In 1905 Azerbaijan was still merely a geographical term describing a stretch of land partitioned between Russia and Persia. The only articulated group identity of its inhabitants was that of being Muslim, and their collective consciousness expressed itself primarily in terms of the universalistic 'umma. The period between this date and the Soviet conquest of Baku in 1920 witnessed the rise of the independent republic, which purported to be the embodiment of the Azerbaijani nation. These fifteen years would seem to be an astonishingly short time for a transformation of such magnitude – were it not for two basic facts of history.

First, Azerbaijani society had been in many ways prepared for this transformation by the preceding century of Russian rule. The main effect of this rule was to integrate Azerbaijan by ending the political fragmentation of the khanate period and by unifying the country's economy. A cultural and social by-product of the contact with Russia was the rise of the intelligentsia, a group that subsequently sought to assume leadership of the emerging community. The role of the intelligentsia represented the native effort at integration. This was pursued by healing Sunni-Shiʿa antagonism and promoting education and modern forms of communication in the new literary language. Also, the secular-minded intelligentsia was that part of society first affected by the waning of 'umma consciousness, which it sought to replace with the ethnocentric ideas of the Turkic qavm and Azerbaijani millät.