The Baku commissars laid a foundation for the national confrontation between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples, senior analyst of the news agency Vestnik Kavkaza Andrei Petrov told Vesti FM radio, speaking about the crimes for which the leaders of the Baku commune, who later became the part of the 26 Baku Сommissars myth, were arrested by the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship on August 1st, 1918.
"The commissars of the Baku Soviet of People's Commissars were arrested on charges of organizing the 1918 March events, resulted in the death of more than 35,000 Muslim Azerbaijanis in Baku," Andrey Petrov said.
"In October 1917, the chairman of the Baku Council Stepan Shaumyan - the leader of the Caucasian Bolsheviks and, in fact, the chief Baku Commissar - received from Lenin a task to take control of the Baku oil fields. To accomplish the task, he had to suppress the activities of the Musavat Democratic Party that dominated in Azerbaijan and enjoyed the support of the local population. The Bolsheviks, in turn, were supported neither in Baku nor in the larger Caucasus, " the analyst pointed out.
"Shaumyan chose a path of revolutionary terror by entering into an alliance with the Armenian party Dashnaktsutyun, which in turn attracted Armenian soldiers who returned home from the Turkish front of the World War I to fight against Musavatists. The clashes on the streets very soon turned into pogroms of Azerbaijanis, who appeared defenseless against the tactics of using soldiers against Musavat: the former front-line soldiers had army weapons while the Baku Muslims had almost no weapons, since in the Russian Empire only officers from aristocracy served,’’ the senior analyst of Vestnik Kavkaza said.
”Hence, there are so many dead people. Shaumyan, by the way, did not deny the incident and in a letter to Lenin, shortly before his arrest, admitted that to take power in Baku, he had to enter into an alliance with the Dashnaks, which led to the significant casualties among the Baku residents. These facts add a new dimension to the history of the 26 Baku Commissars, whose leaders, in fact, laid a foundation for a national confrontation between the Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples living in peace and friendship, "Andrey Petrov concluded.
