Azerbaijan's history: a name that crossed the Aras in 1918

Who ruled north of the Aras before Russia

The earliest evidence of settlement in the territory belongs to the Guruchay culture of Azykh Cave, in the late Stone Age. The rock art at Gobustan was inscribed by UNESCO in 2007 as a cultural landscape.

South of the Aras the Medes built an empire between 900 and 700 BC that the Achaemenids absorbed around 550 BC. The name the modern state carries begins there. Atropates was a Persian satrap of Media under the Achaemenids, reinstated by Alexander the Great, and his name, probably Median and meaning "protected by the holy fire", passed through Middle Persian Āturpātākān and New Persian Āzarbāydjān into the form used now. For most of the two thousand years that followed, the name belonged to the region around Tabriz. Historians and geographers usually called the land north of the river Arran and Shirvan.

How Caucasian Albania passed to Muslim rule

North of the river the recorded state is Caucasian Albania. The Sasanian Empire made it a vassal in 252, and King Urnayr adopted Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century. It kept its monarchy for centuries under a Sasanian military governor who held most real authority. The Arab conquest of Persia brought it under nominal Muslim rule in the first half of the seventh century, and the Umayyads crushed the last Christian resistance, led by King Juansher, in 667.

Local dynasties filled the gap as the Abbasid Caliphate weakened. From the start of the eleventh century Oghuz Turks migrating from Central Asia settled the territory, and the Seljuks arrived by 1067. The Turkic speech they brought gradually replaced Old Azeri, an Iranian language, and became the ancestor of modern Azerbaijani. Under Seljuk rule the poets Nizami Ganjavi and Khaqani wrote in Persian, and Persian kept its hold on literature north of the Aras into the nineteenth century.

The Shirvanshahs, a dynasty of Arab origin that became Persianised, ruled Shirvan with a high degree of autonomy from 861. Baku is first mentioned in 885, and by the eleventh century it belonged to the Shirvanshahs, who made it their capital in the twelfth. The oldest part of their palace in Baku dates from the eleventh century, and the walled city was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 2000.

Why the Safavids made the region Shia

In 1501 the Safavid dynasty of Iran subdued the Shirvanshahs, and over the next century converted the formerly Sunni population to Shia Islam, as it did in Iran itself. The founder of the dynasty, Shah Ismail, wrote poetry in Azerbaijani and is known, in the Foreign Policy Research Institute's account, as the father of its modern literature. In 1538 Tahmasp I deposed the Shirvanshahs outright and made Shirvan a Safavid province.

The religious map drawn then has lasted. Britannica's current figures put the population at more than three-fifths Shia and about a third Sunni. Ottoman armies occupied the territory during the war of 1578 to 1590 and much of it again from 1722 to 1736, and Peter the Great took Baku in 1723, returning it to Persia in 1735. Each occupation ended, and the land stayed under Iranian rule from the Safavids into the nineteenth century.

How Russia moved the border to the Aras

After Nader Shah died in 1747 the territory broke into khanates, among them Erivan, Nakhchivan and Talysh, whose rulers were vassals of the Iranian shah. Russia turned on them at the start of the nineteenth century. Its troops sacked Ganja in 1804 and captured Baku for the last time in 1806. The Treaty of Gulistan of 1813 gave Russia most of the khanates, and a second war ended with the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828, which took Erivan, Nakhchivan and the rest of Talysh and fixed the border between the two empires on the Aras.

The line divided a population that shared a language and, largely, a faith, and it put the historical Azerbaijan of Tabriz on the Iranian side. The Foreign Policy Research Institute estimated in 2019 that only about a third of the world's Azerbaijanis live in the Republic of Azerbaijan and that most of the rest live in Iran. Britannica counted about 13 million Azerbaijanis abroad at the end of the twentieth century, most of them in Iran. The government in Baku speaks of 50 million Azerbaijanis worldwide, a figure the other sources here do not repeat.

North of the river Iranian culture kept its hold for most of the nineteenth century. Shia and Sunni intellectuals in Baku, Ganja and Tiflis read and wrote Persian, and a separate Azerbaijani national identity took shape only towards its end. By 1845 Azerbaijani literature was being taught at the university in Saint Petersburg, and schools in Baku, Ganja and Shaki taught it by the middle of the century.

What oil made of Baku under the tsars

Oil had been gathered on the Absheron Peninsula for centuries. By the fifteenth century lamp oil came from surface wells, and in 1803 Haji Kasimbey Mansurbekov dug two wells into the sea at Bibi-Heybat, 18 and 30 metres from the shore, which a storm destroyed in 1825. In 1846 the engineer Nikolay Alekseev used a percussion drill to reach oil 21 metres down at Bibi-Heybat, thirteen years before Edwin Drake struck oil in Pennsylvania.

Commercial extraction began in 1872. Robert Nobel arrived in March 1873, the Nobel brothers founded their production company in 1877 and Branobel in 1879, and the same family commissioned Zoroastr, built in Sweden in 1877 and described as the first successful oil tanker. By 1890 the Caspian carried 345 tankers. In 1901 Baku produced 11 million tons, more than half the oil produced in the world that year, from about 1,900 wells within six square miles. Foreign capital owned most of it: on the eve of the First World War three companies held 86% of the industry's equity and controlled 60% of production.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute describes three decades of growth in Baku that also fed inequality and ethnic tension. Strikes and ethnic violence during the revolution of 1905 cut output, and Armenian and Azerbaijani militias fought across the South Caucasus between 1905 and 1907. The Foreign Policy Research Institute argues that those clashes, which Russian authorities eventually ended, were what pushed Azerbaijanis to organise politically. Production had fallen to 65,000 barrels a day by 1918.

Why the Musavat republic borrowed an Iranian name

The Russian Empire's collapse in 1917 left the South Caucasus to govern itself. A Transcaucasian parliament, the Sejm, began work in Tiflis in February 1918 with 125 deputies, 30 of them from the Muslim Musavat party, and none of its members at first sought independence. Baku went its own way. Between 30 March and 2 April 1918 Armenian Dashnak militias, with Bolshevik backing, fought the city's Muslims, and between 3,000 and 12,000 Muslims were killed in what became known as the March Days. A Bolshevik-led Baku Commune took the city. Victor Serge's Bolshevik account of the same weeks describes a Muslim rising put down by the Soviet.

In May 1918 Georgia left the federation on a German offer of protection, and it was dissolved on 26 May. The Muslim faction of the Sejm constituted itself as a National Council and on 28 May, still in Tiflis, proclaimed the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. Its charter claimed "the southern and eastern parts of Transcaucasia" and promised equal civil and political rights regardless of ethnic origin, religion, class, profession or sex. With Baku in Bolshevik hands, Ganja became the temporary capital. Azerbaijani units and the Ottoman army took Baku in September 1918, and the city's Armenians suffered reprisals for the killings of March.

Tehran objected to the name at once. Iranian newspapers and Baku's press argued over it for most of a year, and Iranian writers treated it as a pan-Turkist device for detaching Tabriz. In Tabriz itself the Democrat leader Mohammad Khiabani renamed the province Azadistan. The Baku government answered by using "Caucasian Azerbaijan" in documents for foreign readers, and it made no claim south of the river. The two readings of the name survive in the sources. Wikipedia's account says the name had belonged exclusively to the Iranian region before 1918; the Foreign Policy Research Institute describes an older, loosely bounded region spanning the river.

What the parliament did before the Red Army came

The parliament opened in December 1918 and the republic's government answered to it. Musavat formed the largest faction, and 21 of the 120 seats were Armenian, with Russian, Polish, German and Jewish deputies beside them. It held 145 sessions, discussed more than 270 draft laws and adopted 230. Women voted on the same terms as men, two years before women in the United States, sixteen before Turkey and fifty-three before Switzerland. Baku State University opened on 1 September 1919, and 100 students were sent abroad on state funds.

The republic's symbols date from these months. The first regular army unit, a Special Army Corps of 5,000, was formed on 26 June 1918, and the blue, red and green flag was adopted on 9 November 1918. A delegation met Woodrow Wilson in Paris on 28 May 1919, the republic's first anniversary. Wilson told it the Azerbaijani question could not be settled before the Russian one, and the Allied Supreme Council extended de facto recognition only on 12 January 1920. The Foreign Policy Research Institute calls the state "the Muslim world's first parliamentary republic". Population estimates run from about 2,750,000 in 1918, the institute's figure, to around 3 million in Wikipedia's.

How Bolshevik troops ended the republic

Lenin wanted Baku's oil for the Soviet state. On 27 April 1920 the parliament received a Communist ultimatum and voted to hand over power to avoid bloodshed, over the objections of Mammad Amin Rasulzade and others, and the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was established on 28 April 1920. Wikipedia gives that date for the occupation; the Foreign Policy Research Institute dates the Red Army's seizure of Baku to 20 April. Resistance flared in Ganja the following month, and as many as 20,000 Azerbaijani soldiers died opposing the reconquest.

How Soviet rule redrew Azerbaijan's borders and alphabet

The Soviet state fixed the map that Azerbaijan still argues over. The Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921 made the short-lived Republic of Aras into the Nakhchivan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, an exclave of Azerbaijan separated from it by Armenian territory. In July 1921 the Bolshevik Caucasus Bureau voted four to three to assign Nagorno-Karabakh to Soviet Armenia, then reversed itself the next day and left it within Azerbaijan. Historians still dispute why. In 1923 the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast was created with a population that was 94% Armenian.

The alphabet changed twice under Soviet rule and once more afterwards. Azerbaijani was written in the Perso-Arabic script until 1929, in a Latin alphabet from 1929 to 1938 and in Cyrillic from 1938 to 1991, by Wikipedia's dates; Britannica gives 1939 for the Cyrillic switch and 1992 for the return to Latin. Speakers in Iran kept the Perso-Arabic script throughout, so the river divided a written language as well. Azerbaijani became the official language of the Soviet republic only in 1956.

Oil kept Baku central to Moscow's plans. Azerbaijan produced 23.5 million tonnes in 1940, a record that stood until 2005. Britain and France drew up plans in 1939 and 1940 to bomb the Baku fields while the Soviet Union was supplying Germany, and the Wehrmacht's Operation Edelweiss later aimed at them. About 681,000 people went to the front between 1941 and 1945 from a republic of 3.4 million, and some 250,000 were killed, according to Wikipedia's figures; the government's own account puts the numbers at about 700,000 and more than 300,000. The first offshore well at Neft Daşları, the Oil Rocks, was spudded on 24 August 1949 on a causeway built partly on sunken ships.

Union-republic status turned out to matter. Azerbaijan became a full union republic in 1936, and the Foreign Policy Research Institute argues that because the Bolsheviks had conquered it as a sovereign state they could not deny its nationhood. That paper status became independence in 1991: all fifteen union republics became sovereign states automatically, and territories without the status, such as Chechnya and Abkhazia, did not, even where they fought for it.

Why Azerbaijan calls its independence a restoration

The last Soviet years reopened the questions of Karabakh and of the Aras border. On 20 February 1988 the regional soviet of Nagorno-Karabakh voted to join Armenia. Britannica dates Azerbaijan's declaration of sovereignty to 23 September 1989. On 31 December 1989 crowds led by the Popular Front tore down the Soviet border fences along the Aras with Iran, an event the country now marks as World Azerbaijanis Solidarity Day. On 20 January 1990 Soviet troops entered Baku and killed more than 130 civilians, and the date is kept as a day of national mourning.

What followed was framed as a return to 1918. In 1990 the Supreme Council dropped "Soviet Socialist" from the republic's name and restored the Democratic Republic's flag, which a law of 5 February 1991 made the national flag. The Supreme Council declared the restoration of independence on 30 August 1991, and on 18 October 1991 adopted the Constitutional Act on State Independence. The government's own account states that the act referred to the declaration of 28 May 1918 and proclaimed the new state the legal successor of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. A referendum confirmed independence in December 1991.

The 1918 republic now supplies most of the civic calendar.

Baku's central metro station was renamed for 28 May, and Rasulzade's portrait went onto the new currency. The Constitution adopted by referendum on 12 November 1995, in force from 27 November 1995, opens with the people "continuing the traditions of many centuries of their Statehood".

The early independent years were unstable. The elected president Abulfaz Elchibey fell to a military insurrection led by Colonel Surat Huseynov in 1993, and on 15 June 1993 the Supreme Council elected Heydar Aliyev, the former leader of Soviet Azerbaijan, its chairman. On 20 September 1994 the government and a group of foreign companies signed the production-sharing agreement for the Azeri, Chirag and deep-water Gunashli fields, known as the Contract of the Century, and the Baku to Tbilisi to Ceyhan pipeline opened on 13 July 2006.

What the Karabakh wars did to the map

Ownership of Nagorno-Karabakh is contested between Armenians and Azerbaijanis, and this catalogue records both positions without adjudicating between them. Azerbaijan's position is that the region is its territory under the Soviet borders that became international ones in 1991, and four United Nations Security Council resolutions, the first adopted on 30 April 1993, demanded "the immediate withdrawal of all Armenian forces from all occupied territories of Azerbaijan". The Armenian majority of the region held that it had voted to leave, first for Armenia and then for independence.

How Karabakh Armenians voted to leave Azerbaijan

The regional vote of February 1988 turned into war as the Soviet Union came apart. The Sumgait and Baku pogroms were directed against Armenians, and the Gugark pogrom and the Khojaly massacre against Azerbaijanis. A referendum boycotted by the region's Azerbaijani population returned 99.89% for independence on an 82.2% turnout, and the self-declared republic proclaimed its independence in early 1992. No state recognised it.

Full-scale fighting began in early 1992. At Khojaly in February 1992 the dead were never counted exactly; conservative estimates place them at 485, and the Azerbaijani authorities' figure is 613 civilians. Armenian forces took Shusha on 8 May 1992 and, in 1993, seven Azerbaijani-majority districts outside the enclave. A Russian-brokered ceasefire was signed in May 1994. By then about 30,000 people had been killed, about 724,000 Azerbaijanis had been expelled from Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts, and between 300,000 and 500,000 Armenians had been displaced. Armenian forces held 14 to 16% of Azerbaijan's territory, by Wikipedia's reckoning, and the talks mediated by the OSCE Minsk Group produced no treaty over the next twenty-six years.

How the region returned to Azerbaijani control

Fighting resumed on 27 September 2020 and ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire on 9 November 2020, under which Armenia gave up military control of the region and Russian peacekeepers were deployed for five years. Azerbaijan marks the end of that war as Victory Day. The Lachin corridor, the road link to Armenia, was blockaded from December 2022. An Azerbaijani offensive in September 2023 ended the self-declared republic, and by October more than 100,000 of the region's roughly 120,000 Armenians had left. Azerbaijan has kept 20 September as State Sovereignty Day since 2024.

The two states have since filed cases against each other at the International Court of Justice, each alleging ethnic cleansing. Negotiators announced a peace text in March 2025, and the leaders of the two countries signed a joint declaration committing to a peace deal in Washington on 8 August 2025.