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

tion accompanied by bodyguards. Consequently he withdrew all his

troops with no order to do so and retreated towards Baku. Anastas

Mikoyan, then the unit commissar, charged Amazasp with treason

and sent Shaumyan a telegram requesting his arrest. (183)

Another time when “the hero” fled the frontline leaving his

troops in the lurch was in September 1918 when Amazasp fled Baku

to Persia confronted with advancing troops of the Islamic Army of the

Caucasus and the Azerbaijani troops.

Upon completion of World War 1, Amazasp returned to the Cau-

casus to be appointed “the commander of the Armenian Army at Nor-

Bayazet region”. (184) After the Soviet regime was established in Ar-

menia in November 1920, Amazasp stayed in Yerevan relying on “his

merits to the Armenian nation”. However the Armenian Bolsheviks

played a fatal trick on him. In mid-January 1921, he was arrested with

a group of officers to be then deported to Baku. Nonetheless he was

hatcheted to death in prison. His reported last words were: “Bastards,

is this the way to kill people?!” A person initiating terrible atrocities

towards thousands of civilians was defaced to the point when his son

could only identify him by his boots. (185)

***

The Investigation Case on the Devastation of the Town of Guba

and Villages of Guba Uyezd shelved in archives as of 1920, was “dis-

covered” good 70 years later, when the files of the Ad Hoc Inves-

tigation Commission together with other documents related to the

Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan were generally made available to

experts and Azerbaijani scholars in the late 1980’s. It was the period

of perestroika in the former Soviet Union when previously classified

archive records became accessible. Meanwhile this period marked a

new phase of Armenian aggression against the Azerbaijanis with the

Nagorno-Garabagh Azerbaijani-Armenian conflict unleashed in 1988.

This in turn necessitated substantial research of the issue based on

historic documents. Further studies of archive files revealed egregious

facts of mass murder, repression, expulsion of ethnic Azerbaijanis from

the places of their indigenous habitation by the Armenian militants, a

policy that could be qualified as genocide.

Events that took place in various urban and rural areas of Azer-

baijan from May to September 1918, the Guba events in particular,