Ashkhabad Commissars

Ashkhabad Commissars 

nine revolutionaries active in the struggle for the establishment of Soviet power who were shot on the night of July 23,1918, by the WhiteGuards. In the summer of 1918 the Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, White Guard officers, and local bourgeois nationalists of the Transcaspian Oblast (now Turkmenian SSR), working under the orders of the British intelligence service, staged a counterrevolutionary uprising. On July 11–12 they seized power in Ashkhabad and set up a counterrevolutionary government, the so-called Transcaspian Provisional Executive Committee, which was headed by the Socialist Revolutionary F. Funtikov. The White Guards arrested the top officials of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Transcaspian Oblast: V. T. Telia, chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars; Ia. E. Zhitnikov, commissar of supplies and leader of the Ashkhabad Bolshevik organization; S. M. Molibozhko, military commissar; and N. I. Rozanov, commissar of finance and foreign affairs. The White Guards also arrested V. M. Batminov, chairman of the Ashkhabad soviet; D. B. Kolostov, a Soviet and military official in the Urals who was trying to reach Moscow through Transcaspia after Orenburg fell to the Whites; Smelianskii, Kolostov’s aide-de-camp; P. I. Petrosov, commander of a Red Army platoon; and A. A. Khrenov, an old Bolshevik and printer from Baku.

On the night of July 23, 1918, all these people were hauled out in a freight train and shot between Anau and Giaurs railroad stations, 15 km from Ashkhabad. After the Soviets came to power a monument to them was erected at the place of their death.