The commune, led by Stepan Shahumyan, existed until 26 July 1918 when the Bolsheviks were forced out of power by a coalition of Dashnaks, Right SRs and Mensheviks.

On 14 September 1918, during the fall of Baku to Ottoman forces, Red Army soldiers broke into their prison and freed the commissars; they then boarded a ship to Krasnovodsk, where they were promptly arrested by local authorities and, on the night of 20 September, executed by a firing squad between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma on the Transcaspian Railway by Turkmen SR soldiers of the Ashkhabad Committee.

During its brief existence, the Commune had to face several problems: from the shortage of food and supplies to the threat of a strong Ottoman Empire Army which wanted to attack Baku.

[6] The Baku Commune was imprisoned by Turkmen Social Revolutionaries for participation in unlawful military formations,[citation needed] particularly for the March Days atrocities and was replaced by the Central-Caspian Dictatorship.

However, their ship was intercepted by the military vessels of the Caspian fleet and after undergoing an hour's bombardment in mid-sea they surrendered and returned to Baku.

Shahumyan, Dzhaparidze, Azizbekov, and their comrades, along with Mikoyan, then boarded the ship Turkmen, intending to reach Astrakhan by sea.

At Krasnovodsk the commissars were arrested by the town's commandant who requested further orders from the "Ashkhabad Committee", led by the Socialist Revolutionary Fyodor Funtikov, about what should be done with them.

According to historian Richard H. Ullman, Teague-Jones could have stopped the executions if he wanted since the Ashkabad Committee was dependent on British support and could not refuse a request from its powerful ally, but he decided not to do so.

[9] On the night of 20 September, three days after being arrested, twenty-six of the commissars were executed by a firing squad between the stations of Pereval and Akhcha-Kuyma on the Trans-Caspian railway.

The third resigned itself to its fate ...Soviet officials later blamed the executions on British agents acting in the Baku area at the time.

This accusation caused a further souring of relations between Britain and the nascent Soviet government and helped lead to the confrontational attitude of both sides in the coming years.

The commission also consisted of a big group of a high-ranking Moscow's Cheka officers headed by Yakov Peters, an international criminal associated with the Siege of Sidney Street.

Sennikov also brings up a quote of Chaikin in the article of Suren Gazaryan "That should not be repeated" in the Leningrad magazine "Zvezda": "The painting of Brodsky Execution of the 26 Baku Commissars is historically false.

[23] The remains of the commissars were reburied at Hovsan Cemetery on 26 January 2009, with participation of Muslim, Jewish and Christian clergy, who conducted religious ceremonies.

[25] Another scandal happened when Azerbaijani press reports claimed that during the exhumation only 21 bodies were discovered and that "Shahumyan and four other Armenian commissars managed to escape their murderers".

[25][26][27][28] This report was questioned by Shahumyan's granddaughter Tatyana, now living in Moscow, who told the Russian daily Kommersant that: It is impossible to believe that they weren't all buried.