Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

cultural assimilation and the institutionalization of Russian administration.70 These objectives to some extent had been accomplished in practice since the incorporation of the Caucasus into the Russian empire in the early nineteenth century, but Alexander III particularly emphasized cultural (including linguistic) Russification so as to bring Armenian schools under direct Russian control. Russian Armenians, considering the tsar merely another Sultan Abdul Hamid in Russian garb, mobilized opposition against his rule through revolutionary movements.

Most Armenians in the Russian empire worked on the land; a relatively small number was engaged in commerce and various crafts and industries. By the end of the 1880s, agricultural production led to the development of key industries in the production of vodka, cognac, and wine. The advent of industrialization in the late nineteenth century in Russia and across the region created opportunities for economic development and modernization but also led to widespread economic inequalities and dislocation. The Armenian liberal intelligentsia class, influenced by the intellectual currents in Russia and beyond, became active in various aspects of Armenian community life. The more radicals challenged the Armenian traditional institutions (especially the church), customary practices, and structures of power, and advocated a fundamental transformation of Armenian culture to embrace modern (i.e., western) values. These intellectual movements sought to revive Armenian national identity according to their ideological principles and political posture from the Caucasus to Constantinople and to Europe. Their activities also led to the proliferation of Armenian daily and weekly newspapers, debating the advantages and disadvantages of religion and secularization, of tradition and modernization.71 Although most of these papers had a short lifespan, they severely criticized the tsarist regime and Russian policy toward the Caucasus, reported daily on events transpiring in both empires, and drew parallels between the “Red Sultan” and the “Red Tsar.”72

Beginning in July 1903, when Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) confiscated Armenian church properties, Armenian-Russian relations proved a critical testing ground for the organizational mettle of the Hnchakian party and the Dashnaktsutiun (ARF), and a turning point in their political alignments, as they participated in various forms of anti-tsarist and antiRussian activities.73 Khrimian Hayrik (catholicos at Echmiadzin, 1892–1906) outright rejected the confiscation order. The Dashnaktsutiun and the other revolutionary organizations, which until then had criticized the Armenian Church as a conservative institution and for its opposition to revolutionary movements, supported the catholicosate and demanded the return of the church properties. In Ottoman and Russian Armenia, the Armenian Church had maintained a comfortable distance between itself and the emancipatory groups; however, after the confiscation of

properties, the church, particularly under Khrimian’s leadership, welcomed the activism of the revolutionary parties, especially by the Dashnaktsutiun, the leading Armenian party in the region.74

The Armenian revolutionary movement became closely associated with the general anti-tsarist rebellions against the Russian government during the “First Russian Revolution” of 1905.75 Demonstrations, labor strikes, and violence spread throughout the Russian empire, including the Caucasus. Workers and peasants demanded better living conditions. Nascent revolutionary cells established underground presses, and mobilized the public against the tsarist regime. The tsarist government reacted by repressive campaigns against the revolutionaries, as in the cities of Lori and Alexandropol (Gumri) and in the neighboring regions, where Armenian peasants and workers continued their armed clashes with government troops.76

The tsarist policy of confiscation of the Armenian Church properties led to ideological and political realignments among the Armenian revolutionary movements and between them and the Armenian people. The 1905 revolution further crystallized their alignments. These two crises called upon the Armenian organizations that had participated in and led the nationalist movements in Turkish Armenia to protect the nation’s interests in Russian Armenia. The most influential among the political organizations was the Dashnaktsutiun, while some members of the Hnchakian Party increasingly identified themselves with the Marxist-oriented Social Democrat and Social Revolutionaries (successors to the Norodnaia Volia) and subsequently with the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. Internal divisions within both the Armenakan and Hnchakian parties by the closing days of the nineteenth century had weakened their organizations and led to the loss of popular support. The Armenakans had become closely associated with the political and economic interests of the upper classes, while the Hnchakians, albeit engaged in armed self-defense in certain areas, in general remained preoccupied with the theoretical and international dimensions of socialism. The Armenian masses, especially the peasants, viewed both parties as being too removed from their everyday concerns for physical safety and economic security. The Dashnaktsutiun, however, put a premium on active self-defense and became involved in international socialism only secondarily and certainly not as an adherent to orthodox “scientific socialism” à la Marx. Since its inception, the party maintained a pragmatic approach toward western imperialism and capitalism. The Dashnaktsutiun leaders were familiar with the works of past and contemporary leading radical intelligentsia, including Dmitrii I. Pisarev (1840–1868), Mikhail Bakunin (1817–1876), Louis-Auguste Blanqui (1805–1881), Jean Jaurés (1859–1914), Georgi Plekhanov (1856–1918), Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), Henri Van Kol (1852–1925), and Karl Kautsky (1854–1938).77 Some of them had even commented on the Armenian question. For example, in October 1896, Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung (German Social Democratic paper in Dresden) that the west

had to support Armenians in their demands for liberation from the Turkish yoke as well as their aspirations for statehood.78 In 1905, were the Armenian political parties in Turkish and Russian Armenia prepared for such challenges?

In 1905 Tsar Nicholas II took a number of steps to stabilize the situation in the Caucasus. He appointed the more Armenophile Count Illarion I. Vorontsov-Dashkov as viceroy of the Caucasus to reestablish law and order and, on August 1, 1905, returned the confiscated church properties.79 The tsar also issued the October Manifesto (October 17, 1905) approving the creation of the Russian Duma.80 Although the Duma, which included several liberal and radical Armenians, promised to be a representative body, the tsar showed little tolerance for radical and reformist movements in the institution. On June 3, 1907, he dissolved the Duma and subsequently introduced laws that favored greater representation for the wealthy classes. Most of the middle class supported the tsarist regime so long as it promised political and economic stability. Persecution of Armenian revolutionaries continued, however, in 1912, including, the imprisonment of many members of the Dashnaktsutiun, although after trials in 1912 some of them were released from prison.81

THE YOUNG TURK REVOLUTION

The political instability in the Russian empire that challenged the legitimacy of Tsar Nicholas II paralleled the crisis of political legitimacy in the Ottoman Empire that undermined the authority of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. By the early part of 1908, the sultan could no longer check opposition forces, and in July the Young Turk revolution forced him to reinstitute the Constitution of 1876 but forced him to abdicate the throne in 1909. The Young Turk government promised political and economic liberalization, a representative government based on free elections, freedom of religion, and equality among the millets. A democratically oriented leadership in Constantinople, Armenians hoped, could take necessary measures to ameliorate the conditions in the empire in general and in the Armenian provinces in particular. Armenians and foreign observers expected conditions to improve. Hopes for the new era proved ephemeral, however, as the extremist factions among the ranks of the Young Turk leadership pressed for a strong central government, one that would consolidate power and rectify the deficiencies in foreign relations and domestic priorities. The more radical, nationalist Turks within the movement feared that the implementation of political and administrative reforms could potentially contribute to imperial decline, the nationalist leadership within the Ittihad ve Terakki Jemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP)—also referred to as Ittihadists—established a dictatorial regime and propagated the ideologies of pan-Turkism/ pan-Turanism and military modernization to bolster the legitimacy of their

rule. Ittihadist party ideologues such as Mehmed Ziya Gokalp (1876–1924), pan-Turkist author and member of the CUP; Yusuf Akchura (1876–1933), founder of the journal Türk Yurdu (Turkish Homeland); and Tekin Alp (1883–1961), pan-Turkist nationalist, disseminated publications urging the Turkish masses to envision a new Turkey exclusively for the Turks, a Turkey whose cultural ties with all Turkic peoples from Constantinople to Central Asia could revive the Golden Age of Osman.82

No sooner had the Young Turk revolution appeared to have succeeded removing Sultan Abdul Hamid than crises in the Balkans and wider military disasters challenged the legitimacy of the new government.83 Less than a year after the revolution, in April 1909, as reactionary, counterrevolutionary forces attempted to recapture Constantinople, massacres broke out in the Cilician town of Adana and neighboring villages, leading to the death of approximately 20,000 Armenians.84 In 1908, taking advantage of the revolutionary situation, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria declared independence, and Crete declared its union with Greece. A succession of military disasters thereafter undermined the credibility of the Young Turk government. In September 1911 the successful Italian campaign to conquer Tripolitania (Libya) and the Balkan wars of 1912–1913 threatened to dissolve the empire, as Turkey lost its European territories except Adrianople, Scutari, and Janina.85

By 1913 the extremist faction of the Ittihadist leaders, finding further territorial losses intolerable, was prepared to take over the reins of power. On January 23, 1913, a military clique led by Ismail Enver launched a coup against the government of the more liberal political party Hurriyet ve Itilaf (Freedom and Association) and established a military regime that ruled the empire until its demise by the end of World War I. The military coup resulted in the murder of several leading government officials, including Minister of War Nazim Pasha, the grand vizier Mehmed Kiamil Pasha, and other members of his cabinet.86 The repeated military disasters in the preceding decades, they believed, had exposed fundamental weaknesses in political leadership and military organization; therefore, as a first step to consolidating their dictatorial rule, the Ittihadists dismissed the officials associated with the sultan from their posts and appointed party loyalists. The Ittihadist regime thus became dominated by the ultranationalist triumvirate of Mehmed Talaat as the minister of interior, Ismail Enver as the minister of war, and Ahmed Jemal as the minister of marines and commander of the Fourth Army in Syria. Moreover, the proGerman faction led by Enver emphasized military modernization and invited a German military mission, headed by General Otto Liman von Sanders, which arrived at Constantinople in December 1913, to effectuate further improvements.87 The convergence of the ideology and politics of pan-Turkism and militarism culminated in a national catastrophe of unprecedented proportions for the empire’s Armenian subjects.