26 Baku Commissars

After the fall of the Baku Commune its leaders tried to reach Astrakhan but were intercepted by the Caspian fleet and imprisoned. On 14 September 1918, as Baku fell to Ottoman forces, a group led by Anastas Mikoyan freed them, and they boarded the ship Turkmen for Astrakhan, but the ship went to Krasnovodsk instead. Recent historians attribute this to the sailors’ fear of arrest in Astrakhan; Soviet historiography said that two British officers on board ordered the change of course. They were arrested in Krasnovodsk and, on the decision of the Ashkhabad Committee led by the Socialist Revolutionary Fyodor Funtikov, executed by Turkmen soldiers. The 26 included not only commissars but also bodyguards, a clerk and a journalist, and were Greeks, Latvians, Jews, Russians, Georgians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis. How Mikoyan survived remains uncertain.

The Soviet Union blamed the British. The British liaison officer Reginald Teague-Jones attended the committee’s meeting but did not pass on Major-General Wilfrid Malleson’s proposal to hand the prisoners over to the British as hostages, and the historian Richard H. Ullman holds that he could have stopped the executions had he wished. Funtikov, tried and shot in Baku in 1926, claimed that Teague-Jones had ordered the shooting, but Britain denied any involvement. The dispute further soured relations between Britain and the Soviet government. The remains were reburied in a central square in Baku in 1920, and the commissars were commemorated in films, paintings, stamps and monuments. In 2009 the Azerbaijani authorities demolished the 26 Commissars Memorial and on 26 January reburied the remains at Hovsan Cemetery, a move the Armenian public saw as motivated by reluctance to have ethnic Armenians buried in the centre of the capital.