Murder in the dunes: the ‘26 Martyrs’ of Baku and the making of a Soviet legend

In the pre-dawn hours of 20 September 1918, a train, its headlamp off, heading eastwards out of Kransnovodsk on the Caspian sea, came to an unscheduled standstill among the lonely desert dunes of Transcaspia. From one of the two carriages stumbled a group of bound and blindfolded prisoners, who were pushed and dragged up to the crest of a nearby dune, and there gunned down and their bodies hastily covered with sand.

In the context of the times and the area — 15,000 men, women and children had just been slaughtered in Baku on the other side of the Caspian — the political execution of 26 Bolsheviks might not seem a major event, but it was a murder that would resonate down through Soviet history. In the years ahead almost everyone remotely connected with the crime was tracked down and executed, but as the fame and legend of the ‘26 martyrs’ grew and their grubby murders, celebrated in stone and painting in the best tradition of socialist realism, metamorphosed into a tale of communist heroism and imperialist brutality, the one man the Soviet authorities most wanted for the crime — a modest-ranking British Intelligence officer operating in the Transcaucasus and Transcaspian regions — had quietly disappeared back into the evil British empire that had spawned him.