Introduction

This chapter provides an examination of the use by the Soviets of the national factor in manipulating political developments in Iran in the Soviet interest; hence, it is more about the Soviet Union, its tactics and propaganda, than about Iran. Persia ceded roughly half of what is considered Azerbaijan to Russia in 1828. Cross-order contacts between the Azeri Turks, who constitute Azerbaijan's core population, continued without interruption for almost a century. In 1941 when the Red Army occupied northern Iran, including Iranian Azerbaijan, Moscow considered the Soviet Azeri political intelligentsia to be politically reliable enough to be used to lay the groundworks for their Southern compatriots' Marxist-Leninist future. The political aspirations nurtured by the Bolsheviks and their Soviet successors for Iranian Azerbaijan are perhaps the least studied aspect of the relations between the USSR and Iran. The contemporary Soviet approach to Iranian Azerbaijan draws heavily on their experience there during the Second World War.