THE FIRST VICTIM

After seizing power in Azerbaijan on 28 April 1920 with the aid of the 11th Red Army, the Bolsheviks straightaway set about repressing their political opponents - the former leaders of the Azerbaijani Democratic Republic. They were, in the first instance, members of the Musavat and Ittihad parties, leading public figures and ordinary citizens working in various, including lower, structures of the overthrown government.

Even soldiers who guarded the state parliament building were arrested on suspicion of "counter-revolutionary activities". It was the 11th Red Army that introduced reprisals against anyone in Azerbaijan who did not share the communists' ideological convictions. A special unit, whose task was to seek out "enemies of the revolution", existed not only within the Army, but also in all its divisions and regiments, as well as the Navy and on the railways.  Also founded at the same time were the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal (SRT) of the ASSR [Azerbaijani Soviet Socialist Republic] and the Azerbaijani Extraordinary Commission (ACheka), which later became the Azerbaijani Main Political Directorate (AzGPU).

One of the first people the Bolsheviks planned to deal with was an employee of the Kaspiy newspaper, Izrael Glachenhaus. At the beginning of the last century, along with Ceyhun Hacibayov, he was a leading journalist on the paper. The tone of his articles matched the pseudonym he used to sign them - "Needle". Unfortunately, there is no evidence in the archives about the personal life of this remarkable journalist, although his articles are an accurate record of his work. The sparse information we have today about Glachenhaus can be found in the criminal proceedings we discovered in the State Archives of the Azerbaijani Republic.

He wrote what he saw

Izrael Glachenhaus was born in Minsk on 20 January 1876, so at the time he was arrested he was 45 years of age. He was educated at home and he arrived in Baku in 1901, where he lived with a family on Tatarskaya (now A. Topcibasev) street. He had no children of his own, so he took in three children from an orphanage and brought them up. It is worthy of note that the people who had deprived children of parents condemned someone who fostered three children but never allowed them to feel they were orphans. His main place of work was the Kaspiy newspaper, but his work was also published in Bakinskoye Slovo and Azerbaijan. He was active in public life and was a member of the "Children's Hospital" society, whose objective was to open a health care centre for children from all social groups.

When the Bolsheviks came to power, I. Glachenhaus found himself unemployed. On 15 June 1920 he filed a request to the People's Commissariat of Justice: "I have 15 years experience working on newspapers and many years experience in the printing industry and I would like to be offered a suitable post in the Commissariat. Among other things, I could do proofreading." But he received no reply. However, on 27 June the AzCheka received a statement from one Bekzadyants, who described Glachenhaus as a hater of Soviet power and someone who was "painful to read". "He expressed delight at the arrival of the Turks in Baku," Bekzadyants pointed out. Attached to the statement was an article by Glachenhaus in which he expressed his attitude to the flight of the Bolsheviks from Baku in 1918: "Over the course of 18 months this thousands-strong gang has drunk and eaten the people out of house and home, it has traded off everything they held sacred, fed off its blood, deceived, mocked and betrayed them. They are a gang that comes in two varieties: inveterate scoundrels and inveterate nonentities. After doing their dirty work, the gangs and their ringleaders did not hang themselves like Judas the arch traitor, but grabbing the last farthing paid to the workers they fled to where there was more blood flowing, where the riff-raff and dregs of society and thieves released from gaol reign…From Bolshevik to Menshevik and from SR [Socialist Revolutionary] to Dashnak they are all as light-weight as gazelles and swift as wolves when it comes to saving their own skin. Because your own skin is dearer than the 'beloved people' and your own well-being is more sacred than the Internationale."

Investigator Simonyants was instructed to examine the statement. On his instruction, Glachenhaus was arrested and questioned by him. Simonyants "found" strong evidence to bring proceedings against the journalist. A further investigation into the case was carried out by Turkov of the Azerbaijani Extraordinary Committee. At an interrogation on 7 August (40 days after the arrest) he asked Glachenhaus: "Why did you call the Bolsheviks vandals and destroyers?" The journalist's reply was brief and terse: "I wrote what I saw in 1918." Answering further questions, he told Turkov that "he did not have the opportunity to write under the Bolsheviks because when they were in power (November 1917 - August 1918: author's note), there were no non-Communist papers in Baku and he was kept away from the Communist press". Asked "But were you allowed to publish articles under the Musavat?" he said "Yes. The Musavatists gave me freedom (to publish: author's note).  One interrogation was enough for Turkov to transfer the investigation to the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal [SRT], which sent him for trial.

For telling the truth

The indictment, which was signed by a member of the SRT, said: "At a time of the greatest tension in the struggle between capital and labour, when the former had created a united counter-revolutionary front - the destruction of the power of the working people - citizen Glachenhaus was one of the masterminds behind this battle. Armed with his pen, the acrimony, vileness and depravity of which were as sharp as a needle, he lashed all his talent against the one enemy of his master - the proletariat. Sparing no efforts, he vilified the shining leaders of Communism, undermined faith in them and portrayed them as traders of the masses, barbarians, traitors of the workers, thieves and rapists in order to root out from the hearts of the workers any ideological or spiritual link between the latter and the leaders of the social revolution. The Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal, regarding citizen Glachenhaus a most destructive element and a criminal before the memory of dead comrades - Shaumyan, Dzhaparidze and others - commits him for trial, charging him on the specified counts."

Appeal to Nariman Narimanov

The SRT's trial of Glachenhaus took place on 5 September 1920. The tribunal, chaired by Khaltukov, found that "the accused, in the Kaspiy newspaper published under the Musavatist government, being at that time one of its prominent employees, deliberately published articles of a counter-revolutionary nature directed against the Bolshevist movement…He called for the destruction of the Bolsheviks, thereby exhorting the masses to the overthrow of Soviet power, the power of the working people". The court decreed that "citizen Izrael Yulyevich Glachenhaus, as a witting and inveterate enemy of the working people, should face the ultimate punishment - execution by firing squad. This sentence is final and comes into force and is not subject to appeal".

Clearly, neither Glachenhaus nor the members of his family expected such a severe sentence. That same day, 5 September, he wrote from his Bayilovo prison to the chairman of the Azerbaijani Revolutionary Committee, Nariman Narimanov: "Working as an honest and conscientious journalist all my life, I might sometimes be wrong but I would never deliberately be an enemy of the interests of the working masses and the proletariat." Narimanov wrote a brief instruction: "Suspend the execution of the judgement and send the document urgently to me."

On the day the sentence was announced the journalist's brother Yakov Glachenhaus approached Nari-manov and his wife Anna Glachenhaus appealed to the CC [Central Commit-tee] of the Azerbaijani Communist Party (Bolshevik).

A joint session of the Political Bureau and Organizational Bureau of the ACP CC was held on 15 September, 1920. The item "The case of I. Glachenhaus" was included in the agenda of the session. The minutes of this meeting say nothing about how the debates proceeded. Only the ruling of the session is known: "The death sentence is to be quashed and replaced by confinement until the end of the civil war."

Incidentally, a separate question about the work of the AzCheka was examined at this session of the Politburo and the Orgburo. A report on this question was made by N. Narimanov. He noted that as a result of unsatisfactory work the AzCheka is not fighting against counter-revolution but is "engendering counter-revolution". At this same session Eyub Xanbudagov was appointed chairman of the AzCheka and Baba Aliyev one of his deputies.

Little is known of the later fate of Izrael Glachenhaus.  A session of the Commission for Amnesty and Release from Detention Centres was held on 10 February 1921, at which it was decided that Glachenhaus should be "released on probation and sent for training to Azertsentrpechat with the proviso that he also carries out dual employment as a cultural and educational worker at a remand centre as he has proved himself to be a fine cultural and educational worker".