activists”. The meeting arranged in Guba’s Jewish settlement decided

to facilitate the formation of Red Guard squads. (36)

All these meetings and gatherings aiming at arming the largest

possible number of Bolshevik supporters were far from being an idle

talk. The Bolsheviks were conceiving serious plans to seize power

both in Baku and countryside areas. Awareness of local population

regarding these plans was hard to estimate. However, as of early May

1918, part of Guba’s Armenian population started moving to Baku

either hastily selling their households in town or entrusting them to

their Muslim neighbors.

Soon the Baku Soviet led by Stepan Shaumyan started imple-

menting its plans which, as the enfolding events demonstrated, were

not merely restricted to the seizure of power. Tragic events of March

1918 indicated the very first step of this policy.

***

As a result of pogroms of the Azerbaijani population commit-

ted by the Bolshevik and Armenian squads, with partial involvement

of Baku’s Armenian population, more than 12 thousand people were

brutally massacred within just a week. The victims were mainly rep-

resenting the city’s Turkic and Muslim population with civilians provi-

ding an overwhelming majority in the death toll.

Three days out of this week, i.e. evening March 30 to April 2,

were the culmination of the bloodbath. Dozens of thousands house-

holds were looted and set afire in the Muslim neighborhoods together

with Muslim-owned industrial, civilian and commercial facilities and a

number of social, cultural and spiritual hubs particularly valuable for

the local Azerbaijani residents.

It should be emphasized that from the very outset of this car-

nage, the masterminds of these events led by S.Shaumyan were trying

to present them first as “suppression of a riot by the nationalists from

the

Mussavat

party and counter-revolutionary elements supporting

them”, and then as “a civil war”. (37) Needless to say, none of these

definitions stands to any critical test.

Lack of any Azerbaijani military forces neither in Baku, nor in its

environs by March 1918, as well as absence of any armed units of “the

nationalists from

Mussavat

party capable of raising “riot” against the

12 thousand-strong Red Army units (38) was mentioned not only by

Events of 1918 in Guba in the Context of Plans for Mass Extermination

of Azerbaijan’s Muslim Population