Baku Commune troops take Kurdamir

A British chronology of the war records under 12 June 1918 that Kurdamir, a station on the railway from Baku to Tiflis, was occupied by Turkish troops. On that day the little town did indeed change hands, but it was taken by the other side. According to the Soviet Military Encyclopaedia, the troops of the Baku Commune (PL), then called the Caucasian Red Army, occupied Sığırlı station on 11 June and took Kurdamir after a fight on 12 June. The Turks and their Azerbaijani allies entered it only on 10 July.

The offensive from Baku

Since the spring Baku had been ruled by the Bolshevik commune of Stepan Shaumian, which relied on the Russian workers of the oilfields and on the Armenian units of the Dashnaks. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, proclaimed at the end of May, had no army of its own and was counting on the Turks, who were just forming the Caucasus Army of Islam in Ganja under the command of Nuri Pasha, Enver’s half-brother. The Baku authorities decided to forestall its march. On 4 June the commissar for military affairs, Grigory Korganov, ordered the occupation of the plain as far as Yevlakh and its bridge over the Kura, from where the road led straight to Ganja.

The British historian W. E. D. Allen and the Russian émigré Paul Muratoff, authors of the classic work on the fighting in the Caucasus, stress that for the Armenian majority of these troops the most important thing was to protect the Armenian villages and small towns scattered across eastern Transcaucasia, especially in Shamakhi, before regular Turkish troops joined the local Azerbaijani units. The striking force was assembled at Kazi-Magomed station, today’s Hacıqabul, and around 10 June it set off westwards in three columns. Four battalions marched on Ağsu to open the road to Shamakhi, nine along the railway towards Kurdamir, and another four along the Kura. The Azerbaijani volunteer units were unable to stop them. By 15 June the Commune’s troops had reached the Ağsu–Kurdamir line, and only the left column was held up before Petropavlovka.

What came next

Allen and Muratoff judge the plan sound, but one that required fast and experienced troops, which Baku did not have. The battalions numbered 400–500 men each, were poorly disciplined and short of officers. The central column stood idle in Kurdamir, waiting for the outcome of the outflanking move in the north, and the offensive soon lost its momentum. Meanwhile the first regiments of the Turkish 5th Caucasian Division reached Göyçay, and on 16 June the Azerbaijani government moved from Tiflis to Ganja.

At Göyçay, from 27 June to 1 July, the Turks and Azerbaijanis routed the right wing of the Commune’s troops, which lost about 800 killed and wounded and was also being decimated by dysentery. The arrival from Persia of the Cossacks of Lazar Bicherakhov, who was given command in this sector, did not help. On 10 July, after several days of fighting, the Commune’s troops gave up Kurdamir. Only then did what the British chronology placed under 12 June actually happen. The road to Baku lay open before the Turks, although their march, slowed by heat, disease and lack of water, went on for more than two months.