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Stepan Georgevich Shaumian (; ; 1 October 1878 – 20 September 1918) was an Armenians Bolsheviks revolutionary and politician active throughout the Caucasus. His role as a leader of the Russian Revolution in the Caucasus earned him the nickname of the "Caucasian Lenin", a reference to Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin.Panossian, Razmik. The Armenians: From Kings And Priests to Merchants And Commissars. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006 p. 211;
The founder and editor of several newspapers and journals, Shaumian is best known as the head of the Baku Commune, a short-lived committee appointed by Lenin in March 1918 with the task of leading the revolution in the Caucasus and West Asia. His tenure as leader of the Baku Commune was marred with numerous problems including ethnic violence between Baku's Armenian and Azerbaijani populations, attempting to defend the city against an advancing Turkish army, all the while attempting to spread the cause of the revolution throughout the region. Unlike many of the other Bolsheviks at the time, he preferred to resolve many of the conflicts he faced peacefully rather than with force and state terrorism.
Shaumian was known by various aliases, including "Suren", "Surenin" and “Ayaks". After the Baku Commune was voted out of power in July 1918, he fled across the Caspian Sea with the other leaders of the Commune, known as the 26 Baku Commissars. He and the rest of the commissars were captured and executed by anti-Bolshevik forces on 20 September 1918.
Shaumyan returned to Tiflis in 1904, obtained a job as a teacher, while working illicitly as a Bolshevik organiser, leader of local Social Democrats in Tiflis, as well as a prolific writer of Marxism literature. By 1907 he had moved to Baku to head up the significant Bolshevik movement in the city. Joseph Stalin, then known as 'Koba' was also based in Baku. They clashed. Shaumian was arrested on May Day, 1909, but was released after his employer interceded on his behalf, and accused 'Koba' of being a police agent, as the only person who had known the address of the safe house where he had been hiding. (1997). 9780340680469, Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 9780340680469 This accusation against Stalin was never proved, and Shaumian apparently accepted his denials, because they continued to collaborate.
In 1914, Shaumian led the general strike in Baku. The strike was crushed by Imperial Army and Shaumian was arrested and sent to prison. He escaped just as the February Revolution of 1917 was beginning.
In March Days the leaders of Baku Commune disarmed a group of Azerbaijani soldiers, who came to Baku from Lenkoran on the ship called Evelina to attend the funeral of Mamed Taghiyev, son of the millionaire Zeynalabdin Taghiyev. Michael Smith, Azerbaijan and Russia: Society and State: Traumatic Loss and Azerbaijani National Memory In response, a huge crowd gathered in the yard of one of the Baku mosques and adopted a resolution demanding the release of the rifles confiscated by the Soviet from the crew of the Evelina. The Azerbaijani Bolshevik organization Hümmet attempted to mediate the dispute by proposing that the arms were taken from the Savage Division to be transferred to the custody of Hümmet. Shaumian agreed to this proposal. But on the afternoon of 31 March, when Muslim representatives appeared before the Baku Soviet leadership to take the arms, shots were already heard in the city and the Soviet commissar Prokofy Dzhaparidze refused to provide arms and informed the Hümmet leadership that "Musavat had launched a political war". While it was not established who fired the first shot, the Baku Commune leaders accused the Muslims of starting the hostilities, and with the support of Dashnak forces attacked the Muslim quarters:
On the morning of 1 April 1918, the Committee of Revolutionary Defense of the Baku Soviet issued a leaflet with the message:
Bolsheviks had only about 6,000 loyal troops, and they were forced to seek support from either Muslim Musavat or Armenian Dashnaktsutyun. Shaumian, himself an Armenian, chose the latter. Shaumian considered the March events to be a triumph of the Soviet power in the Caucasus:
According to Firuz Kazemzadeh, the Baku Soviet provoked the March events to eliminate its most formidable rival: the Musavat. However, when Soviet leaders reached out to ARF for assistance against the Azerbaijani nationalists, the conflict degenerated into a massacre with the Armenians killing the Muslims irrespective of their political affiliations or social and economic position.Firuz Kazemzadeh. The Struggle for Transcaucasia, 1917–1921. Philosophical library, 1951, p. 75 Estimates of the number of Azerbaijanis and other Muslims massacred in Baku and surrounding regions range between 3,000 and 12,000.
The Committee of Revolutionary Defense issued another proclamation early in April 1918, which insisted on an anti-Soviet character of the rebellion and blamed Musavat and its leadership for the events. The Soviet's statement asserted that there was a carefully laid out plot by Musavat to overthrow the Baku Soviet and to establish its own regime:
Less than six months later, in September 1918, Nuri Pasha's Ottoman Empire-led Army of Islam, supported by Azerbaijani forces, recaptured Baku and subsequently killed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 ethnic Armenians.Michael P. Croissant, The Armenia-Azerbaijan Conflict: Causes and Implications. New York: Praeger, 1998, pp. 14–15 Human Rights Watch. "Playing the 'Communal Card': Communal Violence and Human Rights". Retrieved 16 January 2007.
The Bolsheviks clashed with Dashnaks and Mensheviks over the involvement of British forces, which the latter two welcomed. In either case, Shaumian was under direct orders from Moscow to refuse aid offered by the British.David Fromkin. . New York: Owl, 1989 p. 356 However, he understood the consequences of not accepting British aid, including a further massacre of Armenians by the Turks. Major Ranald MacDonell, a seasoned diplomat and the British Vice Consul of Baku, was tasked by his superiors to persuade Shaumian to reconsider British support.Hopkirk. On Secret Service, p. 305
Shaumian was under the impression that the Bolsheviks would soon be sending reinforcements from the Caspian Sea to assist him, although that prospect remained highly unlikely. He had sent numerous telegrams to Moscow extolling the fighting abilities of his Armenian units but warned that they too, would soon be unable to halt the advance of Enver's army. With this, MacDonell's and Shaumian's conversation ended with the possibility of accepting British aid in exchange for complete Bolshevik control over the military force, terms the British could not immediately accept.
Relations between the Baku Commune and the British soon reached a turning point when Britain decided to reverse its support for Bolsheviks. Shaumian's intransigence had cost him their support, MacDonell was told by a British officer: "the new policy of the British and French governments was to support the anti-Bolshevik forces....It mattered little whether they were Tsarist or Social Revolutionary."Peter Hopkirk. On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, Oxford University Press, 2001; , pp 304–5, 322
Over the previous days, numerous people had visited MacDonell, pleading for a withdrawal of British support for Shaumian. Many claimed to be former Tsarist officers offering their service to rise against the Bolsheviks, though MacDonell reportedly suspected them to have been agents working on behalf of the Bolsheviks.
A new government headed primarily by Russians, known as Central Caspian Dictatorship ( Diktatura Tsentrokaspiya) was formed, as British forces under General Lionel Dunsterville occupied Baku the same day.
Three days later, the British Major-General Wilfrid Malleson, on hearing of their arrest, contacted Britain's liaison-officer in Ashgabat, Captain Reginald Teague-Jones, to suggest that the commissars be handed over to British forces in Meshed to be used as hostages in exchange for British citizens held by the Soviets. That same day, Teague-Jones attended the committee's meeting in Ashgabat, which had the task of deciding the fate of the Commissars. For some reason Teague-Jones did not communicate Malleson's request to the committee, and later claimed he left before a decision was made and did not discover until the following day that the committee had eventually decided to issue orders that the commissars should be executed.C. Dobson & J. Miller The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow Hodder and Stoughton, 1986. pp 94–5Leach, Hugh. Strolling About the Roof of the World: The First Hundred Years of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002 p 26; On the night of 20 September, Shaumian and the others were executed by a firing squad in a remote location between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma on the Trans-Caspian railway.
In 1956, the The Observer published a letter written by a British staff officer who recounted a conversation he had had with Malleson, stricken with malaria at the time, on what was to be done to the commissars. Malleson replied that since the matter did not involve the British, they should not concern themselves with the issue. The telegram that was sent told the authorities holding the commissars to dispose of them "as they sought fit."Leach. Strolling About the Roof, pp 26–27 Nevertheless, Malleson expressed his horror when he learned upon the ultimate fate that had befallen the commissars.Leach. Strolling About the Roof, p 27
During the Soviet period, Stepanakert in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Azerbaijan SSR was renamed as Stepanakert, after Shaumian. The city of Stepanavan in the Armenian SSR was also renamed, in Shaumian's honor, Stepanavan, a name it has retained in post-Soviet Armenia. Streets in Lipetsk, Yekaterinburg, Stavropol and Rostov-on-Don (Russia), an avenue in Saint Petersburg are named in Shaumian's honour. A statue of him erected in 1931 stands in Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Shaumian was also regularly praised by Party leaders in the Caucasus. In 1978, Soviet Azerbaijan's First Secretary Heydar Aliyev remarked:
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Shaumian's legacy has been impacted by the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. In January 2009, Azerbaijan's post-Soviet authorities demolished the 26 Commissars Memorial in Baku. The move caused an outcry in Armenia, as the Armenian public widely perceived the reburial to be motivated by anti-Armenian sentiment. Azerbaijan: Outcry at Commissars' Reburial, by Magerram Zeinalov and Gegham Vardanian, IWPR, 2009 A scandal emerged when the Azerbaijani press reported that only 21 bodies were found buried in the park, as "Shaumian and four other Armenian commissars managed to escape their murderers". The claim was denied by Shaumian's granddaughter, Tatyana Shaumyan, who is a historian at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. In 2009, she told the Russian daily Kommersant:
Historian Ronald Grigor Suny has stressed the importance of Shaumian's efforts to "win power for the people democratically and nonviolently." He added that "the story of the Baku Commune he built provides an important perspective on the Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war."
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