Establishment The
uezd was established on 7 July 1923, by the order of the government of the Azerbaijani SSR.
Sergei Kirov was appointed as its first head. The majority of Kurds in the region were
Shia, unlike the
Sunni Kurds of the
Nakhichevan uezd and other areas of the Middle East. The official language was
Kurmanji At the
1926 Soviet Census, the
uezd had a total population of 51,426 people, with ethnic Kurds constituting 72.3% or 37,182 people. However, according to the same census, 92.5% of the population of the
uezd cited Turkic (later known as
Azerbaijani) as their native tongue.
Dissolution and persecution of Kurds On 8 April 1929, the Sixth Azerbaijani Congress of Soviets approved a reform of the administrative structure, abolishing all uezds, including the Kurdistan uezd. After the dissolution, Kurds continued to assimilate into the dominant culture of the neighbouring Azeris, but some religious
Yazidi tribes mostly stayed the same. Historically, mixed Azeri-Kurdish marriages were commonplace; however the Kurdish language was rarely passed on to the children in such marriages. In the late 1930s, Soviet authorities deported most of the Kurdish population of
Azerbaijan and
Armenia to
Kazakhstan,
Turkmenistan,
Kyrgyzstan, and
Uzbekistan. Years later, Kurds immigrated to
Kazakhstan from the neighbouring countries,
Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan. ==See also==