Everything about March Days totally explained
March Events can also refer to the
Polish student and intellectual protest of 1968.
Despite this appeal for calm from
Lenin to
Shaumyan, immediately upon its arrival, some officers of the Azerbaijani division including its commander, General Talyshinski, were arrested by the Baku Soviet, which resulted in calls for armed resistance to the Soviet among the Azerbaijanis in the city and sparked the violence that pursued on March 30th through April 3rd in Baku, known as "the March Days of 1918."
On 30 March the Soviet based on the unfounded report that the
Muslim crew of the ship
Evelina was armed and ready to revolt against the Soviet, disarmed the crew which tried to resist.
However, according to
Peter Hopkirk, things went in this way:
Alarmed by the growing military strength of the Armenians, to which British founding had undoubtedly contributed, the Baku Muslims had secretly sough help from their co-religionists elsewhere. Among those who responded were units of the all-Muslim Savage Division, which had until the Revolution formed part of the Tsarist forces. Flushed by their success in overthrowing the Bolshevik garrison at the Caspian port of Lenkoran, some detachments now set sail for Baku. Their arrival, on March 30, caused great consternation among both Bolsheviks and Armenians. When officials were sent down to the dockside to try to discover what their intentions were, they were driven back by gunfire, a number of them being killed. Eventually however, the newcomers were disarmed by a stronger Bolshevik force. But then more units of the Savage Division arrived on April 1, in MacDonell's words, "the Baku cauldron boiled over". No one really knows who fired the first shot, but very soon it had become a battlefield, with trenches and barricades being hastily prepared everywhere.. The Soviet side, led by Shaumyan, realized that full civil war was starting and its own forces were insufficient against Azerbaijani masses led by Musavat. Allies were found among Baku Mensheviks, [[Socialist-RevolutionaryParty |
That the attack was directed just as much against the civilian population as against the military detachments of Musavat there can be no doubt. Every Azerbaijani whom the Dashnak bands could catch was killed, and many Persians lost their lives too. According to various sources, a total of between 3,000 to 12,000 Muslims were killed during the violence }}
Shaumyan further "admitted that the participation of the Armenian units ‘lent the civil war, to some extent, the character of a national massacre’, adding that ‘the Muslim poor suffered severely’"}}
Joseph Stalin, who was
Bolshevik People's Commissar at the time, tried to justify the provoking of the
March Days by the Baku Soviet in
Bolshevik "Pravda" newspaper:
"While the center of Muslims, Baku, the citadel of Soviet power in Transcaucasus, unified around itself the entire Eastern Transcaucasus, from Lenkoran and Kuba till Elizavetpol, with arms in hands is asserting the rights of people of Transcaucasus, who try by all forces to maintain a link with Soviet Russia" .
According to one source, pro-Bolshevik Moslems from the Hummet party also took part in the attack on the Azeri quarters in Baku. However this claim isn't supported by other sources. S.M. Efendiev, one of the leaders of the Hummet, was very critical on the conduct of the events. Eventually when the civil war started, most of the Muslims of Russia allied themselves with the Bolsheviks, as the other side seemed even less attractive
The opinions of scholars about the motives of Dashnak militants differ. According to Michael P. Croissant, the
Dashnaks set out to take revenge for the persecution and
genocide suffered by Armenians at the hands of the
Ottomans, while Tadeusz Swietochowski states that "Armenian historians don't offer an explanation for the political calculations behind this move, which was bound to entail terrible retribution, and they hint rather at an uncontrollable emotional outburst".
Aftermath
"The March events touched off a series of massacres all over
Azerbaijan" . "The brutalities continued for weeks. No quarter was given by either side: neither age nor sex was respected. Enormous crowds roamed the streets, burning houses, killing every passer-by who was identified as an enemy, many innocent persons suffering death at the hands of both the Armenians and Azerbaijanis. The struggle which had begun as a political contest between the Musavat and the Soviet assumed the characters of a gigantic race riot" . Persian Armenians in Baku tried to and saved many lives of their fellow citizens, which may have been the basis for Bagrat's exaggerated assertion that some 20,000 Muslims were saved by Armenians . A special commission formed by the
Armenian National Council (ANC) reported a total of 8,988 ethnic Armenians massacred, among which were 5,248 Armenian inhabitants of Baku, 1,500 Armenian refugees from other parts of the Caucasus who were in Baku, and 2,240 Armenians whose corpses were found in the streets but whose identities were never established . It must be noted that these figures were gathered by the
Armenian National Council, whom one can hardly expect to be objective in such a matter .
Further Information
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