Arrest of the committee at Enzeli

The British chronology of the war records under 4 August 1918 that the British military authorities arrested the Bolshevik committee in Enzeli, a Persian port on the Caspian Sea. The sources do not give the exact day. F.J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign writes that when on 4 August Major-General Lionel Dunsterville set out with his staff from Qazvin for Enzeli, the Bolshevik leaders of the port “had just been” arrested by the British. Dunsterville himself recalled that that evening, at the inn in Manjil, he met three of the arrested men being taken under guard to Qazvin.

The revolutionary committee of Bolsheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had ruled Enzeli since December 1917. It was this committee that in February 1918 had not allowed Dunsterville’s mission to sail to Baku. By the summer, however, its position was quite different. After the defeat of Mirza Kuchik Khan’s Jangalis at Manjil in June, the road to the sea was held by the British, and a British detachment was stationed in Enzeli. Dunsterville noted that of the once numerous committee three men remained: the chairman, Chelyapin, a former clerk in a shipping office; a young shopkeeper, Lazarev; and the nineteen-year-old Babukh, a former cavalry trumpeter. Behind them stood about 200 Red Guards. After the fall of the Baku Commune at the end of July the committee had lost its support in Baku.

The British had long wanted to be rid of it. On 23 July the War Office, dissatisfied with Dunsterville’s caution, demanded that Enzeli be occupied at once and Bolshevik influence removed from it. Dunsterville, however, feared that arresting men merely for being Bolsheviks would turn Baku, where the British had only just been called in to help, against them, and would confirm the accusations of counter-revolutionary intentions. So he looked for another reason. A few days before the arrest he invited the committee to Qazvin for two days of talks on exchanging cars for petrol, and meanwhile Major Browne, the commander at Enzeli, prepared the operation on the spot. According to Dunsterville, Chelyapin, on his way back, refused an escort and said that a white flag on the bonnet of his car would be enough, because the Jangalis would let him through. This confirmed the British suspicion that the committee was still in contact with them.

The proof turned out to be an intercepted letter from Babukh to Kuchik Khan, in which he congratulated him on the attack on the British at Rasht and promised support in the further struggle. Browne arrested all three during the afternoon siesta, on a charge of maintaining contacts with the enemy, and sent them inland in a Ford. According to Dunsterville, no one in the town spoke up for them. The Encyclopaedia Iranica, citing the research of the historian Dailami, states that the arrested men were later deported to Mesopotamia. The British took control of the port, through which reinforcements for Baku were now passing, and secured there the steamer President Kruger, needed in case of an evacuation from the city. Thanks to the evidence of collaboration with the Jangalis, Dunsterville was later able to convince the authorities in Baku that the issue had been not a fight against the revolution, but treason.