User:HistoryofIran/Azerbaijan Democratic Republic

The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (often abbreviated as ADR)

Background
Historically, the name "Azerbaijan" referred to the region south of the Aras River, in present-day northwestern Iran. The historical name of the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan was Arran and Shirvan. Before its conquest by the Russian Empire, Shirvan was a province of an imperial structure that was entirely Iranian, in the same fashion as other provinces such as Lorestan and Khorasan. Before the 20th century, the Azerbaijanis barely constituted as an ethnic group, much less a nation. The people who lived in the present-day country of Azerbaijan identified as either Muslims of the ummah (community), or Turks, who shared a language family spread out throughout a considerable portion of Central Asia, or as Persians. Unlike the Armenians and the Georgians, they employed the Persian alphabet as they lacked their own.

The delayed emergence of Azerbaijani national identity has several causes. Persian culture dominated the area that would become modern-day Azerbaijan for the majority of its history, up until the 1820s. The region never formed a distinct, unified state before the Russians finished conquering it in 1828, and even when Iran ruled the area, the eastern part of the South Caucasus was composed of numerous feudal khanates. The ethnic diversity in many of these khanates posed another barrier to national unification.

At the end of the 19th-century national identities were not widely accepted notions in the area and in the state of constant change. Both historical Azerbaijan to the south of the Aras River and the Russian-ruled Baku and Elizavetpol governorates to the north were home to a majority of Turkic-speaking people, who were defined differently by opposing ideologies. The ones to the north of the Aras were known by different sources as "Tatar", "Turk", "Muslim" or "Persian". Only a few sources at the end of the 19th-century call them "Azerbaijani", a term which first started becoming popular after the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917. The Russian imperial government stated that "Azerbaijani Tatars were erroneously called Persians. They were Shiite by denomination and imitated Persians in many ways, but their language is Turkic-Tatar." In order to distinguish them from the other "Tatars" of the empire and the Persian speakers of Iran, the Russian Empire's official documents and numerous published works from the pre-1917 era also referred to them as "Tatar" or "Caucasian Tatars," "Azerbaijani Tatars," and even "Persian Tatars." This came about as a result of all Turkic-speakers being commonly referred in the Russian language as "Tatar."

Formation
As the word Tatar was seen as a Russian colonial concept, the leaders of Azerbaijan refused to identify as such. Instead, they referred to the Turkic-speaking Muslim inhabitants of the southeast Caucasus as Turkic. They were known as Türk and Azerbaijani Türk in their native language. Due to the fact that the majority of people continued to identify themselves by religion, Azerbaijani officials also regularly used "Muslim" to refer to the same group. Because the word "Azerbaijan" might also refer to Iranian Azerbaijan and imply a territorial claim, Iran expressed dissatisfaction when they chose that name for the nation. The phrase "Caucasian Azerbaijan" was thus used in the documents intended for international distribution by the Azerbaijani government to ease Iranian concerns.

Legacy
Though it only lasted from August 1919 to April 1920, its complete independence was nonetheless significant. The people of Azerbaijan were influenced by the ADR in shaping their nationalist aspirations both at that time and after. This was evident in the later creation of the later republics of Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic and the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan.

The majority of the people first adopted the Azerbaijani identity as a result of Soviet policy. Before the Soviet Union established its rule over Azerbaijan, there was no distinguishing Azerbaijani nationalism as a political and social force. Due to the fact that rural Turkic-speaking communities in the Caucasus typically associated themselves more with specific locations and local clans than with the entire Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, the new ethnonym "Azerbaijani" took a while to gain consensus and wide adoption.