course of their retreat provide enough grounds to speak of an ethnic

nature of the hostilities. Another outcome of the clash was that “the

retreat of the Bolsheviks was followed by an exodus of all Russian of-

ficials, except for investigators Manuylov and Esman, as well as phar-

macists and all ethnic Armenians from the area”. (59) Numerous wit-

ness testimonies indicate that Ghelovani “was walking home by home

to evacuate all Russians and Armenians, backed up with the troops”.

According to Ghelovani himself, it was Aghajanyantz, the commander

of the Armenian unit who “gathered all the Christian population of

Guba, dominantly Armenians, with a view to evacuating them”. This

statement sounds trustworthy bearing in mind Ghelovani’s further

comments:

“We started retreating. I was in the foreground with the

unit. The soldiers of Aghajanyantz were fleeing leaving the refugees be-

hind. It should be noted that the refugees were imploring the Armenian

soldiers not to shoot the Lezghins. A group of refugees was taken away

by my unit, whereas another part stayed at the Leontyev Park where

they were massacred by the Lezghins”

. (60)

The casualties of crossfire included several local residents of Rus-

sian, Jewish and Armenian descent “feeing” or “forcedly evacuated”

by the Armenian and Bolshevik units, a Russian and Armenian priests

among them. “Some dead bodies were collected by the Bolsheviks,

the others were left on the spot. No one could figure out whether

they were slain by the Bolsheviks or the Lezghins”. (61)

The population of Guba was only given two weeks to recover. On

May 1, 1918, a 3-thusand-strong unit led by Amazasp and manned

exclusively by ethnic Armenians attacked Guba from three sides.

The way in which “the Soviet rule was reestablished in Guba”

is best described by local residents:

“Early in the morning on May 1,

1918, the unit mentioned above led by a recognized representative of

the Dashnaktsutyun Party, Amazasp, and his aide Nicolay, with exclu-

sively Armenian personnel, surrounded the town and started heavily

bombarding it from cannons, machine-guns and rifles. The mess and

panics were horrible, so the armed unit entered the town unimpeded.”

Immediately after that, the town was divided into four parts with spe-

cial headquarters in each of them: the first was located near the Leon-

tyev Park, the second inside the Armenian church’s fence, the third

one at the mount next to the Muslim cemetery and the forth on the

hill facing the Jewish settlement. (62)

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

of Azerbaijan’s Muslim Population