The Sovietization of Azerbaijan: The South Caucasus in the Triangle of Russia, Turkey and Iran, 1920-1922.

• Author: Tabak, Husrev

The Sovietization of Azerbaijan: The South Caucasus in the Triangle of Russia, Turkey and Iran, 1920-1922

By Jamil Hasanli

Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2018, 470 pages, $ 29.94 (Hardcover) ISBN: 9781607815938

The Sovietization of Azerbaijan is a political history of the occupation of the sovereign Azerbaijan state in 1920 by Soviet Russia, and of the establishment of Soviet bureaucratic and administrative control and structure in the country thereafter. The book, however, offers more than that--it provides an elaborate history of the Sovietization of Georgia and Armenia, Soviet Russia's East policy, its efforts in northern Iran for the establishment of a Soviet regime, the diplomatic victories of the national movement in Anatolia, the Treaties of Kars and Moscow, and the implications of these treaties for the South Caucasus states.

The book starts with a section on the history of the political geography of Azerbaijan since the early 18th century, particularly focusing on the early 1900s. The section principally highlights the burgeoning of the sentiments and political organization for an independent Azerbaijan, and the role that Armenian aggression and oil politics played in this. Here, Hasanli clearly explicates the intricacies of regional politics, particularly after World War I, among the Ottomans, the Azeris, the Russians and the British regarding Baku oil and the Armenian claims for territorial control and statehood in the southern Caucasus. The discussion on how independent Azerbaijan came to be occupied by the Red Army in late April 1920, and the national parliament's handing over of the government to the Muslim communists (the Communist Party of Azerbaijan) is exemplary, and elegantly portrays the establishment of the Soviet regime in Azerbaijan thereafter.

The subsequent discussion details the USSR's efforts to consolidate the Soviet regime in Azerbaijan, and how Soviet Russia oversaw Soviet Azerbaijan's relations with independent Georgia and Armenia. The book eloquently demonstrates the local dynamics at play in the transformation of Azerbaijan's existing administrative and socio-economic structure into a communist-party-ruled administrative, political and socio-economic order, and the conflicting communication taking place between the center (Soviet Russia) and the periphery (Soviet Azerbaijan) in fortifying communist rule in the country. Hasanli provides valuable examples of the everyday influences and...