Turks take Kurdamir

On 10 July 1918 units of Nuri Pasha’s Caucasian Army of Islam, supported by Azerbaijani volunteers, took Kurdamir, a station on the railway from Tiflis to Baku. A month earlier, on 12 June, it had been captured by the troops of the Bolshevik Baku Commune (PL), which had then set off west to forestall the Turkish advance. Now they had to give it up, and their June offensive finally collapsed. The date of 10 July is given consistently by the historians W. E. D. Allen, a Briton, and Paul Muratoff, a Russian émigré, authors of the classic work on the fighting in the Caucasus, as well as by Soviet and Turkish sources.

After the battle of Göyçay

From 27 June to 1 July, at Göyçay, Turks of the 5th Caucasian Division and Azerbaijani militia routed the right wing of the Commune’s forces. The Baku troops, mostly Armenians, lost about 800 killed and wounded, and were also being decimated by dysentery. On 2 July they withdrew from Ağsu. Hope came to Baku with the arrival of Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov. This Cossack commander, who had until then fought in Persia alongside the British, landed with his detachment at the port of Alat on 5 July. According to Allen and Muratoff, he had about 1,200 Cossacks and six guns. The Bolsheviks and the Armenian nationalists agreed to give him command of the Ağsu–Kurdamir sector.

Bicherakhov reached Kurdamir on 7 or 8 July, as the sources differ by a day. He intended the Armenians to hold the positions at Ağsu and Kurdamir while he himself, with the Cossacks and a thousand picked soldiers from Baku, struck from the village of Karasakkal into the gap between two Turkish columns. He was too late. The Turks attacked Kurdamir as early as 7 July. Stepan Shaumian, chairman of the Baku Council of People’s Commissars, telegraphed to Stalin, then in Tsaritsyn, that the attack had been repulsed after twelve hours of fighting with the help of Cossacks and armoured cars. The fighting, however, went on on 8 and 9 July as well.

The fall of the station

According to Azerbaijani and Turkish accounts, the main burden fell on the 13th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Caucasian Division, which outflanked Kurdamir from the north, and on the Azerbaijani detachment of Lieutenant-Colonel Habib Bey Salimov, attacking from the west. During the night before the decisive attack a detachment was sent out that destroyed the track behind the defenders, near Kerar station. On 10 July two Turkish regiments, Azerbaijani militia and mounted volunteer units attacked along the whole front from Kurdamir to Karasakkal. The Armenian detachment in Kurdamir fell back towards Kerar, and Bicherakhov, so as not to be surrounded, had to follow it. The right wing of the Commune’s forces abandoned the Ağsu area. Crowds of Armenian refugees from Shamakhi and the surrounding villages streamed along the roads towards Baku.

The Turks had their troubles too. In keeping with German wishes, Enver Pasha officially forbade his brother to march on Baku, although, as Turkish research shows, he secretly encouraged him to do so. The heat in the Kura valley, the lack of good water and long supply lines slowed the advance, and the dysentery that had thinned the Armenians now reached the ranks of the 5th Caucasian Division. Allen and Muratoff write that many Azerbaijani militiamen deserted, and as early as 15 July Nuri was asking for reinforcements.

Over the next few days Bicherakhov concluded that his tired troops could not withstand a clash in the open with regular infantry supported by artillery. He ordered the right wing to fall back towards Baku, and the centre, by rail, towards Hacıqabul. According to Soviet sources, the Turks took Kerar station as early as 14 July. The Commune’s troops fell back towards the city, and by the end of July they stood a few kilometres from its centre.