Fall of the Baku Commune

At the end of July 1918 the rule of the Bolshevik Baku Commune (PL) in Baku came to an end. Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, commander of the British forces in northern Persia, recorded under 26 July the “long-expected coup d’état” that had overthrown the Bolsheviks. In fact it was not a coup but a vote. On the evening of 25 July, at a session that dragged on into the night, the city’s soviet of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies, against the Bolsheviks, passed a motion to invite the British. The Bolsheviks surrendered power, but the formal handover took several more days. That is why sources give different dates for the end of the Commune, from 25–26 July to 31 July.

The Turks before the city

Since June the Commune’s troops, mostly Armenian, had been losing to Nuri Pasha’s Caucasian Army of Islam. After the defeat at Göyçay and the loss of Kurdamir on 10 July they fell back along the railway towards the city. On 20 July the Turks and Azerbaijanis took Shamakhi. Help from Soviet Russia was modest: according to Russian sources on 19 July (according to the British official history only on 2 August, from Astrakhan) a well-armed detachment under Grigory Petrov arrived from Tsaritsyn, with cavalry, sailors and a battery of artillery. The city was short of food, and the Armenian population above all trembled before the Turks and their Azerbaijani allies.

More and more of the inhabitants saw salvation in the British. From the end of June Dunsterville’s detachments had been reaching Enzeli on the Persian side of the Caspian Sea, but the Bolsheviks had kept him out of Baku earlier and were still rejecting his help. The chairman of the Baku Council of People’s Commissars, Stepan Shaumian, had clear instructions from Moscow not to accept it in any case. In favour of inviting the British, on the other hand, were the Armenian Dashnaks, the Right Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks. They also had support among the sailors of the Caspian Flotilla. The British vice-consul in Baku, Ranald MacDonell, was in contact with the Bolsheviks’ opponents.

The vote of 25 July

At an extraordinary session of the soviet, enlarged by representatives of the districts and the army, the bloc of Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Dashnaks put forward a resolution “on inviting the English to Baku and forming a government of representatives of all socialist parties”. According to Shaumian’s collected writings it passed by 259 votes to the Bolsheviks’ 236. Some authors, following the British historian Peter Hopkirk, place the vote on 26 July. Shaumian announced that the commissars were giving up power and would leave the city. Hopkirk quotes his words: “With pain in our hearts and curses on our lips, we who came here to die for Soviet power are forced to leave.”

On 27 July Shaumian telegraphed Lenin that after the resolution was passed “there was a smell of civil war”, and that the invitation to the British, whose help he considered highly doubtful, had “finally demoralised the army and disorganised the rear”. He asked for regular troops to be sent from Russia at once. At the front things were getting worse. About 3,000 Armenian soldiers refused to march out, and on 29 July the remnants of the Commune’s troops fell back to Biləcəri station, a few kilometres from the city centre.

The Centrocaspian Dictatorship

The Bolsheviks refused to join a coalition. On 31 July the Council of People’s Commissars formally announced its resignation and decided to ship the troops and Soviet property to Astrakhan, the only Bolshevik port on the Caspian Sea. A dozen or so ships were loaded, thirteen according to Dunsterville, but vessels of the flotilla turned the convoy back to port. On 1 August power was assumed by the “Provisional Dictatorship of Centrocaspian and the Presidium of the Provisional Executive Committee of the Soviet”, known for short as the Centrocaspian Dictatorship. The name came from Centrocaspian, the Central Committee of the Caspian Flotilla, elected by the sailors. The Dictatorship relied on the Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks and Dashnaks. The forces in the city were commanded by the former tsarist generals Georgy Dokuchaev and Yakov Bagratuni.

The new authorities at once invited the British. On 4 August the first, small detachment arrived in Baku from Enzeli, and the next day the defenders repulsed the first Turkish assault. Thus began the Battle of Baku proper, which ended in September with the capture of the city by the Turks. In mid-August the Bolshevik commissars again tried to sail for Astrakhan, but they were stopped at sea and thrown into prison.