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Azerbaijan Within the Soviet Union
The invasion of 1920 began a seventy-one-year period under
total political and economic control of the state that became the
Soviet Union in 1922. The borders and formal status of Azerbaijan
underwent a period of change and uncertainty in the 1920s and
1930s, and then they remained stable through the end of the
Soviet period in 1991.
Determination of Borders and Status
In late 1921, the Russian leadership dictated the creation of
a Transcaucasian federated republic, composed of Armenia,
Azerbaijan, and Georgia, which in 1922 became part of the newly
proclaimed Soviet Union as the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated
Socialist Republic (TSFSR). In this large new republic, the three
subunits ceded their nominal powers over foreign policy,
finances, trade, transportation, and other areas to the unwieldy
and artificial authority of the TSFSR. In 1936 the new "Stalin
Constitution" abolished the TSFSR, and the three constituent
parts were proclaimed separate Soviet republics.
In mid-1920 the Red Army occupied Nakhichevan, an Azerbaijani
enclave between Armenia and northwestern Iran. The Red Army
declared Nakhichevan a Soviet socialist republic with close ties
to Azerbaijan. In early 1921, a referendum confirmed that most of
the population of the enclave wanted to be included in
Azerbaijan. Turkey also supported this solution. Nakhichevan's
close ties to Azerbaijan were confirmed by the Russo-Turkish
Treaty of Moscow and the Treaty of Kars among the three
Transcaucasian states and Turkey, both signed in 1921.
Lenin and his successor, Joseph V. Stalin, assigned
pacification of Transcaucasia and delineation of borders in the
region to the Caucasian Bureau of the Russian Communist Party
(Bolshevik). In 1924, despite opposition from many Azerbaijani
officials, the bureau formally designated Nakhichevan an
autonomous republic of Azerbaijan with wide local powers, a
status it retains today.
The existence of an Azerbaijani majority population in
northern Iran became a pretext for Soviet expansion. In 1938
Soviet authorities expelled Azerbaijanis holding Iranian
passports from the republic. During World War II, Soviet forces
occupied the northern part of Iran. The occupiers stirred an
irredentist movement fronted by the Democratic Party of
Azerbaijan, which proclaimed the communist Autonomous Government
of Azerbaijan at Tabriz at the end of 1945. The Western powers
forced the Soviet Union to withdraw from Iran in 1946. Upon the
subsequent collapse of the autonomous government, the Iranian
government began harsh suppression of the Azerbaijani culture.
From that time until the late 1980s, contacts between
Azerbaijanis north and south of the Iranian-Soviet border were
severely limited.
Data as of March 1994
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