochowski argues (p. 108) that Russia devised a policy designed to dis- 

mantle the bedrock of Azeri identity by promoting “the millat over the umma 
identity, of the secular, rather than the Islamic foundations of communal life, 
and of fragmentation rather than of the Muslim unity.” Islam suffered from the 
ensuing all-out offensive and repression. The Soviet policy against Islam creat- 
ed an atmosphere of terror under which Muslims were ceased observing the five 
pillars of Islam and the teaching of its rites to the younger generation in any 
form. The brutal and pervasive campaign to deconstruct Islamic identity and to 
replace it with a secular and atheist identity resulted, as observed by the author, 
in abandoning “the visible manifestations of Islamic identity such as the obser- 
vance of the five pillars of Islam . . .“ (p. 116). 

Swietochowski also discusses the history of Azerbaijan under the control of 
Iran in the south. According to him, Azeri Turks fell victim to the Persianization 
campaign of Mosaddaq, who carried out a nationalization policy after 1951. As 
part of an accelerated assimilation policy, Azeri Turkish was banned at the 
schools for it “could corrupt a proper Persian accent.” Swietochowski notes that 

Azeri was thus reduced to the status of a spoken idiom with a stigma of social infe- 
riority attached to those who use it. To insist that Azerbaijan had its own national 
language was politically dangerous, and a writer arrested by the secret police was 
forced to deny in front of television cameras that such a language existed. (p. 170) 
Assimilation policies were accelerated further during the 1960s, and Tehran’s 

Persianization effort at the grassroots level intensified. The author draws com- 
parisons between the Russian-controlled north and the Iranian-controlled south 



Book Reviews 105 

of Azerbaijan (p. 173). He argues that "the suppression of Azeri identity in Iran 
had certain parallels albeit different in scope and character, in the Soviet Union. 
Ominous ignals appeared in 1950 with the condemnation of Shamil's role in 
history in a scholarly publication whose title tem1ed him 'Henchman of Sultan's 
Turkey and British Colonizer . "' Despite all these efforts, although loyal 10 Iran, 
during the twentieth century the Azeris managed to retain their own peripheral 
ethnic identity, as expressed by their successful boycott of Iran's constitutional 
referendum on December 2, 1979. 

The startling collapse of the Soviet Union enabled the expression of Azeri 
identity on its own independent soil. Moreover, the old Azeri-Armenian con­
flict, which remained under the rug during Soviet rule, urfaced again in 1988. 
Moscow once more resorted to force to put down senrimencs of independence 
and the revival of Azeri religious and cultural identity in the early 1990s. a cam­
paign that claimed the Jives of many civilian Azerbaijanis. This tragic military 
intervention. which took place in Baku, was approved by tl1e United States State 
Department. In addition, the Western media showed a biased reaction and made 
no references to the hundreds killed by the Russian army's onslaught. 
Swietochowski's articulate analysi of the last two hundred years of troubled 
Azerbaijan ends with an insightful touch on recent developments and their far­
reaching implications for domestic and international politics. A scanning of 
twentieth-century Azerbaijan reveals President Haidar Aliyev's stamp on the 
design and shape of domestic politics. Aliyev's first appearance in power goes 
back to 1969. He was a member of the Politburo until forced to resign in 1987 
by Gorbachev. Aliyev returned to power in 1993 when Abulfaz Echibay was 
toppled by a military coup. 

Swictochowski's valuable and inforn1ative book addresses significant themes 
in the history of Azerbaijan and furnishes the reader with an insight about a 
country that lies at the crossroads of Turkish-Russian-Iranian geopolitical and 
geocultural triangles. 

Talip Kucukcan 
Center for Research in Ethnic Relations 

University of Warwick 
Coventry, England