In late 1905, Italian historian and writer Luigi Villari sat aboard a train in Tiflis, Georgia. Few had boarded the train for Baku, and the former diplomat of the Italian Foreign Office turned news correspondent cut an isolated figure. He was a foreigner in lands described as the “alien nations” by Russian bureaucrats of the Tsarist Empire, then the master of the South Caucasus.

The steam train exited Tiflis trundling along, clanking and clattering down the rail track, drawing smooth wooden carriages behind it as it weaved its way through green, cultivated valleys before descending into the flatlands in modern-day Azerbaijan and speeding towards the Caspian Sea. Bare-boned train stations in these flatlands were isolated islets in a sea of desert plains where conductors desperately hid away from the pitiless sun and the mosquitos amidst the poverty of the rural Azeri lands who at the time were called ‘Tartars’. The plains are only broken by scorched mountains as rivers and vegetation were swallowed up by the harsh life on the steppe.

Trains coming from the opposite direction were packed with refugees fleeing from Baku, and military activities increased as he neared the town. On arrival in Baku, the beautiful station was chaotic. ‘Refugees fighting for places in the outgoing trains. More soldiers, more bayonets,’ he scribbled in a notebook. ‘No Tartar or Armenian driver dares appear in the streets. Windows closed and shuttered, few passers-by, but perpetual patrols’ by Russian soldiers in white uniform and Cossacks, crack soldiers of the Tsarist army.

Baku, one of the world’s ancient cities, was the Wild West, feverishly being thrust forward into modernity by an ocean of black gold, so vast at the time that it produced half the world’s oil. Oil derricks had proliferated, and the Azeri fields were coveted by businesses and empires alike as British and Russian companies competed to monopolise the oil market. Staggering fortunes were made and lost in Baku ‘as people from all parts of the world… flocked to Baku in the hope of making’ making profits.

The gluttony of the oil-rush, which had created staggering inequality and greed did not escape Villari. ‘Russians and foreigners rushed to Baku in large numbers. No other oil-fields, save those of America, are so large. The importance of the wells for Russia is incalculable. The growth of the industry is largely due to foreign enterprise.’ 

The grey slums and mud houses dwarfed by companies and palaces of oil barons meshed together with new quarters - which had sprung up to accommodate newcomers - had created a topography of vast inequality. The super-rich dwelt in ‘ostentation and vulgarity’ neglecting the most basic aspects of governance across the city which had become rife with ‘colossal frauds, mad speculations, huge fortunes and irretrievable ruin’. 

Though depressed by the shambolic nature of Baku, Villari’s main focus was on the tensions cutting through the oil-rich town. The town and the wider Caucasus had made international headlines for all the wrong reasons. The New York Times described a ‘Reign of Anarchy’ in the Caucasus, a consequence of a ‘long period of misrule’. In London, the issue had been raised in the House of Commons with the MP of Stowmarket constituency in Suffolk, Mr Ian Malcom, demanding information on the massacre of Armenian Christians, pointing to the Russians as the prime culprits of the February massacres. “From a report received from His Majesty's Consul at Ratum, it appears that the fighting lasted for four days,” Earl Percy responded as members of Parliament fretted over the safety of British subjects in Baku. 

It was in Georgia that Villari had caught wind of violence in Baku. ‘Everyday news came of fresh horrors, some true, some exaggerated, some purely fictitious,’ he wrote. ‘According to some accounts the whole of Baku was in flames and half the inhabitants massacred. The authorities had very few troops, but large numbers were reported on the way.’ Tit-for-tat violence had broken out across the Caucasus and Tsarist forces, and the new viceroy, Count Vorontzov-Dashkov, who had been appointed in May faced rebellions in modern-day Georgia, Dagestan and Azerbaijan. Strikes had paralysed the region, as blood flowed between the Azeris and Armenians.

The political upheaval in the Caucasus - which had turned violent in cities such as Baku - did not exist in a political vacuum. Tsarist Russia, humiliated by defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and facing calls for domestic reforms of an autocratic political system, was on its knees as workers and peasants demanded political change, economic modernisation and the dismantling of the police state spearheaded by the fearsome Okhrana. Parallel to this, from the Baltic to the South Caucasus, national minorities were resisting policies such as Russification, either demanding greater autonomy and independence or fighting to end discrimination against them. Jews in Southern Russia and Ukraine and Armenians in the South Caucasus, actively discriminated against before the 1905-1906 constitutional crisis, were now being massacred or killed in vast numbers, smeared as conspirators and revolutionaries by roving armed groups. The “Southern Storms”, the term coined for the atrocities being perpetrated, led to thousands of deaths. 

The slaughter of protestors in St. Petersburg on “Bloody Sunday” and repression of the Tsarist regime in its wake had sent shockwaves across the empire. The Caucasus’ problems, boiling beneath the surface, spilt over. In Baku, tensions had been brewing between the Russian authorities and the Armenians. Though the minority group had been a part of the bourgeoisie - many Armenians holding influential positions in the military, government and commerce (50 to 90 per cent of the civil service in the Caucasus were Armenians). Prince Grigorii Golytsin, who had been governor-general of the Caucasus since the 1890s, had intensified Russification in the Armenian communities, shutting down schools and exploiting tensions between the Armenian and Azeri populations in the region. 

To quell rising Armenian nationalism and placate growing resentment among the Azeris, who argued that Armenians were given better social and economic opportunities in the empire, Golytsin began appointing the Azeris to positions of power and allowing the study of their language. ‘Armenians were weeded out (and) new staff were appointed, either Tartars or Russians who shared Golytsin’s prejudices.’ Crucially, the majority of the policemen, chiefs of police and inspectors, were Azeri.

The divide and conquer strategy, designed to weaken revolutionary and nationalist fervour created bad blood between the two communities. In 1903, the governor-general enraged the Armenians further when he confiscated the properties of the Gregorian Church, the religious authority underpinning the Armenian faith pushing the community to the brink of revolt. That same year, Golytsin was nearly assassinated and forced to leave the region. 

In Baku, Golytsin’s ally, Prince Alexander Davidovich Nakashidze, a veteran of the wars in Crimea and the Caucasus and the city’s governor, was more militant. The Armenians and Russians dominated the oil industry, forming the backbone of the industry with the Azeris working in the lower echelons of the sprouting business. However, there was much multiethnic cooperation. The Russian Social Democratic Workers Party was formed, which involved Armenian and Azeri workers and organised strikes demanding economic and social reforms. In 1903, RSDWP organised the region’s first-ever general strike in the region demanding a pay rise, an end to overtime work, improvement of housing and more. Russian authorities cracked down. Employers initially refused to meet the protestors’ demands but eventually conceded in December 1904 after a second strike paralysed the city throughout the year.

The strikes were revolutionary, a challenge to Nakashidze’s narrative that Armenians and Azeris wanted to slaughter each other in a religious bloodbath. By extension, they were also a challenge to the autocratic rule of Tsar Nicholas II. The events of Bloody Sunday - which occurred a month after strikes in Baku - and the outbreak of violence across Tsarist Russia gave Nakashidze the pretext to strike at the RSDWP and weaken other anti-government forces. 

Many Armenians were still furious that their culture and religion were being targeted while the Azeris were allowed more political and religious freedoms. Instead of playing down fears of conflict, Nakashidze fanned conspiracies that the Armenians were planning to attack the Azeris, stirring sectarianism in the city and warning of an impending massacre. As the RSDWP strikers’ became a formidable obstacle to the Russian authorities in Baku, Nakashidze authorised ‘the issue of large numbers of arms permits to Azeris.’ With distrust and conspiracy running wild in Baku, and old resentments simmering and opportunists looking to exploit the violence spreading across Tsarist Russia, the city was primed for an explosion. 

While murder was common in Baku, the police and political authorities in Baku infused many investigations with religious venom, spreading rumours that sectarian killings were taking place. The killing of Gashum Beg, an Azeri shopkeeper, by several Armenian assailants who were part of the Armenian Revolutionary Committee set the city alight. A public funeral procession, held for one of the Azeri victims who had attempted to redeem Beg’s honour at the cost of his life quickly mutated into a mob.

Even by the standards of lawlessness and corruption associated with Baku, the February pogrom had taken violence between the Armenians and Azeris to levels unprecedented in modern history. For four days, Azeris gangs and Armenian vigilantes roamed the streets terrorising their communities, burning, murdering and looting with knives, rifles and pistols. Between 500 and 2,000 men, women and children were killed in the rampage as Baku burned. The police stood by and did nothing in the opening hours and days.

Western onlookers, some prejudiced, often blamed the violence on the “Tartars”, with Villari himself, describing the Azeris in Baku as “primitive savages”, others, particularly the Russian authorities, pointed the finger at Armenians and Azeri groups such as the ARF (Armenian Revolutionary Party) or Difai (Defence), denouncing them as spies and traitors who were targeting Tsarist officials with assassinations and stirring ethnic hatreds across the Caucasus. Extremism and incompetent local authorities abetted by Western conspirators was to blame, not Tsarist policies.  

A closer investigation later conducted by Senator Kuzminskiy, a member of Nicholas II’s State Council, suggested otherwise. According to his report, Nakashidze had done little to intervene in the riot, with neither the police nor the fire brigade, dominated by Azeris, being deployed to offer help to the Baku communities. “Large crowds of armed Tartars, in the presence of many bystanders, often police officials and Cossack patrols, beat and robbed,” he described. He went further, arguing that the administration had not simply been negligent, but were guilty of systematically instigating the violence of the “Tartars” against Armenians communities in Baku. 

The British Ambassador, Charles Hardinge had echoed Kuzminskiy’s assessment weeks after the pogrom, criticising the local authorities for their “ineptitude” and “apathy” while dismissing ethnic hatred as the prime cause of the violence. “Baku was placarded with proclamations purporting to be signed by the local chief of police but are said to be forgeries, inciting the Mussalmans to a massacre of the Armenians.” 

Villari was convinced that Nakashidze had actively encouraged the Azeris to take revenge, noting that he had said that could not protect the Armenians from mobs seeking retribution (this despite the fact he had actively armed Azeri militias and policeman and stirred sectarian violence). ‘Had Nakashidze wished to prevent trouble, he would have stopped the (funeral) procession’ of the killed Azeri, the journalist wrote. ‘Nakshidze was constantly receiving frenzied appeals for help from hard-pressed Armenians besieged in their own houses, he replied that he had no troops and could do nothing, despite the fact he had 2,000 soldiers.’

Vorontsov-Dashkov blamed the policies of Golitsyn, arguing that his anti-Armenian policies, supported by Nakashidze, had stirred resentment against the Russians. Kuzminskiy eventually recommended the prosecution of police officials involved. It was all in vain. Nakashidze did not live long enough to face answers for his negligence and incitement as he had already been assassinated in May 1905 after a bomb was hurled at him by an Armenian factory worker, an act of revenge for his role in the Baku pogrom. Baku’s chief of police was never punished for fanning the violence. 

While Kuzminskiy report was damning of Golitsyn and Nakashidze’s incompetence and the local police, he and Vorontsov-Dashkov downplayed the role outdated Tsarist policies had played in stoking the conflict in the first place. For Kuzminskiy, it did not seem possible that Nakashidze had conspired to spark a state-sponsored pogrom against the Armenians, that neither Nakashidze had the brains to pull off the conspiracy or that the “Tartars” had the “subtlety of mind” to execute such a plan. 

In other parts of the empire, however, where Jews had been massacred and murdered in pogroms by rioters, anti-Semitic Tsarist officials had already been complicit in or turned a blind eye to the terrible violence against Jewish communities, most notoriously at Kishinev in modern-day Ukraine in 1903. For the Tsarist officials, blaming the police, effectively scapegoating the Azeris, and tarring the pogrom’s causes as a result of “primitive passions” was an easier explanation. This narrative ignored the fact that it was Azeri imams and the Armenian clergy, along with community leaders, who had worked together to end the pogrom in Baku. 

Thousands of city residents flocked onto the streets demanding an end to the rioting as Baku smouldered, shaming the police and government officials who had watched the violence unfold. In Yerevan, the capital of modern-day Armenia, the chief administrator was scandalised: “Two parts of the city’s populations closely linked by common interests, and very often by the ties of friendship, warmed their hands in blood. Hearts bleed from the horror.” Days after the pogrom had ended, Armenians and Azeris across the region were donating money to Baku to support the victims of both communities. The humanitarian aid was distributed by a committee evenly comprised of Armenian and Azeri’s officials from the city. 

The damage of Nakashidze’s policies went beyond the destruction wrought in Baku during February. Fuelled by misinformation and stories of the massacre, conflicts broke out across the region. Villages were incinerated, and fighting broke out in places such as Yerevan, Nakhitchevan, Shusha while fighting returned to Baku that same year. The violence continued unabated till 1906 with Azeris blaming Armenian “nationalists” and the Armenians blaming Azeri “Muslims” and the Russians. While local leaders sought compromise and intermittent peace deals, decrying the bloodletting, they pointed the finger at the other side for starting the conflict. Thousands died as cruelty, bloodshed and wanton looting caused deep traumas in the communities affected.

More liberal papers such as the Kaspii and Baku reporting on the events across the South Caucasus were even-handed as conspiracies spread, arguing that “ill-intentioned” opportunists were actively encouraging violence between Armenian and Azeri communities, making efforts to reporting on mediation efforts by local Armenian and Azeri leaders to solve the crisis diplomatically. 

The official death toll of the Baku pogrom stood at between 316-344 civilians. Historians generally agree that two-thirds of those killed in Baku were Armenians, outgunned by well-armed Azeri rioters. However, in other areas of the South Caucasus, in cities such as Shusha in the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh, more Azeris were killed by Armenians as vendetta killings swept the region. Local mediation efforts, supported by Vorontsov-Dashkov’s deployment of Tsarist soldiers to the region, brought the fighting to a standstill. It is unknown how many died in the broader conflagration, but it is estimated between 3000-10,000 perished and hundreds of villages were wiped off the face of the earth.

Much as the 1905 constitutional crisis was the tolling bell for the Tsarist dynasty (which would collapse twelve years later), the Baku pogrom was a harbinger for the destruction approaching the region, driven by the revolution in Russia, the First World War, and, most tragically, the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of the Armenians. In the wake of the state-sponsored mass-murder, the South Caucasus’ troubles only deepened as the Tsarist empire crumbled as anarchy, banditry, famine and the ideological fervour of Bolshevik Russia arrived.

The Republic of Armenia, formed against the backdrop of the Armenian genocide during the First World War, and the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic went to war over competing national claims for Nagorno-Karabakh. The Karabakh Armenian quarter in Shusha was destroyed by Azerbaijan’s army in 1920 as the region became the epicentre of some of the war’s worst atrocities until Bolshevik Russia intervened to end the violence and illusion of an independent Azerbaijan and Armenia, effectively freezing the currents of nationalism in Nagorno-Karabakh under the mediation of the Soviets’ new, ruthless and ambitious Commissar of Nationalities, Joseph Stalin. 

Before the nationalist movements in Azerbaijan and Armenia could fully form, the Soviet Union seized the Caucasus. Communist ideology and Kemalist nationalism in Turkey (once the Ottoman Empire had fallen) conspired to crush budding Azerbaijani and Armenian nationalism in the South Caucasus. The Armenians who formed the short-lived Republic of Armenia lost further territory in the post-war agreements between the Allies, Russia and Kemalist Turkey, and it took two months for the Soviets to put down resistance in Azerbaijan. 

The conflict and aspirations of the Armenians and Azerbaijani nationalists were stamped out by the Soviet authorities. The Bolsheviks redrew the map of the South Caucasus - naming it the Transcaucasian Federation - including modern-day Nagorno-Karabakh. Stalin dissection of the region was one of his many bloody historical legacies as historian Thomas De Waal explained.

Over two days in July 1921, the Caucasus Bureau seemed to opt-in favour of the Armenian claim (to Nagorno-Karabakh) on one day, but the next day ruled in favour of Soviet Azerbaijan. The population was 94 per cent Armenian…Only one pocket of territory with a large Azerbaijani population, Shusha, remained. It created an arrangement of uncertain allegiances. 

This decision, whether by incompetence or a specific ‘divide and conquer’ policy, was to become a ticking time-bomb. The collapse of the Soviet Union, and a referendum held by Karabakh Armenians in 1991 to secede from Azerbaijan, reignited this dispute, leading to several wars which have killed over 35,000 people and displaced one million more. While the pogrom has faded into relative obscurity, the majority of the elements that created those terrible days in the winter of 1905 remain etched on Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenian-Azerbaijani relations.

115 years after covering massacres in Baku, Shusha and Nakhitchevan as drones wiped out Armenian positions and ballistic missiles rained down on Azeri and Armenian cities and towns in the autumn of 2020, the sense of deja vu for Villari would have been overwhelming. The shadow of the pogrom and the ghosts of Baku haunt the South Caucasus to this day.