26 Baku Commissars

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The 26 Baku Commissars were Bolshevik and Left SR members of the Baku Soviet Commune that was established in Baku after the October Revolution. The commune was led by Stepan Shahumyan until July 26, 1918 when the Bolsheviks were forced out of power by a coalition of Dashnaks, Right SRs and Mensheviks. After the overthrow, the Baku commissars attempted to escape but were captured by the White Army and placed in a Baku prison. On September 14, Red Army soldiers broke into the prison and freed the commissars who then boarded a ship to Krasnovodsk, where they were promptly arrested, and on the night of September 20, 1918 executed by a firing squad between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma of the Transcaucasian Railroad.

See the article:

Main article: Azerbaijan_Democratic_Republic#The_fight_for_Baku

[edit] Impact of execution

Isaak Brodsky's "The Execution of the Twenty Six Baku Commissars" depicting the Soviet view of the execution.

Soviet officials blamed the execution on British agents acting in the Baku area at the time, in particular, Reginald Teague-Jones.^[1][1][2] The British denied involvement in the incident, saying it was done by local officials without any knowledge of the British. This caused a further souring of relations between the British and the then fledgling Soviet government and helped lead to the confrontational attitude of both sides in the coming years.

The Soviets would later immortalize the death of the 26 commissars through, among other things, movies[3], artwork[4], stamps[5], and public works including the 26 Commissars Memorial.

[edit] Commissars

The 26 Commissars were:^[2]
Stepan Shahumyan
Meshadi Azizbekov
Prokopius Dzhaparidze
Ivan Fioletov
Mir-Hasan Vazirov
Grigory Korganov
Yakov Zevin
Grigory Petrov
L.V. Malygin
A.M. Amiryan
M.V. Basin
S.G. Osepyan
E.A. Berg
V.F. Poluhin
F.F. Solntzev
A.A. Bor'yan
I.Y. Gabyshev
M.R. Koganov
B.A. Avakyan
I.P. Metaksa
I.M. Nikolayshvili
A.M. Kostandyan
S.A. Bogdanov
A.A. Bogdanov
I.A. Mishne
T.M. Amirov

[edit] Notes

^ Reginald Teague-Jones, The Spy Who Disappeared: Diary of a Secret Mission to Russian and Central Asia in 1918 Gollancz, 1990.
^ Peter Hopkirk, Like Hidden Fire Kodansha, 1995. Names transliterated from a Soviet pamphlet showing names and pictures of the commissars.