page_title: March Days
section_title: Casualties
hierarchical_section_title: March Days / Casualties
caption_attribution_description: Removing the dead from the streets of baku march days 1918 of the en:March Days.
context_page_description: The March Days, March Events, or March Genocide was a period of inter-ethnic strife and massacres of about 12,000 Azerbaijanis and Muslims that took place between 30 March – 2 April 1918 in the city of Baku and adjacent areas of the Baku Governorate of the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic.
  Facilitated by a political power struggle between Bolsheviks with the support of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation on one side and the Azerbaijani Musavat Party on another, the events led to rumours of a possible Muslim revolt on the part of Bolshevik and Dashnak forces and the establishment of the short-lived Baku Commune in April 1918.
  Azerbaijan officially refers to the March Days as soyqırım. Other sources interpret the March events in the context of civil war unrest.
context_section_description: The May 1918 dispatch of The New York Times stated that "2000 were killed and 3000 were wounded in struggle between Russians and Mussulmans". Later 1919 publication by The New York Times reported – presumably citing Azerbaijani officials – that 12,000 people were killed during the March Days of 1918. The same publication wrote that according to Azerbaijani representatives, Bolsheviks crushed Muslims with assistance from Armenians who wanted to "wipe out old enemies and seize their lands". The post-1920 New York Times editions used the same figure of 12,000 victims, as did several historians.
  Azerbaijani delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference provided the following interpretation of the March Days:
  In that bloodthirsty episode, which had such fatal effects upon the Muslims, the principal part was played by the Armenians, who were then in Baku, clustering as elsewhere around their nationalist party [ARF]... The truth is that the Armenians under the guise of Bolshevism, rushed on the Muslims and massacred during a few frightful days more than 12,000 people, many of whom were old men, women, and children.
  The leader of Baku Soviet, Stepan Shahumyan, claimed that more than 3,000 killed in two days. However, in his October 1918 article for the Armenian Herald, publication of the Boston-based Armenian National Union of America, one of the prominent ARF leaders, Karekin Pastermadjian, asserted that over 10,000 Azerbaijanis and nearly 2,500 Armenians were killed during the March Days of 1918.
  
  According to Firuz Kazemzadeh, 
  The brutalities continued for weeks. No quarter was given by either side: neither age nor sex was respected. Enormous crowds roamed the streets, burning houses, killing every pass-by who was identified as an enemy, many innocent persons suffering death at the hands of both the Armenians and the Azerbaijanis. The struggle which had begun as a political contest between Musavat and the Soviet assumed the character of a gigantic race riot.
caption: Removing the dead from the streets
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