Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916-1926

The men were former leaders of the Baku Commune. Following the collapse of that regime on 26 July 1918, they had been imprisoned on 14 August 1918 by the succeeding Central Caspian Dictatorship, which was dominated by Dashnaks, Rightist members of the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, and which enjoyed the support of the forces of the Allied intervention, in the shape of Dunsterforce. On 14 September 1918, as the Ottoman Army of Islam stormed Baku, Red Guards led by Anastas Mikoyan broke into the Bailovskii prison and freed the incarcerated Bolsheviks and their allies. The commissars then fled by sea, on board the ship Turkmen, hoping to reach Bolshevik-held Astrakhan, but for reasons that remain obscure the ship’s captain instead sailed for Krasnovodsk, on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. There, the commissars were detained by troops loyal to the anti-Bolshevik Transcaspian Provisional Government. When the commissars’ presence at Krasnovodsk became known to the commander of British forces in the region (Norperforce), Major General Wilfred Malleson, he asked the British intelligence officer at Ashkhabad, Captain Reginald Teague-Jones, to suggest to the local authorities that the prisoners be taken to India as hostages, in the hope of arranging an exchange for British citizens held in Russia (notably the men of a British military mission recently captured at Vladikavkaz). Teague-Jones attended the meeting of the Ashkhabad Committee at which the commissars’ fate was to be decided, but apparently did not communicate Malleson’s suggestion and left the meeting before a decision was taken. He discovered the next day (he later testified) that the Ashkhabad Committee had ordered that the men should be executed.

At around 6:00 a.m., on 20 September 1918, the sentence was carried out. (For reasons that are unclear, only 26 of the 35 men in captivity were executed. Among those who survived was the aforementioned Mikoyan (head of state of the USSR, 1964–1965, whom J. V. Stalin would later, mockingly—and threateningly—dub “the 27th Commissar”). After the civil wars, the Soviet government placed the blame for the execution of the Twenty-Six Commissars at the doors of the British, even alleging that it had been British agents on board the Turkman who had directed it to Krasnovodsk. They were supported in this view by the testimony of F. A. Funtikov, one of the leaders of the Ashkhabad regime, who (before he was tried and shot at Baku in 1926) charged that Teague-Jones had personally ordered the executions.

Funtikov’s version forms the basis for the official graphic memorial to the men, I. I. Brodskii’s 1925 painting The Execution of the 26 Baku Commissars, in which two British officers are visible in the left foreground as the shootings take place (The canvas’s composition, it should be noted, has a distinct resemblance to those commemorating the execution of the Communards in Paris in 1871.) The British government always denied that this had been the case (and there is certainly no evidence that any British officers were present at the executions). Nevertheless, this controversy soured interwar relations between Britain and the USSR and can be regarded as one of the roots of the Cold War.

The incident was largely forgotten in Britain, but in the Soviet Union the Twenty-Six Commissars were canonized and commemorated in innumerable books, films—notably 26 Komissarov (dir. N.M. Shengelaia, 1933, but micromanaged by the leaders of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic)—coins, stamps, songs and poems (e.g., Sergei Esinin’s “Song of the 26”), place-names, and statues. Indeed, following the return of the commissars’ remains to Baku in September 1920 (not coincidently, during the Congress of the Peoples of the East), the hagiography associated with “The Twenty-Six” was probably bested only by the Lenin cult in Soviet political culture. The most prominent piece of public commemorative art was the Twenty-Six Commissars’ Memorial in Baku, designed by Alesker Huseynov, which was raised in 1958 above the spot on Sahil Square where the men’s remains had been ceremonially reburied in 1920.