Azarbaijan People's Government
| Azerbaijan People's Government | ||||||||||
| آذربایجان ملّی حکومتی | ||||||||||
| Puppet state of the Soviet Union | ||||||||||
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 Flag
 Coat of arms
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| Capital | Tabriz | |||||||||
| Languages | Azerbaijani | |||||||||
| Religion | Islam | |||||||||
| Government | Marxist Leninist One party state | |||||||||
| President | Ja'far Pishevari | |||||||||
| Historical era | Cold War | |||||||||
| • | Established | November 1945 | ||||||||
| • | Disestablished | December 1946 | ||||||||
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| Today part of |
 Iran
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The Azerbaijan People's Government (APG; Azerbaijani: Azərbaycan Milli Hökuməti, Persian: آذربایجان میلّی حکومتی, Russian: Азербайджанское народное правительство, Azerbajdzhanskoe narodnoe pravitel'stvo) was a short-lived unrecognized secessionist state in northern Iran from November 1945 to December 1946. Established in Iranian Azerbaijan, the APG's capital was the city of Tabriz. Its establishment and demise were a part of the Iran crisis, which was a precursor to the Cold War.
To supply the Soviet forces with war material through Iran, British and Soviet troops jointly occupied the country in August 1941. Soviet forces entering Iranian territory from the Armenian SSR and the Azerbaijan SSR and British and Indian forces entering from Iraq soon took the control of the country. On 16 September, the British forced Reza Shah, who had pro-Nazi sympathies, to abdicate in favor of his son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, who ruled until 1979.
With the dethronement of Reza Shah in September 1941, Soviet troops captured Tabriz and northwestern Iran for military and strategic reasons. The Azerbaijan People's Government, set up by the Soviets, under leadership of Ja'far Pishevari was proclaimed in Tabriz in 1945. Lavrenti Beria was nominally in charge of the operation, but delegated it to Mir Jafar Baghirov, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan in Baku. The Democratic Party of Azerbaijan was also created by the direct order of Joseph Stalin and capitalized on some local people's dissatisfaction with the centralization policies of Reza Shah. It was supplied with money and weapons by the USSR. With northern Iran under Soviet occupation, Stalin made plans to "spread Socialism" by creating independent states and wanted to make pressure on Iran to get an oil concession in the southern part of Azerbaijan. The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad was one such state and the Soviets decided to create a separate state for northern Iran's Azeri population as well. During this time, a revival of the Azerbaijani literary language, which had largely been supplanted by Persian, was promoted with the help of writers, journalists, and teachers from the Azerbaijan SSR. In the quest of imposing national homogeneity on the country where half of the population consisted of ethnic minorities, Reza Shah had previously issued in quick succession bans on the use of Azerbaijani language on the premises of schools, in theatrical performances, religious ceremonies, and, finally, in the publication of books. These directives were issued despite the fact that Reza Shah's mother Noosh Afarin and his wife Taj-Al-Molook Ayrimlu were both of Azerbaijani descent.
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Wikipedia