March Days, Baku §

Background

By March 1918 the city of Baku sat at a four-way intersection of late imperial collapse: the Bolshevik Stepan Shahumyan commanded the Baku Soviet, which exercised effective authority over the city (Kazemzadeh, 1951, Ch. 4); the Musavat party led the Azerbaijani Muslim political community in opposition; the Armenian National Council, dominated by the ARF (Dashnaktsutyun), commanded the bulk of the demobilised tsarist army's Armenian units in the Caucasus (Richard G. Hovannisian, 1996, Vol. I, Ch. 2); and the British Empire, still locked in the war against the Ottomans, was seeking access to the Caspian to keep Baku oil out of Central Powers hands.

The proximate trigger was Shahumyan's confiscation, in early March, of munitions from a steamer that had been carrying the personal bodyguard of an Azerbaijani notable to a funeral (Swietochowski, 1995, Ch. 5). The confrontation rapidly escalated. Most analysts read the underlying contest as one between the Soviet–Armenian alliance and the Musavat–Ottoman alliance for control of the city as the Ottoman Army of Islam under Nuri Pasha approached from the west. editorial

The event

Fighting began on 30 March 1918 between Soviet–Armenian forces and Musavat-aligned militia. By 31 March, the Musavat military had been broken; by 1 April, Soviet authority was secure across the city (Swietochowski, 1995, Ch. 5). But the violence did not stop with the Musavat units' surrender. Over the following four to five days, Armenian Dashnak detachments, operating notionally under Soviet command but in practice independently, moved through the Muslim quarters of the inner city, the Old City and Bayil. Civilian deaths in those quarters dominate the casualty count (Swietochowski, 1995, Ch. 5).

Estimates have ranged enormously (Audrey L. Altstadt, 1992, Ch. 4): contested

• Soviet-era and contemporaneous accounts: c. 3,000 Muslim dead; c. 2,000 Armenian dead.
• Swietochowski and Altstadt (academic Western Azerbaijani-side): 8,000–12,000 Muslim dead (Swietochowski, 1995, Ch. 5).
• Modern Azerbaijani official: 12,000 Muslim dead.
• de Waal and the Kazemzadeh tradition: 3,000–10,000 (Thomas de Waal, 2010, Ch. 2).

The systematic basis for the higher figures is uneven; most academic accounts converge in a range of 3,000–10,000 Muslim and approximately 2,000 Armenian dead. The qualitative finding is uncontested: the Armenian Dashnak detachments killed civilians in considerable numbers, and the killings were not incidental to the military operation.

Aftermath

The Soviet–Armenian alliance held the city through the summer. In late July it was displaced by the brief Centro-Caspian Dictatorship (a coalition of Mensheviks, SRs and Dashnaks), under whose patronage British forces under Major-General Dunsterville landed in the city. Both, in turn, were swept aside in mid-September by the September Days, when the Ottoman Army of Islam took the city and the Musavat–Ottoman command tolerated three days of retaliatory massacre against the Armenian population.

The two events are paired in regional memory. Swietochowski reads the September Days as "explicitly framed as retaliation for the March Days" (Swietochowski, 1995, Ch. 5). sourced opinion The pairing is symmetrical in form but asymmetric in two relevant senses: the September Days were larger in scale and were committed by an external invading force, while the March Days were committed by long-resident urban detachments under domestic political authority. editorial

Memory and politics

In Azerbaijani memory the March Days are the genocidal foundation of the modern conflict (Audrey L. Altstadt, 2017, Ch. 9). contested 31 March is observed as the "Day of Genocide of Azerbaijanis" by presidential decree of Heydar Aliyev of 1998, which ascribed to the events both genocidal intent and a casualty figure of 12,000 (Audrey L. Altstadt, 2017, Ch. 9).

In Armenian historiography the events are typically read as a Bolshevik–Musavat civil war during which Armenian detachments under Bolshevik command committed massacres, events for which institutional Armenian responsibility is partial (the units acted under Bolshevik political authority and substantially without Armenian National Council direction) (Richard G. Hovannisian, 1996, Vol. I, Ch. 2). editorial Both readings have merit; both also have political functions in their respective contemporary politics. The dispute is documented in detail at the March Days dispute in this atlas.