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  • The Sovietization of Azerbaijan: The South Caucasus in the Triangle of Russia, Turkey, and Iran, 1920–1922 by Jamil Hasanli
  • Heather D. DeHaan
Jamil Hasanli. The Sovietization of Azerbaijan: The South Caucasus in the Triangle of Russia, Turkey, and Iran, 1920–1922. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018. 384 pp. Cloth, $50. ISBN: 978-1607815945.

Jamil Hasanli’s The Sovietization of Azerbaijan is a richly documented study of Azerbaijan on the regional and world stage in the months immediately preceding and following its occupation by the Red Army in 1920. The work closely assesses Azerbaijan’s diminished—and ever diminishing—scope for independent foreign policy initiative in this period. In so doing, the work forcefully depicts the colonial nature of Red Army occupation, which was marked by the expropriation and export of large quantities of local goods, the execution of many Azerbaijani leaders, as well as a form of cultural disregard that alienated the local Muslim population. At the same time, it offers a detailed study of competing Azerbaijani and Soviet objectives for Azerbaijan’s diplomatic endeavors, including divergent concepts of Azerbaijani sovereignty. It also sheds light on regional territorial disputes, Azerbaijani relations to Turkey and Iran, and Soviet attempts to export the Revolution to the East.

This work displays the tremendous skills and wide expertise of its author, who has spent a career studying the history of Azerbaijan and its place in the realm of international relations. A prolific scholar, Jamil Hasanli has published works in English, Russian, Turkish, Persian, and Azerbaijani and integrates scholarly findings from a variety of languages. For this particular study, Hasanli conducted research in archives in the United States, Georgia, Russia, France, and Azerbaijan, also making use of published archival documents, [End Page 180] diplomatic memoirs and diaries. The study thus incorporates a broad range of voices and perspectives, including those of pro-Communist and émigré Azerbaijani political figures, British and German officials, and Soviet party and state figures. This resulting narrative captures the messiness of international affairs at the time—the many competing interests both between and within different states.

This complex study eschews falsely simple, linear narratives of sovietization—these latter, emphasizes Hasanli, being a weakness of much of the existing literature on this subject. The process whereby Azerbaijan lost its independence was non-linear, marked by back-and-forthing between competing factions within Soviet and Azerbaijani officialdom, as well as by the contingencies of international events. For instance, both Communist Azerbaijanis and many Soviet officials regarded the Red Army occupation of Azerbaijan as a stepping-stone to exporting the Revolution to the East, and particularly to Iran. Yet, Azerbaijani and Soviet advocates of this policy did not agree on their strategies for the export of the Revolution—with which revolutionaries to partner, what kind of revolution to advance, and how to deal with advocacy for Persian merchants deprived of their Baku holdings. Further, some leaders in Moscow sought to use “Red Gilan” as a bargaining chip in negotiations for British withdrawal from Iran, clearly prioritizing state interests over those of revolution. Was Azerbaijan a gateway to the East, or simply a pawn in the Soviet pursuit of control over oil or leverage against British interests? As Hasanli demonstrates, sovietization needs to be interpreted through all of these lenses, as the messy result of anti-British, imperial-revolutionary, and Azerbaijani Marxist ambitions.

Hasanli’s study of sovietization likewise sidesteps simplistic binaries that pit Russia as colonizer against Azerbaijan as colonized, even as he meticulously documents the colonial nature of the Red Army occupation, along with Soviet Russia’s subordination of Azerbaijani interests to its own geopolitical exigencies. He documents frequent partnerships across ethnic and political divides, both between and within states operating in the southern Caucasus. As he indicates, groups represented each of the major peoples of the Caucasus (Georgians, Armenians, Turks, Iranians, and Azerbaijanis) partnered with Soviet Russia at some time or another, if not out of ideological affinity then out of shared geopolitical interests. Loyalties between them were also contingent: for instance, the Kemalists alternatively betrayed and supported Azerbaijan, first accepting its loss of sovereignty and then defending its claim to Nakhichevan—shifts that reflected Turkey...

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