Guba, April-May 1918. Documented Pogroms of the Muslims

216

sian and Turkish Armenians, the party leaders, through armed revolts and terrorist

attacks were planning to create to establish an autonomous state of the Greater

Armenia stretching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caspian Sea and embracing

territories of neighboring states like Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey. After the Octo-

ber Revolution of 1917,

Dashnaktsutyun

activists were involved in the foundation of

the Trans-Caucasian Commissariat and the Trans-Caucasian Seim. The party’s Baku

outlet had its own Central Committee and

Vpered

newspaper published in Russian.

Out of 50 members of the Armenian National Council founded in Baku in March

1917, 17 were representing

Dashnaktsutyun

Party. While the Baku Commune’s po-

wer was established,

Dashnaktsutyun

activists entered made an alliance with the

Baku Soviet led by S.Shaumyan to be jointly involved in the massacre of the civi-

lian Muslim population in Baku, Shemakha and other places in Azerbaijan during

the events of March 1918. With demise of the Transcucsian state in May 1918, the

party activists formed and headed the Government of Armenia. In the Democratic

Republic of Azerbaijan,

Dashnaktsutyun

had a fraction in the Azerbaijani Parliament,

although the party’s overall influence was significantly weakened. In Armenia,

Dash-

naktsutyun

was the party in power since May 1918 to November 1920. Upon the

Soviet takeover of Armenia, the party went underground, with major activists emi-

grating.

The Shemakha events

broke out almost at the same time with the events

in Baku on March 30(12), 1918 when the pogroms occurred all over Shamakha

Uyezd. The whole Muslim part of Shemakha was scorched out by Select squads

led by Stepan Lalayev, Tatevos Amirov and others scorched out the whole Mus-

lim section of Shemakha together with all Azerbaijani households in the Armenian

neighborhood, all mosques with people sheltered there and all commercial and

civil outlets owned by the Azerbaijanis. The pogroms also spread on the villages of

Shemakha Uyezd where 72 Azerbaijani settlements were plundered and devastated

and the number of death toll reached 7 thousand persons, including 1653 women

and 965 children. Surviving Azerbaijani residents were forced to flee.

Alexandrovich (Litovski) Aley Adamovich

(1882-?), a lawyer, a Lithu-

anian Tatar by ethnic origin, admitted to the bar of the Judicial Court in Vilno on

December 21, 1913. As of September 1919, an attorney at law in District Court

Chamber of Azerbaijan. Following recommendation by Mammad-Khan Tekinski,

A.Alexandrovich was included into the Ad Hoc Investigation Commission to serve in

the AHIC Baku team as the officer in charge for the Commission’s correspondence.

With no official employment by public services he served at the AHIC until the dis-

solution of the Commission in November 1919. In early Soviet years, Alexandrovich

was a member of the Investigation Commission at the Supreme Tribunal. No further

information available.

The comment made in the Soviet period

Jafarov Mammadyoussif Hajjibala oghlu

(1885-1938), a recognized pub-

lic figure and statesman of his time, one of the founding fathers of the Democratic

Republic of Azerbaijan, Deputy Chairman of the Azerbaijani Parliament, graduate of

the high school in Baku and the School of Law at the University of Moscow, member

of the 4

State Duma (the Russian legislature), the Special Trans-Caucasian Commit-