Book Review: Russia’s conquest of Azerbaijan by Khaled Ahmed

Daily Times, Pakistan
Jan 20 2008

BOOK REVIEW: Russia’s conquest of Azerbaijan by Khaled Ahmed

On the Religious Frontier: Tsarist Russia and Islam in the Caucasus
By Firouzeh Mostashari
IB Tauris 2006
Pp203; Price £45
Available in bookstores in Pakistan

The book is actually about how the Russians separated a part of
Azerbaijan from Persia and later incorporated it into the Soviet
Union. Under the tsars, the policy was to advance towards the
Caucasus as a kind of civilising mission, a Toynbean formulation of
acceptance of `challenge’ that raises nations to empires, which the
Americans did too in regard to the Red Indians. In actual fact, it
was Russia’s encounter with Islam because the varieties of Christian
faith encountered in Armenia and Georgia were more easily subsumed in
the Orthodox Church and their elites accepted into the Court in St
Petersberg. There was also the long-drawn out war with Turkey with
whom the Muslims of Caucasia identified.

Russia looked at its southern neighbourhood from a number of points
of view. They saw the Caucasus as the border across which other
Europeans were making their colonial encroachments. It also saw the
`savage’ people living there as a challenge for the civilising spirit
of a new Russia given birth by Peter the Great. Orientalists stoked
the imagination as usual and the initial expertise on Muslim Asia was
not very enlightened. For instance, they saw the Caucasian Muslims
from the prism of their relations with Turkey, feeling threatened by
them when the relations were bad and romanticising them when they
were good.

Orientalist N Dubrovin for example thought that Sunnis were good
because they believed they had to obey whoever was in power over them
provided he let them practise shariat. The Shiites were rated `bad’
and as enemies by him because they wanted the tsar to be a Muslim
before they could accept him. This applied to the Transcaucasian
Azerbaijan where the khanates were Turkic but Shiite. The 19th
century Russian orientalists dubbed the Muslims as Tatars,
stereotyping them as lazy, dishonest and conniving. Dubrovin recalls
early British assessment of the Afghan Pakhtun when he sees them
`spending all their time idly when not stealing their neighbour’s
horse’.

Just as the Americans grabbed land belonging to the Red Indians,
Russians first diagnosed the Transcaucasus as `turbulent frontier’,
then set about evolving policy to pacify it. The invasion began in
1804 and ended in 1828 leading to wars with Persia which owned the
region and gave it the honour of deriving its Turkic crown prince
from it. What they invaded were the khanates owing allegiance to the
Persian Shah. The khanates made their job easy by pursuing
internecine quarrels just like the Indian princes did when East India
Company arrived in India. The Gulistan Treaty, which Russia signed
with a defeated Persia in 1813, made over the khanates of Karabakh,
Ganje, Sheki, Shirvan, Derbent and Kuba to Russia, precisely the
region which is today known as Azerbaijan.

Generals ruled the region thereafter with General Ermolov becoming
the virtual ruler, alternating policies of localism with those of
extreme cruelty with great poets like Pushkin immortalising them in
their poetry. The second Russo-Persian War (1826-28) ended in the
Turkmanchai Treaty which gave Russia the khanates of Nakhichevan and
Erevan (later to be the capital of Armenian Soviet Republic) to
complete the laying down of Russia’s boundary with Persia. Defeated
Persia paid war indemnities and gave Russians exclusive rights of
navigation in the Caspian Sea. It also gave Russia the first
extraterritorial rights on its soil, thus accepting its hegemony.

The next governor in the person of General Vorontsov in 1845 was a
Russian hero of the Napoleonic wars. What the region got in the shape
of administration was his gradualist assimilatory policy towards the
conquered territory. His policy it was that sought to integrate the
Caucasian elites into the Russian upper crust in St Petersberg. He
gave land rights to the old elites and allowed landlords to become
civil servants in the Russian government. This pattern became
dominant in the decades to come till the rising Azerbaijani
intelligentsia began to mimic everything Russian, only to become
involved in the struggle for independence and rights later on, more
or less in the same process that was followed by the intelligentsia
in India.

The Brits did not come to settle in India. A few thousand ran India
and got Indians to help them in administration, but in the Caucasus
ordinary Russians migrated and became the `privileged’ lower classes
over the local lower classes but not over the local elites. Thus when
`revolution’ came to the region, it came with the Russians, and the
Azerbaijani intelligentsia gravitated to it. All over Central Asia,
the same kind of development among the local educated class took
place with many sacrifices that the Soviet Union later celebrated.
Hasan Beg Zardabi, HZA Taghiev, Nariman Narimanov and Ali Mardan
Topchibashov led literary and social movements that finally joined
the larger Soviet revolutionary stream in later times.

The anti-colonial backlash in Azerbaijan developed on the basis of
the colonial experience, just as in India the anti-British reaction
most effectively came from the westernised elite. The Russian
intelligentsia was struggling against the tsarist regime for a long
time and it often found itself in solidarity with the Muslims of the
borderlands. The chemistry was bilateral as both wanted strength from
each other. But the Azerbaijani intelligentsia lost its moorings in
the Islamic roots as it advanced towards the modernist concept of
human rights rather than the sharia. This had a long term consequence
after 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up and Azerbaijan found itself
a free republic.

The pan-Islamic vision came from the Caucasus and was centred on the
Khilafat of Turkey, but the leaders who thought of a global Muslim
community were from the Crimean Tatars who actually thought of
pan-Turkism and were not clerical in their outlook. In India it
appealed only to the clergy and Congress and it swayed all the
Muslims. Today the people of Azerbaijan are spiritually separated
from Iran by the weight of their modernist association with the
Soviet Union even though the new Azeri nationalism is hardly
nostalgic about Soviet days.

In 1905 the Muslims of the Caucasus were holding their first Congress
to call for their rights together with the social-democrat Russians.
Religion came to the fore but the rise of the Khilafat Movement kept
Shia Azerbaijan away from it. In the First World War Russia was
arrayed against Turkey and St Petersberg was convinced that the
Caucasian Muslims would not be loyal as soldiers because of their
pro-Turkish sentiments and kept them out of the army. The nationality
policies of the Tsar and then of the Soviet Union under Stalin left a
deep impression on the Muslim consciousness in these regions. Falling
within the Russian Federation, they have not been freed as the other
Muslims living in new republics. *