Execution of the Baku commissars

Before dawn on 20 September 1918, in the desert by the Transcaspian Railway between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma, about 200 kilometres east of Krasnovodsk, 26 men connected with the Bolshevik Baku Commune (PL) were killed. Among them were the chairman of the Baku Council of People’s Commissars, Stepan Shaumian, Prokofy Dzhaparidze, Meshadi Azizbekov and Grigory Korganov. The sentence was passed without trial by the anti-Bolshevik government of Transcaspia in Ashkhabad, dominated by the Socialist Revolutionaries. In the history of the USSR the “26 Baku Commissars” became one of the most important symbols of the revolution, and for decades their deaths weighed on Soviet-British relations.

From Baku to Krasnovodsk

The commissars had been held in a Baku prison since mid-August. After the fall of the Commune they had tried to sail away with their troops to Astrakhan, but ships of the Caspian Flotilla turned them back to port, and the authorities of the Centrocaspian Dictatorship accused them of abandoning the city in its hour of danger. On the last night of the defence of Baku, 14–15 September, they were set free. According to Russian sources, the young Bolshevik Anastas Mikoyan obtained the authorities’ consent to their evacuation; according to others, they escaped in the confusion. They missed the ship with a Bolshevik crew and early on 15 September boarded the steamer Turkmen, full of Armenian refugees and soldiers. Instead of Astrakhan the ship put in at Krasnovodsk. Some authors explain this by a shortage of fuel, others by the crew’s hostility to the Bolsheviks.

Krasnovodsk was subject to the Transcaspian government, headed by an SR, the former railway engine driver Fyodor Funtikov, and the town itself was run by its commandant, Kuhn. The commissars who were recognised were arrested. On Korganov, who in the Baku prison had distributed food among the prisoners, a list of his fellow prisoners was found. According to later Soviet findings, it was this that became the list of the condemned. That is why some well-known Bolsheviks, such as Mikoyan, who had not been in prison, survived, while several chance individuals were killed, as was the Armenian partisan commander Tatevos Amirov.

The decision in Ashkhabad

The Transcaspian government, alarmed by the fall of Baku and fearing a revolt in its own towns, turned to the British. According to the account of C. H. Ellis, an officer of the British mission in Meshed, on the morning of 18 September a representative of Ashkhabad informed General Wilfrid Malleson of the arrests and asked for advice. Malleson replied that the prisoners must not be allowed to travel by rail into the interior, and proposed that they be handed over to the British as hostages in exchange for British subjects held in Soviet Russia. He himself telegraphed Simla proposing that they be interned in India. His liaison officer in Ashkhabad, Captain Reginald Teague-Jones, was present that night at the committee’s meeting, but according to his own account left before the decision was taken.

According to Ellis, the committee did not reach agreement, and the order to shoot the prisoners was given after the meeting by Funtikov and another committee member, Kurilov, who went to Krasnovodsk to prepare everything. During the night of 19–20 September the commissars were taken out of prison and put on a train, being told that they were going to Ashkhabad. The train stopped at the 207th verst of the line. According to an account later quoted by the SR journalist Vadim Chaikin, at about six in the morning the prisoners were led out in groups of eight or nine and shot. According to another statement attributed to Chaikin, the prisoners were not shot but cut down with sabres. When Malleson learned of the execution, he had Ashkhabad told that he was “horrified”. A few days later approval arrived from India for sending the commissars there as hostages.

The dispute over guilt

The Transcaspian government long concealed the execution. According to Ellis, the commissars’ fate became known in Moscow, or was at least spoken of publicly, only at the beginning of 1919. Chaikin, after a conversation with the imprisoned Funtikov, accused the British of having ordered the execution, and Funtikov put the blame on Teague-Jones. This version became the canon of Soviet historiography. It was immortalised by Isaak Brodsky in a 1925 painting in which British officers stand by at the execution. Funtikov was tried and shot in Baku in 1926. Britain denied any involvement. Ellis and most historians writing on the basis of British archives believe that the British did not give the order. The American historian Richard Ullman, however, held that Teague-Jones could have prevented the execution, because the government in Ashkhabad depended on British aid, and that he did not do so. The matter remains disputed.

In 1920, after the Red Army occupied Azerbaijan, the commissars’ remains were brought to Baku and solemnly buried in a square named after them. In 2009 the Azerbaijani authorities demolished their mausoleum, and the remains were moved to a cemetery. Only 23 bodies were found at the time, and Shaumian’s was not among them.