Baku Commune

After the March Days, the Bolsheviks held only 58 of the 308 seats in the Baku Soviet in April 1918, yet Shaumyan carried a resolution, by 124 votes to 2 with 20 abstentions, to form a Council of People’s Commissars of Bolsheviks and Left SRs alone. Members of other factions could take part only individually and on condition that they recognised Soviet power. Four commissars were Left SRs and the rest were Bolsheviks. The government declared that it was not seceding from the Russian Soviet Republic but remained part of it. It reorganised the courts and schools, expropriated banks, shipping, fisheries and the oil industry, decreed the nationalisation of the subsoil on 22 May and introduced the eight-hour working day on 25 May. According to the English-language source, the Baku Cheka executed only two people, both members of the Soviet caught embezzling public funds.

The commune stood on weak ground. The Bolsheviks were a minority in the Soviet, and the Muslims, the largest group in the city’s population, were not represented in the government. Seventy per cent of its troops were Armenians, which gave the Dashnaks great influence, and during the failed attack on Ganja Armenian soldiers committed violence and looting against the Muslim population. After the Red Army was beaten by the Islamic Army of the Caucasus at Goychay, the Baku Soviet, with a majority of Dashnaks, Right SRs and Mensheviks, voted on 25 July to call in Lionel Dunsterville’s British force from Enzeli. The commissars resigned in protest, and on 26 July, after 97 days, the Centrocaspian Dictatorship took their place. The Russian-language source notes that Azerbaijanis saw the commune as a case of Bolshevik–Armenian collusion.