ABSTRACT
On 28 April 1920, less than three years after the Bolshevik takeover in St Petersburg, the 11th Red Army entered Baku and raised the red flag over a city known for a century as the Russian gate to the East. For the Bolsheviks, Baku was not just another city inherited from the fallen Tsarist Empire but was a bastion from where the revolution would set the East ablaze. The fallen empire’s immediate neighbours, Iran and the Ottoman Empire, were entangled in the political turmoil of change and revolution, and from Southeast Asia the echoes resounded of the anti-British Indian nationalist uprising. For the Bolsheviks, expanding the revolution to the West and to East Asia became essential to safeguard the revolution at home. In September 1920, it was with this mission in mind that the Communist International (Comintern) called for the First Congress of the People of the East to be held in Baku. In his opening address, Zinoviev, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Comintern appealed to the hundreds of delegates, the majority of them Muslims from Asia and Africa, as well as to the people from the Tsarist Empire’s colonies in Central Asia and the Caucasus, to join the Russian revolution and wage a jihad against British imperialism.
