Guba, April-May 1918. Documented Pogroms of the Muslims
40
However comrade Levon Gogoberidze, an authorized representative
of Alesha Japaridze arriving in Guba 4 days after Amazasp, did not
even bother to listen to him. Instead he charged Baghirov and his four
aides with involvement in the bloodshed and ordered their arrest. A
new Revolutionary Committee (Revkom) was established in town led
by Churayev. This new Revkom was dominated by ethnic Georgians
due to the officers and representatives of Georgian descent seconded
by Japaridze. They got engaged in negotiations with A.Zizikski, then
deployed in Gusar Precinct of Guba Uyezd while arrested M.Baghirov
was writing a detailed personal letter to Stepan Shaumyan. (94)
Baghirov did not elaborate on the contents of the letter he
wrote while in detention. Instead, “having received reports about a
new attack to be made on Guba, secretly, not be apprehended by
either Hamdulla Efendi of Alibey Zizikski, and with no Gogoberidze’s
consent he fled Guba to Baku”. (95) After this, he never showed up in
Guba again unless the Soviet power was finally established in Azer-
baijan in 1920.
Odd as this may seem, the Guba events of 1918 were mentioned
almost 30 years later by Mirjafar Baghirov, then the First Secretary of
the Azerbaijani Communist party and the leader of the Soviet Socialist
Republic of Azerbaijan. This happened during Baghirov’s concluding
speech at the 17th Congress of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of
Azerbaijan held on January 25-28, 1949 in Baku. The reason of this
was an increasing activeness of Dashnaktsutyun Party both within the
Soviet Union and abroad. While the claim to increase the territory of
Soviet Armenia at the expense of the Soviet Republics of Georgia and
Azerbaijan constituted the leitmotif of the Dashnaktsutyun’s anti-So-
viet activities abroad (96), within the USSR this found its way through
books and publications featuring an overtly anti-Azerbaijani stance.
In that particular case, it was The Bay Lights novel by someone
Georgy Kholopov (Khalapyan) that became the subject to Baghirov’s
criticism. The novel dedicated to S.M.Kirov, one of the leading Rus-
sian and Soviet state and public figures, was featuring Kirov’s being
the head of Azerbaijan’s Communist Party in 1921-1926. However, ac-
cording to Baghirov, “ while describing Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan,
the author intentionally excluded the Azerbaijani people from the nar-
rative and presented its characters in a provocative manner”.
So what was the rationale behind such an overt and abrupt criti-