Stepan Shaumian (1 October 1878-20 September 1918) was a Bolshevik revolutionary of Armenian origin who was one of the 26 Baku Commissars.
Biography[]
Stepan Shaumian was born on 1 October 1878 in Tiflis, Tiflis Governorate, Russian Empire (Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia) to a family of Armenian cloth merchants. He attended college in St. Petersburg and Riga, graduating from the philosophy department of the Humboldt University of Berlin in the German Empire in 1905. Shaumian was exiled to the Caucasus by the Russian Empire for his anti-czarist activities, and he joined the Baku Bolsheviks in 1907 before leading the ill-fated 1914 general strike in the city. He was jailed from 1914 to 1917, and he succeeded in escaping due to the Russian Revolution. In 1918, Shaumian assisted the Bolsheviks in taking over Baku from the newly-independent government of Azerbaijan, but he was forced to flee as a result of the Azerbaijanis' recapture of the city. Shaumian was executed by a White Army firing squad on 20 September 1918.