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The Fall of Baku
As Talaat and von Hintze were haggling in Berlin, Enver Pasha had ordered Halil Pasha, Eastern Army Group Commander, to take charge of the Baku operation. During the first days of September, approximately fifteen thousand Ottoman and Azerbaijani troops resumed the offensive, while the 15th Division pressed toward Derbend to cut communications between Baku and the North. By September 13, the defenders had fallen back into the suburbs of the city. General Dunsterville prepared to evacuate his small British contingent and urged the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship to negotiate for the surrender of Baku. The Russian and Armenian leaders now threatened to sink every vessel of the Dunsterforce if the British attempted to desert. The situation was hopeless, however, and by the morning of September 14 few believed that Baku could hold. Restless Moslems in the city began to display greater courage and prepared for the moment of deliverance. Dunsterville, not wiling to risk the loss of his entire group, rejected the Centro-Caspian appeal to hold a day or two longer so that the civilian population could be evacuated. Under cover of darkness that same evening, the British sailed unhindered toward Enzeli, whence they had appeared. 34 The panic in Baku needs no description. The Christian population rushed toward the harbour, where they crammed into every available vessel. Nearly half of Baku's seventy thousand Armenians succeeded in escaping the Turkic vengeance by sailing to Enzeli, Astrakhan, or Krasnovodsk. The reminder were abandoned. On the morning of September 15, the Armenian Council and the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship departed in one the last ships, as the Christian quarters of Baku were already shrouded in smoke. Halil, Nuri, and Mürsel withheld the entry of regular Ottoman units into Baku so that the age-old Islamic custom of looting and pillaging defiant cities might be observed. Enver Pasha's subalterns had forbidden the participation of General von Kress' men in the attack and now ignored the entreaties for leniency from the German officers attached to the Turkish staff and from the Baku consuls of neutral nations. 35 The Moslem masses of Baku, thousands of irregular troops, and even several regular Ottoman regiments swarmed throughout the city plundering and killing. Property valued at a billion rubles was destroyed and thousands of Christians fell before the frenzied horde, which garnered sweet revenge for the humiliation and agony of the "March Days." Conservative estimates of Armenian dead are close to ten thousand, while many sources claim that from twenty to thirty thousand Christians were slaughtered. 36 On September 16, the Ottoman divisions marched into Baku in a victory parade reviewed by the Turkish Command and greeted by thousands of cheering Moslems. The despised Bolsheviks and Armenians had been expelled, and Fathali Khan Khoisky's Azerbaijani government was now able to transfer triumphantly from Ganja to the great and natural capital of the world's first Moslem republic. 37
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34) Major General L. C. Dunsterville, "The Adventures of Dunsterforce" (London, 1920), pp. 309-311; A. Rawlinson, "Adventures in the Near East, 1918-1922" (London and New York, 1923), p. 94; Sergei Melik-Yolchian, "Bakvi herosamarte", [The Heroic Battle of Baku], Hairenik Amsagir, III (May, 1925) (August, 1925), pp. 111-112.
35) Johannes Lepsius, "Deutschland und Armenien, 1914-1918: Sammlung diplomatischer Aktenstücke" (Potsdam, 1919), pp. 441-445; Joseph Pomiankowski, "Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches: Erinnerungen an die Türkei aus der Zeit des Weltkrieges" (Leipzig, 1928), p. 374; Archives of the Republic of Armenia Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference [now integrated into the archives of Dashnaktsoutyoun, Boston, Massachusetts], File 1/1, Protest of the Danish, Norwegian, Persian, and Dutch consuls in Baku to Nuri Pasha.
36) W. E. D. Allen and Paul Muratoff, "Caucasian Battlefields: A History of the Wars on the Turco-Caucasian Border, 1828-1921" (Cambridge, 1953), p. 495, give the number killed as 9,000, Joseph Pomiankowski, "Der Zusammenbruch des Ottomanischen Reiches: Erinnerungen an die Türkei aus der Zeit des Weltkrieges" (Leipzig, 1928), p. 374, as 10,000, M. Larcher, "La guerre torque dans le guerre mondiale" (Paris, 1926), p. 423, as 15,000, and E. A. Tokarzhevskii, "Iz istorii inostrannoi interventsii I grazhdanskoi voiny v Azerbaidzhane" (Baku, 1957), p. 160, as between 30,000 and 35,000. The most thorough statistical study of the September massacre is B. Ishkhanian's "Velikie uzhasy v gor. Baku: Anketnoe izsledovanie sentiabr'skikh sobytii 1918 g." (Tbilisi, 1920). He shows that, during the struggle for Baku and immediately following the city's capitulation, 20,000 Armenians perished. Among the refugee population, the number of fatalities from famine, epidemic, and violence subsequently rose to 10,000.
37) Just before the fall of Baku, the Bolshevik prisoners were released, largely through the endeavours of Anastas Mikoyan. Twenty-six of the former Baku commissars sailed aboard the "Turkmen" for Astrakhan, but en route the captain changed course and anchored at Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Social Revolutionaries, in control of Transcaspia, sent the commissars by rail toward Ashkabad. Before reaching the city, the twenty-six commissars were taken from the train, forced to dig their own graves, and then were shost. British Captain Teague-Jones was implicated in the bloody deed, which finds a place in every history of the Soviet Union. Stepan Shahoumian and his comrades, as martyrs and victims of the "imperialistic interventions," still serve their party and ideology.
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