FIRST HOLOCAUST

The dramatic events in Baku, which took place in late March 1918, when thousands of Muslims were killed at the hands of Dashnaks and Bolsheviks, did not leave in the shadow other equally horrible events that occurred in other Azerbaijani cities with other ethnic and religious groups. One of them is the death of hundreds of Jews in Quba.

We must say that for the most part, the Jews of Azerbaijan kept either neutral or helped those who became victims of atrocities to survive. For example, an officer of the Russian army, Prince Mansur Qajar, much later gave a detailed testimony about his salvation thanks to Jewish friends from inevitable death at the hands of Armenians. During the riots, he, like other influential Azerbaijanis, he was held as a hostage in the house of the oilman Melikov, who openly funded Dashnaktsutyun and even turned his home into the headquarters of the organization. This is proved by documents collected by the professor and doctor of historical sciences, Solmaz Rustamova-Tohidi.

The attitude of Jews is also proved by the testimony of Y. N. Smirnov, former public mayor of Baku, in which he emphasizes the sympathetic attitude of the Russian population of the city to the Azerbaijanis in the days of the March tragedy. The documents, as well as numerous testimonies of Azerbaijanis themselves, contains many examples when Jewish, Russian and Georgian neighbours, acquaintances or just passers-by took an active part in saving the lives and property of the Muslims of Baku.

"There were many cases where Jews and Russians hid Muslims," says Ismayil Israfilov, an old man from Baku. "My father fought the Dashnaks in those years. It was, of course, before I was born. And his parents and other family members hid at their neighbours' on Vidadi Street. I cannot name them right now, and I don't even remember them, but almost everyone who lived there helped, and many of them left during the Soviet era, and I myself missed these neighbours."

Deception and terror

The tragedy that befell the people took place not in Baku but in Quba. Quba County (which is confirmed by the census data) had a very colorful ethnic composition in those years and was inhabited by Turks, Jews and Lezgins. Their number was almost equal. We must say that during the years of war and unrest such a thing as "terror" had a positive value for those who organized it, as can be seen from the Bolshevik newspapers of those years. Terror in the form of mass intimidation of the population was the main active force of the Bolsheviks and was therefore increasingly turned against civilians (primarily farmers) rather than their class enemies - the bourgeoisie. In Azerbaijan, it took the form of an alliance between Bolsheviks and Dashnaks. The latter did not know, of course, how this alliance would end. In the meantime, communist Stepan Shaumyan and his associates resorted to a frankly unprincipled collusion with Armenian nationalist groups led by their vanguard - the Dashnaktsutyun party.

What happened in March 1918 in Quba became known only in recent years following the appeal of the community of Mountain Jews to the Academy of Sciences. In a letter to the Institute for Human Rights, the chairman of the community of Mountain Jews of Azerbaijan, S. B. Ikhiilov, said: "Back in the 1980s I discovered facts that were previously unknown to the general public about the mass extermination of Jews that took place during the genocide of the Azerbaijani people in 1918-19. To date, we have managed to identify the names of the 81 innocently murdered Jews. Every year on 31 March, the day of remembrance for the victims of the genocide of the Azerbaijani people in 1918-19, we read funeral prayers for killed Jewish children, women and men. Currently, we continue work to identify mass graves in other parts of our common motherland - Azerbaijan - and establish the names of the dead." This letter is accompanied by a list of representatives of the Jewish civilian population, victims of the sorrowful period in our history, "who died at the hands of bad people on 19 Iyar 5679 in the town of Quba."

The theme of the mass killings of Jews was not covered in the Soviet period, as they were attributed to the Tat ethnic group without indicating faith (the Soviet Union did not divide people on the basis of religion, as everyone had to be an atheist - editor). Therefore, those archives spoke about the extermination of the Tat small ethnic group (which, of course, also cannot justify their actions). So, according to these archives, the mass killings of Jews were carried out by the armed gangs of a Hamazasp, who acted on behalf of Stepan Shaumyan.

The National Academy of Sciences today had to gather information literally bit by bit to determine the scale of the crime and its motives. They were, as it often happened, terror and deception.

The thing is that, once in the Jewish villages, Hamazasp and his men began to spread rumours that local Lezgins are preparing to kill the Jews and that they, Dashnaks and Bolsheviks, have come to protect them. This alliance needed human resources for the war on Muslims. But the Jews did not believe them and then the gangs switched to the second option of "work with the population" - terror.

Today the names and surnames of 81 people have been identified. The Academy of Sciences is still working to identify the names of the victims of terror. The ultimate goal is to identify the total number of victims and their names. The work will end (if possible) with a stele carrying the names of those killed, which will be installed in this land.

According to various estimates, from 3,000 to 12,000 people were killed during the March events in Baku alone and the number of victims throughout the country reached 30,000. Given the number of victims, the March events were one of the bloodiest episodes in the course of the Russian Revolution. According to the Polish historian and specialist in the study of the South Caucasus and especially Azerbaijan, Tadeusz Swietochowski, in the minds of Azerbaijanis the Baku commune became a poignant symbol of the Armenian-Bolshevik conspiracy that was born in the bloodbath of the March events. These events led to the alienation of the Muslim masses from the Bolsheviks, whose power was short-lived. In July 1918, power in Baku was taken over by the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship, and the Baku commissars were forced to flee to Krasnovodsk, where they were executed by local socialist revolutionaries. The Centro-Caspian Dictatorship also did not last long, and in September 1918 the ADR government took control of the city as a result of the Battle of Baku.