Azerbaijan was also the scene of an early Cold War confrontation. On March 4, 1946, Soviet Army brigades deployed into Azerbaijan. The United States perceived this provocation as the first step in a Soviet strategy to penetrate the Middle East. In the face of shrewd Iranian diplomacy backed by Western resolve, the Soviet forces withdrew, averting an international crisis.
The limitations of the Soviet command economy coupled with the Western strategy of containment contributed to political and economic stagnation, especially in the last decades of the Soviet regime. A rekindled nationalism ignited by an outbreak of ethnic violence occurred in 1988 when neighboring Armenia voiced its claim to the district of Karabakh. As violence escalated, a national emergency ensued and new political groups, such as the People’s Front of Azerbaijan emerged to challenge the predominant Communist Party of Azerbaijan (CPAz) upon the dissolution of the USSR. On August 30, 1991, Azerbaijan, once again became an independent republic.
However, the early years of independence were marred by political instability, exacerbated by the ongoing Karabakh conflict. The hostilities contributed to the fall of several administrations in the fledgling government with a favorable solution to the conflict taking precedence over the achievement of key political and economic reforms. On October 3, 1993, Heidar Aliyev, a former Communist Party secretary, filled the power vacuum. Signing a tentative cease-fire agreement with Armenia over the Karabakh conflict allowed him to concentrate reform efforts in Azerbaijan’s government and economy.
In the early twenty-first century, the Republic of Azerbaijan is a secular democracy with a government based on a separation of powers among its three branches. The executive power is vested with the president, who serves as head of state, bearing ultimate responsibilities for domestic and foreign matters. The president of the republic also serves as the commander in chief of the armed forces and is elected for a term of five years with the provision to serve a maximum of two consecutive terms. The legislative power is executed by the National Parliament (Milli Majlis), a unicam-eral body consisting of 125 members. The ParliaAzerbaijan, 1992 © MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS. REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION ment holds two regular sessions-the spring session (February 10-May 31) and the fall session (September 30-December 30).
The judicial branch includes a Supreme Court, an economic court, and a constitutional court. The president, subject to approval by the parliament, nominates the judges in these three courts.
Azerbaijan’s economy has been slow to emerge from its Soviet era structuring and decay. The CIA World Fact Book (2002) indicates that the agricultural sector employs the largest segment of the working population at 41 percent. Recognizing the significance of the petroleum industry in stimulating the economy, the Azerbaijani government has promoted investment from abroad to modernize its deteriorated energy sector. A main export pipeline
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from the capital, Baku, to the Turkish port of Cey- CIA. (2002). The World Factbook-Azerbaijan. «www.cia han will facilitate transport of oil to Western mar- .gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/aj.html». kets. Cleveland, William L. (1999). A History of the Modern
Middle East. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. See also: ARMENIA AND ARMENIANS; ISLAM; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, SOVIET; NATIONALITIES POLICIES, TSARIST Swietockhowski, Tadeusz. (1995). Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition. NY: Columbia University Press.
Alstadt, Audrey. (1992) The Azerbaijani Turks: Power and Identity under Russian Rule.Stanford, CA: Hoover In- GREGORY TWYMAN stitution Press.
(1894-1940), regarded as one of the finest writers of fiction of the twentieth century.
Babel was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Odessa. Though nonobservant, he remained interested in Jewish culture-he translated Shalom Aleichem-and Jewish identity became a central interest of his art. Odessa was a vibrant port city, without a heritage of serfdom, more cosmopolitan than was the custom in Russia. Babel saw it as fertile ground for a southern school of Russian literature-sunny, muscular, centered on sensuous experience, free of the metaphysical yearnings and somber seriousness of the Russian tradition. French literature attracted him. He had a Flaubertian dedication to his craft; Maupassant’s skill in depicting the surface of things was a model. Babel’s playful side is most evident in his first cycle of short stories, The Odessa Tales (1921-1924). But an age of war, revolution, and terror demanded sterner stuff. Babel responded with his tragic Red Cavalry (1923-1925) and his study of the complexities of growing up Jewish, The Story of My Dovecot (1925-1931).
Babel was sympathetic to the aims of the Russian Revolution and served it in several capacities, including a stint as translator for the secret police (Cheka). For a long time he enjoyed the benefits and celebrity of a Soviet writer, though he eventually became a victim of Soviet terror. In 1920 he signed on as correspondent with the First Cavalry Army, a leading unit of the Reds in the civil war, at the time engaged in battle with Poland. His summer with this largely Cossack army gave him the material for his great book of revolution and war.
Success brought pressures to conform. With the ascendancy of Josef Stalin and the mobilization of society commencing with the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), writers could no longer feel safe pursuing their private visions as long as they avoided criticism of communist rule. They were now expected to produce work useful to the state. Babel made abortive attempts to conform but mostly sought the safety of seclusion and silence. As he said at the First Congress of Soviet Writers: “I have so much respect for [the reader] that I am struck dumb.” Nevertheless, he produced some outstanding work in the thirties, including “Guy de Maupassant” (1932) and “Di Grasso” (1937)- two parables of the life of the artist. He was arrested as a spy on May 15, 1939. Like millions of
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innocent men and women, he fell victim to Soviet tyranny; he was shot on January 27 of the following year.
Babel wrote many fine stories and several interesting plays. Among his best work are his cycles. The Odessa Tales treat a crew of Damon Runyon-like gangsters and their cohorts of the Jewish ghetto of Moldavanka. They are not clothed in realism’s ordinary dress but in the colorful garments of romance or the crazy garb of comedy. The stories are designed to charm, not move the reader, though their rejection of Jewish resignation to suffering is a common theme for Babel. The four tales comprising The Story of My Dovecot have greater depth. They tell of the breaking away of a Jewish boy from his highly pressured home-the father is compensating for the indignities wrought by anti-Semitism. Red Cavalry is a masterpiece. It weaves its complex ways between irreconcilable an- tagonisms-of constancy and change, action and culture, revolution and tradition-to offer an image of the tragic character of human life. See also: PURGES, THE GREAT
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Carden, Patricia. (1972). The Art of Isaac Babel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ehre, Milton. (1986). Isaac Babel. Boston: Twayne. Poggioli, Renato. (1957). “Isaac Babel in Retrospect.” In The Phoenix and the Spider. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trilling, Lionel. (1955). Introduction to The Collected Stories, by Isaac Babel. New York: New American Library.
used by the peasants to oppose state policy, and sometimes led to the temporary dissolution of newly formed collective farms. Their frequent use in the winter of 1929-1930 likely played a role in the party leadership’s decision to slow the pace of collectivization in March 1930.
The gendered aspect of babi bunty was very important. The Bolsheviks considered peasant women to be an especially backward social group, one incapable of organized political action. They believed that babi bunty were incited by kulaks and other anti-Soviet elements, who were manipulating the women. Because of this belief, the Bolsheviks responded with propaganda instead of force. Peasant men who resisted Soviet policies during this period, on the other hand, were treated with great violence. The peasants’ recognition that participants in babi bunty would be treated leniently made these actions a favored form of resistance to collectivization. Although babi bunty only slowed the collectivization process, their frequency likely played a role in the state’s decision eventually
