[2] 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.

[4] Stepan Gevorgi Shaumian was born to a family of Armenian cloth merchants in Tiflis (Tbilisi), then part of the Russian Empire.

[5] His family was descended from the Shaumian line of meliks (Armenian nobility) of Meghri; one of his ancestors, also named Stepan Shahumian, took part in Davit Bek's rebellion in the 1720s.

He graduated in 1898 and entered the Riga Polytechnic Institute, but left when his family ran into financial difficulties, and found work as a proofreader.

[8] In Europe, he met with such exiles from the Russian Empire as Lenin, Julius Martov and Georgi Plekhanov, and was present at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, in London, at which the party split into factions, and Shaumyan sided with Bolsheviks.

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.

[13] 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.

Due to the efforts of both the local Soviet and the Military-revolutionary committee of the Caucasus Army, which moved here (from Tiflis and Sarikamish) we already had armed forces – about 6,000 strong.

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.

[13] 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 appearance of the staff of the Savage Division, headed by the unmasked Talyshkhanov, the events in Lenkoran, in Mugan, and at Shemakha, the capture of Petrovsk by the Daghestan regiment and the withholding of grain shipments from Baku, the threats of Elisavetpol, and in the last few days of Tiflis, to march on Baku, against soviet power, the aggressive movements of the armored train of the Transcaucasian Commissariat in Adzhikabul, and, finally, the outrageous behavior of the Savage Division on the steamship Evelina in shooting comrades—all this speaks of the criminal plans of the counterrevolutionaries grouped mainly around the Bek party Musavat and having as its goal the overthrow of Soviet power.

"[16]Less than six months later, in September 1918, Nuri Pasha's Ottoman-led Army of Islam, supported by Azerbaijani forces, recaptured Baku and subsequently killed an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 ethnic Armenians.

[22] In mid-summer, MacDonell personally visited Shaumian's home in Baku and the two discussed the issue of British military involvement in a generally amiable conversation.

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.

"[3] 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.

In the most widely accepted version of events a group of Bolsheviks headed by Anastas Mikoyan broke into the prison and released Shaumian.

[23][24] 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 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.

"[29] As American journalist Harrison Salisbury wrote: During the Soviet period, Khankendi in the Nagorno-Karabakh region of the Azerbaijan SSR was renamed as Stepanakert, after Shaumian.

[32] 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".