In 1921, after World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Russian Civil War, the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet republics signed the Treaty of Kars, recognizing each other within the new Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The Provisional Government—soon Republic—of Turkey signed as well. While not formally a party, Russia played the leading role and also signed.
In a gesture to the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, prominent Bolshevik revolutionary Sergei Kirov, decreed Kurdistana Sor (Red Kurdistan, known as Krasnyi Kurdistan) on July 16, 1923, a plan that Joseph Stalin, in his capacity as People’s Commissar of Nationalities, had hinted earlier. In 1926, the official Kurdish population of the Soviet Union was 69,000, almost two-thirds of them in Azerbaijan. The real figures were likely higher because Soviet authorities misrecorded assimilated Kurds as Azeris.
Stalin understood an autonomous territory within Azerbaijan could be a check on Azerbaijan’s independence.
The Bolshevik Revolution had succeeded partly because it appealed to the Empire’s non-Russian peoples. In the 1920s, this meant modernization by korenizatsiia (indigenization): establishing “autonomous” territorial units in which titular nationalities enjoyed enhanced opportunities for advancement, with government and cultural services conducted in local languages. This became the origin of Krasnyi Kurdistan, as several districts within Soviet Azerbaijan between the Armenian frontier and the largely Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh were ethnically Kurdish. These Kurdish districts formed into a de facto autonomous republic with the town of Lachin as capital, Kurdish-language education, a broadcasting service, a newspaper that published as late as 1961, and other institutions.
Pragmatic considerations also motivated Bolshevik support for Red Kurdistan. Stalin understood an autonomous territory within Azerbaijan could be a check on Azerbaijan’s independence, especially since the republic was the Soviet Union’s main oil-producing region.
Subsequent collectivization of agriculture ignited peasant uprisings across the Soviet Union and raised alarm along its international frontiers. As Stalin re-thought and cut back earlier concessions to the non-Russians, a 1928 Kurdish uprising in Turkey sparked concern about inspiration that ethnicities within the Soviet Union could take from co-ethnicists in other countries. The Muslim Kurds represented a particular danger because their uprising garnered sympathy from Orthodox Christian Armenians on both sides of the border. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs warned of similar Iranian worries. It was then, in 1929 and 1930, that Moscow demoted Red Kurdistan, downgrading it to a lower-ranking Kurdish okrug (territory) of three districts and parts of three more, and later ending any official Kurdish autonomy. Soviet authorities subsequently deported many Kurdish families to Central Asia and other places for resisting collectivization, depopulating much of Red Kurdistan.
Red Kurdistan’s story offers much for policymakers engaged with minority conflicts in Southwest Asia and the Middle East.
Soviet authorities were not alone in opposing Kurdish autonomy, even within the Soviet context. Azerbaijan resettled Azeris into the Kurdish districts to dilute Kurdish identity. The change to okrug status in 1930 further bolstered Baku’s authority there. In 1937, the Great Terror enabled Stalin to deport most of the remaining Kurdish population of Armenia and Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan. The Soviet Union’s 1939 census counted only 6,000 in Azerbaijan, other Central Asian republics, and Siberia. In 1944, the Soviets ethnically cleansed thousands of Kurds along with Meskhetians and Khemshils from Georgia.
Some Kurds returned to Azerbaijan and southern Russia under Nikita Khrushchev, though as individuals rather than communities. Many remained where Stalin sent them, since they had established new lives. Adult children of mixed marriages chose non-Kurdish parents’ official ethnicity; thousands reclassified as Meskhetians could not leave until Mikhail Gorbachev lifted that group’s “punished” status. Later still, Kurds became entangled in the war that broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan in 1990. Both sides pressured their Kurdish minorities to leave. Many ended up in refugee shelters in central Azerbaijan, or further away still in the Russian city of Krasnodar, east of Crimea; young men fled Azerbaijan to escape conscription. Some Kurds suffered Azerbaijani discrimination, while Armenian extremists called for their murder if found in the Lachin Corridor or Karabakh.
Following Azerbaijan’s defeat in Karabakh, a Kurdish Liberation Movement led by Wekîl Mustafayev declared a new Lachin Kurdish Republic in early 1992. In May, however, Armenian forces established a corridor through it to Karabakh, pillaging as they went, displacing Lachin’s Kurdish population and renaming the area Kashatag; in 1993, Armenian forces expanded their corridor and displaced more Kurds. Well into the 2020s, no mutual, internationally recognized settlement has been reached, which leaves a mere two thousand self-identifying Kurds in Armenia and 14,000 in Georgia; a more substantial 200,000 remain in Azerbaijan, perhaps 51,000 in Russia, and 150,000 to 200,000 in Central Asia.
The Soviets may have believed Red Kurdistan could showcase for Kurds (and Turks) the happiness of being national minorities under communist rule, and to dupe sympathetic intellectuals among the “peoples of the East,” but it was doomed from the start. Still, Red Kurdistan’s story offers much for policymakers engaged with minority conflicts in Southwest Asia and the Middle East and raises questions about the situation of the Kurds (and others)—not only in Turkey and Iran, but also in Syria and Iraq.
