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.