Transcaucasian Commissariat

a counterrevolutionary bourgeois-nationalist government of Transcaucasia (Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia), founded on Nov. 15 (28), 1917, in Tbilisi by Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries (SR’s), Dashnaks, and Musavatists with the active support of the Entente.

The Transcaucasian Commissariat pursued a policy of separating Transcaucasia from Soviet Russia. It concluded agreements with the anti-Soviet Kuban’ Rada, with the White Guard ataman A. M. Kaledin, and with the leaders of the Dagestan and Terek counterrevolutionary forces for joint struggle against Soviet power and the revolutionary forces in Transcaucasia. In November and December 1917, by order of the Transcaucasian Commissariat, Menshevik military units in Tbilisi suppressed the Bolshevik newspapers and seized •the arsenal in Tbilisi. The Commissariat began to disarm revolutionary-minded units returning to Russia from the Caucasian front. On Jan. 9 (22), 1918, thousands of soldiers were killed and wounded by armed nationalist gangs at the Shamkhor railroad station near Gandzha and at Khachmas near Baku. On February 10 (23), the day on which the Transcaucasian Diet held its first session, a mass meeting of working people in the Aleksandrovskii Gardens in Tbilisi was fired upon by order of the Commissariat. The proletariat of Tbilisi responded to these brutal actions by holding political strikes at the urging of the Bolsheviks. On Mar. 26, 1918, the Transcaucasian Commissariat was dissolved by the Transcauca-sian Diet.