March Days - Aftermath

Aftermath

Further information: Armenian–Azerbaijani War and Battle of Baku

In the immediate aftermath of the March Days, many of the Muslim survivors fled to Elisabethpol (Ganja) in central Azerbaijan. While the Temporary Executive Committee of the Muslim National Councils and the Musavat ceased their activities on the territory of the Baku Governorate, the left-wing Azerbaijani political groups, such as the SRs and the Hümmet, benefited from the developments and became effective leaders of the Azerbaijani community in Baku. The Muslim Socialist Bureau appealed to the Committee of Revolutionary Defense to redress some of the grievances of some of the Muslims.

On April 13, 1918, within few days of the massacres, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Stepan Shahumyan proclaimed the Baku Commune. This new body endeavored to nationalize Baku's oil fields, drawing ire from the British, and to form the "Red Army of Baku", an undisciplined and poorly managed force composed largely of ethnic Armenian recruits. Although the majority of the Commissars (leaders of Baku Commune) were ethnic Armenians, two of them were ethnic Azeri revolutionaries, Meshadi Azizbekov and Mir Hasan Vazirov. Nevertheless, in Azeri psyche, the Baku Commune symbolized the Bolshevik - Armenian collusion born out of the March Days bloodbath.

March Days of 1918 had a profound effect on the formulation of Azerbaijani political objectives as well. While before Azerbaijani leaders only sought an autonomy within the Russian domain, after the Bolshevik-perpetrated massacres in Baku, they no longer believed in Russian Revolution and turned to the Ottomans for support in achieving total independence. Therefore when Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was proclaimed on May 28, 1918, its government immediately dispatched a delegation to Istanbul for discussing a possibility of the Ottoman military support for the young republic. The Ottoman triumvir, Enver Pasha, agreed to Azerbaijani requests and charged his brother, Nuru Pasha, with forming an Ottoman military unit, known as the Caucasus Army of Islam, to retake Baku. When in July 1918, the Ottoman-Azerbaijani force defeated the "Red Army of Baku" in several key battles in Central Azerbaijan, Bolshevik power in Baku started crumbling under pressure from the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, Dashnaks and British agents in the city. On August 1, 1918, the Baku Commune was replaced by the Centrocaspian Dictatorship, which desperately invited a 1000-strong British expeditionary force led by General Lionel Dunsterville to the city. But this was a futile effort and, in face of an overwhelming Ottoman-Azerbaijani offensive, the Dunsterforce fled and the Caucasus Army of Islam entered the Azerbaijani capital on September 15, 1918.

The March Days brought the underlying tension between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis to the fore. Less than six months after the March massacres, when the Ottoman-Azerbaijani force entered Baku, the city fell into chaos and nearly 10,000 Armenians were massacred. A special commission formed by the Armenian National Council (ANC) reported a total of 8,988 ethnic Armenians massacred, among which were 5,248 Armenian inhabitants of Baku, 1,500 Armenian refugees from other parts of the Caucasus who were in Baku, and 2,240 Armenians whose corpses were found in the streets but whose identities were never established. Although these figures were gathered by the Armenian National Council, and have been questioned by some, given the general run of events, they were unlikely to be too exaggerated.

While trying to escape Baku amidst the Ottoman-Azerbaijani offensive, the Bolshevik Baku Commissars were taken by a ship across the Caspian to Krasnovodsk, where they were imprisoned by the Social Revolutionary Transcaspian Government with alleged support of the British. Few days later, on September 20, 1918, between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma on the Trans-Caspian railway, 26 of the Commissars were executed by a firing squad.