Azerbaijan People's Government

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Azerbaijan People's Government was proclaimed in Tabriz in 1945, and for just over a year it controlled a slice of northern Iran that Soviet forces had occupied since the early days of World War Two. A short-lived, unrecognized secessionist state, it lasted from November 1945 to December 1946. Its story is one of Cold War maneuvering, ethnic politics, oil ambitions, and the swift collapse of a Soviet-backed experiment. How did a militia take over an entire Iranian province in a matter of days? Who was pulling the strings from Baku and Moscow? And why did the people of Tabriz, who had so recently welcomed the new order, burn their own native-language textbooks when it fell?

• 2. Occupation and Origins

  ›

  In August 1941, British and Soviet troops jointly occupied Iran to keep supply lines open for Soviet war material. Soviet forces entered from the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijan SSR; British and Indian forces came in from Iraq. On the 16th of September, the British forced Reza Shah to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who would rule until 1979.

  With Reza Shah gone, Soviet troops moved into Tabriz and northwestern Iran, holding the region for military and strategic reasons. The ground had been prepared, in a sense, by Reza Shah himself. He had banned the Azerbaijani language in schools, theatrical performances, religious ceremonies, and book publishing, one restriction following another in rapid succession. Those accumulated grievances gave the Soviets something to work with.

  The Democratic Party of Azerbaijan, known by its Persian abbreviation as the Firqah-i Dimukrat, publicly announced its formation in Tabriz on the 3rd of September 1945. It was headed by Ja'far Pishevari, a veteran communist and long-time leader of the revolutionary movement in Gilan. The party was created by direct order of Joseph Stalin. Lavrenti Beria held nominal oversight, but delegated practical control to Mir Jafar Baghirov, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan in Baku. Money and weapons flowed in from the USSR. Stalin's core objective was an oil concession in Iranian Azerbaijan, and the new party was a vehicle to apply pressure.

• 3. The Coup That Took Three Days

  ›

  At its first congress in September 1945, the Azerbaijani Democratic Party authorized the creation of a peasant's militia. That militia moved with striking speed. On the 18th of November 1945, it launched a bloodless coup. By the 21st of November, just three days later, it had captured every remaining government post in the province. Iranian Azerbaijan became, in the language of the time, an autonomous republic under the direction of a 39-member national executive committee.

  The Soviet army made the takeover possible by blocking the Iranian army from intervening. The Tudeh party, the main communist organization in Iran, dissolved its Azerbaijan chapter and ordered its members to join the new Azerbaijani Democratic Party, consolidating the left-wing base under a single, Soviet-aligned structure.

  Real power appears to have rested with Mohammed Biriya, who served as both Minister of Propaganda and head of the local secret police. Pishevari led the government formally, but Biriya's dual role over information and internal security placed him at the nerve center of the new state. A revival of Azerbaijani literary language was promoted during this period, with writers, journalists, and teachers brought in from the Azerbaijan SSR to support the effort.

• 4. Soviet Calculations and U.S. Pushback

  ›

  Declassified documents confirm that the Pishevari government was formed by direct orders of Stalin. The broader prize was clear: Stalin wanted to leverage the situation into an oil concession in Iranian Azerbaijan. A Soviet-Iranian oil agreement had been concluded under duress in March 1946, granting the Soviets 51 percent ownership and effective control of northern oil resources.

  The United States moved to counter this. American support helped Iran lodge complaints with the UN Security Council, addressed in Resolution 3 and Resolution 5. On the 11th of September 1947, U.S. ambassador George V. Allen publicly condemned the use of intimidation and coercion by foreign governments to secure commercial concessions in Iran, and promised full American backing for Iran's right to decide freely about its own natural resources.

  That support proved decisive. Following the election of a new Majlis, the newly elected deputies refused to ratify the Soviet-Iranian oil agreement. On the 22nd of October 1947, the vote was 102 to 2 against ratification. The oil concession Stalin had maneuvered to obtain never materialized.

• 5. Collapse and Its Aftermath

  ›

  On the 13th of June 1946, Pishevari signed an agreement with the Central Government in Tehran. He agreed to abandon the autonomous republic, relinquish the ministries and premiership, and fold the parliament into a provincial council under the existing Iranian Constitution. The agreement signaled the Soviet Union's recognition that its position was untenable.

  By mid-December 1946, the Iranian army, backed by the United States and Britain, reentered Tabriz. The government collapsed on the 11th of December. Pishevari and his cabinet fled to the Soviet Union. Christopher Sykes, who witnessed the army's return, wrote that he had seen such enthusiasm among crowds only once before, in France in 1944.

  The collapse was violent on multiple fronts. Before the army arrived, the people of Tabriz rose and executed Democratic Party officials they could find. Approximately 500 supporters of the Ferqeh were killed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas offered a sharply different account of what followed: he claimed that while the Red Army had been on its best behavior in Azerbaijan, the Iranian Army behaved as an occupying force, burning peasants' beards, brutalizing women, plundering houses, and stealing livestock. Absentee landlords then demanded both current rents and unpaid arrears from the Pishevari period, pressing further hardship onto peasant households. Pishevari's forces had also taken livestock and grain when they withdrew, compounding the damage. Azerbaijani students publicly burned their native-language textbooks. Scholar Tadeusz Swietochowski noted that the mass of the population had not been ready for even regional self-government if it carried the taint of separatism.

  Ja'far Pishevari died in a car accident in Baku in 1947. Prime Minister Kordary was imprisoned by the Shah for many years before being released through the efforts of his brother Kazem Kordary. In Mahabad, the leaders of the companion Kurdish Republic were tried, sentenced to death, and hanged in Chwarchira Square in the center of the city in 1947.