Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

By October 1920, consequently, the Whites had been forced back into Crimea, only to find the elements turning against them, as freak weather conditions dried out the Sivash marshes that abutted the narrow and easily defensible pathway onto Crimea, the Perekop isthmus. This permitted Soviet forces (at this point including many Makhnovists) to invade the peninsula and cause a huge evacuation of White forces from its southern ports in November. This was far better organized than Denikin’s effort at Novorossisk nine months earlier, but nevertheless many White soldiers remained trapped in Red territory and became the subject of a campaign of retribution and terror by the Cheka in which at least 12,000 people were executed.170

Until 1920, the three small and mutually disputatious republics of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan that had emerged from the disintegration of a short-lived Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic in May 1918 remained quarantined from Soviet invasion by the presence in their region of first German and Turkish and then Allied interventionists and the screen provided by Denikin’s forces in the North Caucasus. But now the Allies had withdrawn (with the exception of the British garrison at Batumi, which would leave in mid-July 1920), and the Whites had been shoved aside, leaving the three republics fatally exposed. This was most unfortunate for the Azeris and their port capital of Baku, which found itself first in line for the Red Army’s attentions in Transcaucasia. Unlucky too was the fact that a Red advance into Azerbaijan could utilize the Rostov–Baku railway, which, having pressed along the steppe north of the main Caucasus range, then ran south along the Caspian coastline and snaked through Daghestan to Derbent, then into Azerbaijan itself. But this amorphous—and often despised—Muslim population of the old empire was always going to be a prime target for the Reds, as the Azeris (or “Tatars,” as the Russians called them) were not well organized but possessed precious stocks of oil. Thus, on 22 March 1920, it is not surprising that Red Army Glavkom Kamenev issued the order that “the entirety of the former Baku guberniia” should immediately be occupied by the 11th Red Army.171 The small Azeri army could never have mounted effective resistance to this Red thrust—not least because it lacked experienced generals, Muslims generally having been distained by the imperial Russian forces. In addition, the many Turkish advisors to the Azeri army, who were anxious (in order to disturb the postwar settlement as it pertained to Anatolia) to forge closer links between the new Kemelist regime in Ankara and Moscow, were duplicitously advising the Azeris that they had nothing much to fear from the Bolsheviks. Thus, resistance was always likely to have been minimal, even had not 22 March 1920 also been a day marked by a renewed and unfortunately diversionary outbreak of hostilities in the Azeri–Armenian War that had been rumbling on since 1918. Soon afterward, an uprising of local Bolsheviks, who had been joined by the left wing of the Hummet party (now renamed the Azeri Communist Party), seized parts of Baku; on 28 April 1920, advance units of the 11th Red Army arrived there to oversee the immediate proclamation of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic. Azeri uprisings, especially that at Ganja in May 1920, still troubled the Soviet government, but were eventually contained. A subsequent Red push into the disputed Karabakh region in June–July 1920 then presaged a full-blown invasion of neighboring Armenia in November of that year; the establishment of the Armenian SSR; and a subsequent agreement with Kemalist Turkey (the Treaty of Moscow, 16 March 1921), in which the Soviet government, seeking to encourage Turkey’s hostility to the Allies, ceded to Ankara lands in Eastern Anatolia previously claimed by Yerevan (including Mount Ararat). The treaty was also, as Armenian nationalists claim to this day, a punishment inflicted on Armenia as a consequence of the widespread uprising against Soviet power that gripped the country in February 1921 and temporarily drove the Red Army out of Yerevan—an uprising that continued to tie down Soviet forces in the southern region of Zangezur, where the independent Mountainous Republic of Armenia was proclaimed, until July 1921.