Azerbaijan Democratic Republic
former country in the South Caucasus (1918–1920)
The Republic of Azerbaijan, better known in historiography as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, was the first secular democratic republic in the Turkic and Muslim worlds. The ADR was founded by the Azerbaijani National Council in Tiflis on 28 May 1918 after the collapse of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic, and ceased to exist on 28 April 1920. Its established borders were with Russia to the north, the Democratic Republic of Georgia to the north-west, the Republic of Armenia to the west, and Iran to the south. It had a population of around 3 million. Ganja was the temporary capital of the Republic as Baku was under Bolshevik control.
Under the ADR, a government system was developed in which a Parliament elected on the basis of universal, free, and proportionate representation was the supreme organ of state authority; the Council of Ministers was held responsible before it. Fatali Khan Khoyski became its first prime minister. Besides the Musavat majority, Ahrar, Ittihad, Muslim Social Democrats as well as representatives of Armenian (21 out of 120 seats), Russian, Polish, German, and Jewish minorities gained seats in the parliament. Many members supported Pan-Islamist and Pan-Turkist ideas.
Among the important accomplishments of the Parliament was the extension of suffrage to women, making Azerbaijan one of the first countries in the world, and the first majority-Muslim nation, to grant women equal political rights with men.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Azerbaijan Democratic Republic” as former country in the South Caucasus (1918–1920). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q206411. VIAF identifies the subject as 137406194. The Library of Congress control number is n2003105043. Authority coordinates are 40.500, 47.560. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918 and 1920.
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This entry incorporates text from “Azerbaijan Democratic Republic” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.