Window on Eurasia: Moscow Increasingly Anxious about Southern (Iranian) Azerbaijan

Paul Goble

Vienna, October 4 – Growing tensions between Tehran and the West over Iran’s nuclear program, increasing instability across the Caucasus, and President Vladimir Putin’s own upcoming visit to Tehran for a Caspian Sea summit are prompting Moscow officials to focus on Southern Azerbaijan and its possible role in the event of a war.
Southern Azerbaijan is the historical term for the regions of northwestern Iran that are populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis who are closely related to the titular nationality of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the North even though some of its members are closely integrated into Iranian society.
Although there is no accurate census information on their numbers, Azerbaijanis are thought to form roughly a third of the Iranian population overall – some 30 million people – and to constitute a slightly greater share of the residents of the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Over the last two centuries, the Russian state and the Iranian one have engaged in intense struggles for influence and control of this region, but during intervals between these struggles, both have preferred to speak and especially act as if the issue did not even exist.
(For a useful survey of this complicated and generally neglected issue and a bibliography of other works, see David Nissman’s The Soviet Union and Iranian Azerbaijan: The Use of Nationalism for Political Penetration, Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.)
Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, not only Moscow and Tehran but also Baku, the capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan, have generally continued this pattern at the official level, clearly having concluded that even talking about this “divided nation” could lead to instability and reprisals.
But now that calculation may be changing. On October 1, the Moscow weekly Profil’ published an article by Sergei Lopatnikov on the conflict between the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and the United States and Great Britain, on the other, over Southern Azerbaijan in 1946 (http://www.profil.ru/items/?item=24143).
During World War II, as Lopatnikov recounts, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly occupied Iran in order to prevent it from falling under German influence. As the war was approaching its end, the Soviets set up an Azerbaijani Peoples Republic in a bid to retain and extend Moscow’s influence toward the Persian Gulf.
Using this institution as leverage, the Soviet government forced the Iranian authorities to promise to supply the USSR with five million tons of oil a year, a flow that would then not go to the Western powers and thus something that constituted a major geopolitical as well as economic prize.
According to Lopatnikov, US President Harry Truman pressed by the British threatened Stalin with the possible use of nuclear weapons if the Soviet dictator did not withdraw from Iranian Azerbaijan and give up this concession. Truman’s threat worked, the Soviets pulled out, and the Iranians then refused to honor the Soviet-Iranian oil deal.
Lopatnikov says that all this constitutes “an instructive history” of what he says is a very dangerous reality: The United States and its allies, he says, were ready to begin “a world war” in order to ensure that they and not Moscow have access to five million tons of oil a year.
Obviously, he concludes, ”Oil is a [very] special elixir indeed.”
Undoubtedly, most people reading Lopatnikov’s article would likely consider it to be simply another example of a current Moscow theme:Washington is doing what it is in the Middle East simply because of oil and not for any broader or more politically defensible agenda.
But in a subsequent article in Baku’s Ekho newspaper, a leading Azerbaijani political commentator suggests that Lopatnikov’s article is far more important because it shows that Moscow officials are now thinking about Southern Azerbaijan and its possible impact in the event of a war (http://www.echo-az.com/politica05.shtml).
Nurani argues that Lopatkin’s essay is full of mistakes of both fact and interpretation. And he suggests two of the latter are especially serious and even indicative of how some Russian officials and Russian analysts may be thinking about an issue few of them have much knowledge about.
On the one hand, the Baku commentator writes, Lopatnikov fails to understand that the West took action in Iran not so much in order to gain access to the oil but rather as part of its emerging strategy of containing communism by preventing wherever possible Soviet expansionism.
And on the other, Nurani says, Lopatnikov simply ignores what how Stalin viewed the situation in Southern Azerbaijan at that time. “At the very least,” one should remember that in 1946, Moscow was “seriously frightened” by “ national resistance in [newly-annexed] Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia, and the Baltic countries.”
Consequently, Nurani continues, many of them and “not without foundation” were seriously concerned” that Moscow “united” Southern Azerbaijan with the Soviet Union, there was a genuine possibility that “both the Caucasus and Central Asia would ‘blow up.’”
Indeed, he suggests, such fears played an equally large role in Stalin’s decision-making as did any threat that Truman or other Western leaders may have made. And that kind of calculation, one not mentioned by Lopatkin but probably the reason his article was commissioned, provides a clue to how Moscow may proceed in the current crisis.
Beyond any doubt, Nurani says, the Profil’ article shows that Moscow once again is “seriously concerned about ‘the Southern Azerbaijani factor” – “or more precisely about that role which the national movement in Southern Azerbaijan could play” as the current crisis around Tehran’s nuclear program plays itself out.
And Nurani suggests that the Kremlin “is concerned that the Azerbaijanis in Iran could play the very same role that the Baltic peoples did in the USSR” and lead to the disintegration of Iran into its ethnic component parts, a development that would seriously limit Moscow’s ability to expand its influence in the Middle East..
But obviously Moscow has even greater fears: If the 30 million ethnic Azerbaijanis of Iran should ever be linked to the eight million people living in the Republic of Azerbaijan, that would change the balance of power in a region much closer to Russia’s borders – and change it in ways that would not be in Russia’s favor.
Thus, Nurani concludes, Moscow has every reason to work to moderate the current crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program, doing what it can to prevent a war lest that lead to the disintegration of Iran with all the consequences such a development would have for the Russian Federation.
Although Nurani makes no mention of this in his article, the next occasion where Russian influence is likely to be brought to bear on Tehran will be when Putin arrives in the Iranian capital later this month for a summit of the heads of the Caspian littoral states (see http://www.rosbalt.ru/2007/03/418844.html).
That meeting, which is supposed to focus on the delimitation of the seabed of that inland body of water, now takes on a more important dimension as the Russian president seeks to maintain his stance as a friend of the Muslim world while seeking a resolution of the crisis that could, via Southern Azerbaijan, lead to one of his worst nightmares.

Window on Eurasia: Putin Likely to Disband Presidential Plenopotentiary System

Paul Goble

Vienna, October 4 –Vladimir Putin is likely to disband the system of Federal Districts headed by Presidential Plenopotentiaries he created in 2000 because it has achieved all the goals he set for it and because he will soon be leaving the presidency himself.
In an essay posted online today, Tat’yana Stanovaya, a specialist on this system, points out that two of these posts are now vacant – given the elevation of Dmitriy Kozak from the Southern Federal District to minister of regional development – and the transfer of Kamil Iskhakov from the Far Eastern Federal District to be Kozak’s deputy.
Although she acknowledges that these positions have not been vacant long, Stanovaya argues that the entire system has exhausted itself and notes that sources in the Office of the President have told her that Putin is likely to scrap it before the end of his term (http://www.politcom.ru/print.php?id=5176).
Putin created the seven federal districts headed by presidential representatives shortly after he took office to rein in regional leaders, bring regional legislation into line with federal laws, and weaken the political base of former Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov who was backed by regionally centered Fatherland-All Russia movement.
Very quickly, Stanovaya suggests, the polpredy, many of whom had military or security backgrounds, achieved these goals on behalf of Putin’s broader project of constructing a tight “power vertical” with himself at the top. And consequently, many analysts began questioning the further utility of these arrangements as early as 2004.
On the one hand, these writers noted at that time, the polpredy typically formed another layer of bureaucracy, one that all too often simply complicated the lives of Moscow-based ministries and regional officials without serving a broader purpose.
And on the other, many of them pointed out, such limitations could only be overcome by giving these polpredy so much power that they would by themselves constitute a threat to the center, something their creator, President Putin, would naturally oppose.
By the end of his first presidential term, Putin had deprived regional leaders of one of their chief levers on the federal legislative process by reforming the Federation Council and undermined the independence and self-confidence of these leaders by having his prosecutors bring criminal charges against some of them.
When Putin in 2004 ended elections for regional leaders and secured the virtually uncontested power to appoint them, many in Moscow thought this would give a new lease on life to the Presidential Plenopotentiaries. After all, someone would have to sift through and select officials for Putin to nominate to these jobs.
But it quickly became apparent, Stanovaya argues, that this was a technical rather than a political function and that it could be handled in Moscow every bit as well as it could be in the regions. And consequently, at that time, Kremlin officials indicated to her that Putin would end the system before the completion of his second term.
In the intervening period, the position of Presidential Plenopotentiary has declined in importance, she continues, serving either as a springboard for a bigger career, as has been the case with Kozak, or a place of honorary retirement, the status of “virtually all the other polpredy.”
In addition to the arguments Stanovaya advances for thinking Putin will soon do away with these institutions, there is another and perhaps more compelling one: After next year’s elections, he will not be president and as the odds’ on favorite to become prime minister, he is likely to want a very different set of arrangements in the future.