Guba, April-May 1918. Documented Pogroms of the Muslims
42
pyan) was just an example of this kind, however its direct link with
some facts of the then recent history drove Mirjafar Baghirov to draw
the attention of the Soviet leadership of the day to the aggressive na-
ture of the Armenian nationalism in its new forms and manifestations.
It should be inter alia mentioned that the text of Baghirov’s con-
clusive speech at the Azerbaijani Communist Party Congress with co-
pies of certain documents and a letter to Stalin were sent to Moscow,
and his insistent requests to raise the issue of The Bay Lights novel at
the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist (Bolshevik) Party
upheld. (99)
In the meantime, the value of Baghirov’s speech and the 17th
Communist Congress was not only to draw attention of the party elite
to this ‘harmful book’ and related issues.
Speaking of the Baku events of 1918, even though through the
prism of the official version of ‘the civil war’, Baghirov nonetheless
admitted that “errors of some comrades from the Baku Sovnarkom
(The Soviet of People’s Commissars) in 1918 played perfectly into the
hands of Dashnaktsutyun and Mussavat parties’ activists, the former
ones in particular, as they benefited from the momentum to trans-
form the civil war into an ethnic one, in some places, and thus to
arrange a massacre”. (100)
In fact, this was the first time when the high-ranking Bolshevik
public figure dared to qualify the March events of 1918 as a “massacre”
of the Azerbaijani population committed by the Armenian Dashnak-
tsutyun activists due to “errors” of the Bolshevik authorities of the day.
Meanwhile, Baghirov was not confined with this. “Amazasp,
Abram Velutz, colonel Avetisov – they all were far from fighting for
the Soviet rule, - he stated, - I was a witness, and, regretfully an inad-
vertent participant of these events, following certain comrades’ sug-
gestion. I was representing Amazasp’s squad, and I saw what they
committed in Guba, let alone Shemakha and other places”. (101)
This way or another, more than 30 years after the events in Guba, the
representative of the Soviet regime, an Azerbaijani Bolshevik Mirjafar Baghi-
rov speaking at the Communist Party forum to the Communist elite ulti-
mately admitted that the events inGuba had nothing to dowith establishing
the Soviet rule in the area and that the so-called ‘Red Army commanders’
led by Amazasp were in fact performing a totally different mission.