The Kurds in the Soviet Union
Chapter 10 The Kurds in the Soviet Union /smet Cheriff Van/y THE KURDS UNDER IMPERIAL RUSSIA At the beginning of the, nineteenth century, Georgia, eastern Armenia and northern Azerbaijan were conquered by the Russians. These territories, previously under Persian rule, all contained sizeable Kurdish minorities. Whether these Kurds were the de scendants of the Transcaucasian Kurds of earlier centuries was, except possibly in the case of the Azerbaijani Kurds, not clear in the light of the complexity of the historical changes that had taken place since the reign of the Shaddadids, let alone those of the earlier periods of the Khoren and the Medians. All that can be stated with certainty is that the original inhabitants of Kurdistan had always overspilled its boundaries into neighbouring territories, including Transcaucasia, for reasons which ranged from economic pressures and internecine conflicts to semi-nomadism. According to the census of 1897, the first to be based on mother tongue, the Russian empire had a total population of 125,640,200 including 100,000 Kurds approximately as shown in Table 10.1. The figures in Table 10.1 are unreliable (as are later Soviet statistics) and there are strong grounds for believing that the total of 99,900 refers solely to the Kurdish population of Transcaucasia and does not include Turkmenia, which at that period was the only Central Asian territory with a Kurdish minority. These, according to A. Bennigsen (1960, pp. 513-30) the least known of the USSR's minority peoples, were in fact a part of the initially small settlement in Khorasan of Kurmanji-speaking Kurds who had been moved there from Azerbaijan in the eighteentli century by Shah Abbas to defend Persia's north-east frontier agaiIlst the Uzbeks.
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