Azerbaijan and the revolutions in Persia and Turkey

The revolutionary period that had ended in Russia proper by mid-1907 extended longer in Azerbaijan, which was rocked by the shock waves of new upheavals. These took place first in Persia, then in Turkey, all in the context of cultures and societies with which the Azerbaijanis identified themselves incomparably closer than with Russia.

From the Azerbaijani perspective there were two meanings to the term Persia: One denoted the large, multiethnic kingdom linked to Azerbaijan by the ties of religion, cultural heritage, and, until the nineteenth century, common history. The other meaning was narrower and connoted Persian Azerbaijan, the country of common language and closest ethnic kinship. The bonds between the two parts of the divided land had not dissolved with the Russian conquest; in some respects they grew even stronger with the coming of the industrial age. “Travel back and forth between Azerbaijan and Russia was one of the important factors in the progress of civilization in Azerbaijan,” reminisced a prominent native of Tabriz. “Russian commercial and oil wealth attracted the people of Iran. They brought back money, chiefly, but also some knowledge.” While the merchants and shipowners from Baku carried on the bulk of the Russian trade with Persian Azerbaijan, Azerbaijani-speaking workers from Persia's Tabriz province regularly migrated north of the Araxes River border. The latter accounted for a large proportion of the labor force in Eastern Transcaucasia – 15 percent and 12 percent in the guberniias of Baku and Elizavetpol, respectively.