Musavat

Its first name was the Muslim Democratic Musavat Party, and its early members included Nariman Narimanov, later the Communist leader of the Azerbaijan SSR. Although it leaned towards pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism, it supported the tsarist regime during the First World War. It became a legal party after the February Revolution, merged with the Party of Turkic Federalists on 17 June 1917, and at its first congress in October adopted a 76-article programme calling for a federative democratic Russia based on national and territorial autonomy, the eight-hour working day and the distribution of land to the peasants. Mensheviks, SRs and Bolsheviks branded it a party of “beks and khans”, but the Soviet historian A. L. Popov wrote that in the early revolutionary period the Musavat stood for democracy and even socialism and could not be classified a priori as reactionary.

The Musavat won 30 seats in the Transcaucasian Seim and became one of its ruling parties, by then aiming at a united Muslim state under Ottoman protection. When the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic became independent on 28 May 1918 it held the majority in its parliament, and Rasulzade was the first head of state until 7 December. The name “Azerbaijan” was adopted under its leadership, and women received the vote in 1919. After the republic fell to the Red Army invasion in April 1920, the party formed a secret committee and prepared rebellions in Ganja, Karabakh, Zaqatala and Lankaran, but the Soviet authorities arrested at least 2,000 of its members by 1923. The remaining leaders went into exile, where Rasulzade founded the party’s Foreign Bureau in 1923.