Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
[Mystery] of Angels,” he presented the founda-
tions of Copernican thought to the Islamic world.
ment known as the Baku Commune briefly held
power in Baku between April and August 1918,
when an anti-Bolshevik government that lasted
until 1920 was established with British support.
In September 1920 Baku hosted the Congress of
the Peoples of the East that brought together
nearly 2,000 Communist delegates from across
Asia as part of the Bolshevik government's
attempt to spread its revolution throughout the
continent. Baku served as the capital of the Azer-
baijan Soviet Socialist Republic from 1920 to
1922, when the three Caucasian republics of
Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were brought
together into one political unit named the Trans-
caucasian Federation. In 1937 the Transcaucasian
Federation was dismantled and Baku restored to
its status of capital of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. In the
late 1980s Baku was at the forefront of the
nationalist turmoil that contributed to the end of
the Soviet Union. In February 1988 dozens of
Armenians were killed during a three-day riot in
the town of Sumgait north of Baku. In April
1990 Soviet troops fired on nationalist demon-
strators in Baku. When Azerbaijan declared its
independence from the Soviet Union in 1991
Baku became its capital. With the strategic
maneuvering that took place in the 1990s over
the construction of oil pipelines to transport oil
from the Caspian basin fields, Baku regained
some of the luster of the pre-Soviet era.
Baku
A city of about 1.1 million inhabitants located on
the southwestern shore of the Caspian Sea, Baku
(Baky in the Azeri language) is the present-day
capital of the Republic of Azerbaijan. Annexed by
the Russian Empire in 1806, it became an impor-
tant urban center and port and the center of the
Russian and Soviet oil industry until the dissolu-
tion of the Soviet Union in 1991. The earliest
recorded mentions of the city date to ninth and
10th centuries, at which time it was already
known for its oil resources. In 1509 Baku became
a part of the Persian Safavid Empire, and the site
of one of the strongest fortresses in the Caucasus
region. The Ottoman Empire briefly held Baku
from the 1580s until 1604 when the troops of the
Persian shah Abbas I recaptured the city.
Russian interest in Baku dates to the reign of
PETER I the Great and in 1723 during the RUSSO -
PERSIAN WAR of 1722-23 Russian troops captured
the city, which they held until 1735, when it was
returned to Persia after the Treaty of Gandjeh.
Baku became part of the Russian Empire on a
more permanent basis in 1806 during the Russo-
Persian War of 1804-13. In the 1870s Baku
entered a period of sustained economic growth
sparked by the development of the Russian oil
industry, a process in which foreign investment
by prominent Western business families such as
the Rothschilds and the Nobels played a central
role. By 1901 Baku accounted for 95 percent of
Russia's oil production and close to 50 percent of
the world's oil production. Oil production
declined in the next two decades, as Baku suf-
fered from the overall political turbulence that
spread across the Russian empire. During the
1905 Revolution, Baku was the site of a large
pogrom against its Armenian minority. In the
summers of 1913-14 and again in the winter of
1916-17 general strikes swept through the city
as the power of the Russian monarchy waned.
After the October Revolution, a Soviet govern-
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich
(1814-1876)
revolutionary
Born to a prominent aristocratic landowning
family, Bakunin turned away from a life of priv-
ilege and embraced the cause of revolutionary
ANARCHISM . Bakunin was educated at a military
school in St. Petersburg and later became an offi-
cer in the Imperial Guard, before resigning his
commission. He was an early participant in the
intellectual discussions of the seminal Stanke-
vich Circle of Moscow University students
formed in the 1830s. Bakunin left Russia in
1840, after rejecting the Hegelian ideas of the
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