Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds
320
Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520970366 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
Connected Revolutions
Local and Global Contexts
No doubt, too, the universality of revolution owed something to mere contagion: the fashion of revolution spreads. But even contagion implies receptivity: a healthy or inoculated body does not catch even a prevailing disease. Therefore, though we may observe accidents and fashions, we still have to ask a deeper question. We must ask what was the general condition of Western European society which made it, in the mid-seventeenth century, so universally vulnerable — intellectually as well as physically — to the sudden new epidemic of revolution?
Controversial British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper refers to seventeenth-century Western European revolutions as "contagion," "epidemic," and "fashion"; whether one agrees with these general observations or not, his plea to delve deeper into the revolutionary context is certainly welcome. To explore revolutions not only with their local and regional constraints as well as freedoms in mind but to view them as part of the global context remains the most meaningful approach. This book is a study of three contiguous and overlapping revolutions, the Russian (1905), Ottoman (1908), and Iranian (1905–11), through the lens of Armenian revolutionaries whose movements within and across these frontiers contributed to connecting the struggles as well as illuminating their study. It seeks to explore the interconnectivity of the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian revolutions in several ways that interweave global and local. First, the study advocates a novel approach to the three revolutions, previously studied in isolation and, to a lesser degree, in comparison, that draws on a "connected histories" approach to the study of world or global history, which has, over the last decade, become influential in how historians study the past. A connected histories approach goes beyond an examination of the similarities and differences of revolutions and allows a more revealing understanding of how the revolutions are connected. It does this through an archivally grounded analysis of the circulation of revolutionaries, ideas, and print. The protagonists of our analysis are the roving Armenian revolutionaries and intellectuals who, because of their participation in all three revolutions, their border crossings within the region and beyond, their adoption and interpretation of and adaptation to such influential and global ideologies as constitutionalism, federalism, and socialism, become ideal subjects for a retelling of the complex story of the revolutions — a story of revolutionary linkages, of local and regional actors with global ties to big ideas. This brings us to another aim of this book: to view the revolutions not only within their local and regional milieus but as part of the global context. This approach takes into consideration the interplay of "facts on the ground" — that is, phenomena particular to the region — with larger historical processes, such as revolutions in communication, transportation, and ideology that had deep and wide-ranging ramifications across the world. A consideration of these global factors helps to explain the deceptively narrower world of our revolutions.
Chris Bayly's astute observation that global philosophies, like liberalism and socialism, originating in the West "had left an indelible imprint on most human communities by 1914" certainly resonates for the Middle East and South Caucasus, where these ideas spread and indigenized according to local conditions, objectives, and aspirations. Bayly notes that often ideas and ideologies took on a discernibly distinct form as they disseminated. In chapters 3 and 4, this kind of adaptation and appropriation becomes apparent. Several ideas or ideologies became malleable in the minds and writings of our revolutionaries and intellectuals, as they selectively applied aspects of anarchism and socialism and synthesized them into an eclectic blend that suited their reality and served their political and social interests. Revolutionaries were keenly aware of and familiar with European (including Russian) social scientific and socialist literature, as well as with leftist movements and revolutionary stirrings, not only in their backyard and in Europe but also farther afield — for example, in Cuba and China. As such, they shared much with each other but also with the world around them, which had, in the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, been experimenting with such ideas as constitutionalism and socialism and had witnessed constitutionalism succeed in parts of Europe and socialism thrive in Western and Central European and Russian political movements. They drew inspiration from such activities and applied their understanding and familiarity to the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian revolutionary environment.
It is within this larger global context that the Russian, Iranian, and Young Turk Revolutions, occurring almost simultaneously in regions bordering each other, may be understood in fresh and revealing ways. All three revolutions under discussion involved the participation of Armenian revolutionaries and intellectuals who contributed in differing ways and degrees and with varying rates of success to revolutionary preparation, process, and development. Whatever the parallels and dissimilarities among the revolutions, neither the revolutions nor the participants were isolated from each other. In fact, they were inextricably connected, a concept not yet fully explored in the study of revolutions. Activists of all three revolutions knew of and about each other and their actions; they were not operating in a vacuum. Therefore, it is essential that such contemporaneous, geographically close revolutions be considered in conjunction and with reference to the larger contemporary context.
With these concerns in mind, this introductory chapter aims to accomplish several goals. It seeks to introduce the local, regional, and global environment and lay out the methodological concerns that drive the study. It begins with the main protagonists of the study, the roving Armenian revolutionaries and their milieu. Following Roper's advice, the chapter then moves to the "general conditions," not only in terms of the wider regional and global context but also the larger methodological issues. It examines comparative, world, and related histories as well as more specifically comparative revolutions to make a case for applying a "connected histories" approach to the study of the early twentieth-century Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian Revolutions — that is, for viewing them as "connected revolutions." It then explores these revolutions on their own and compares them to each other in order to provide the necessary historical background and, thus, move to a discussion of the fin de siècle, 1880s and 1890s, and global transformations that smoothed the way toward revolution. The introduction ends with an overview of the sources and the structure of the book. It seeks to lay the crucial foundations for the rest of the study, which explores the finer points of the circulation of men, arms, print, and ideas that justifies a connected histories method for the study of these revolutions and of the interaction of global, regional, and local contexts that explain circulation and connections.
Before moving on to a discussion of connected histories — and given the considerable importance of Armenian activists and intellectuals in the connected history of the revolutions under discussion here — it is necessary to provide briefly some background on the communities and conditions that produced these historical actors on the move.
ARMENIANS AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
At the turn of the twentieth century, Armenians constituted a minority in three empires: the Ottoman, the Russian, and the Iranian. The largest number of Armenians lived in Asia Minor, or Eastern Anatolia, in the six Ottoman provinces of Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbak?r, Van, and Harput, with a smaller, commercially and intellectually developed minority in the urban hubs of Istanbul/Constantinople and Izmir/Smyrna. It is an impossible task to establish the exact number of Ottoman Armenians at the turn of the twentieth century, partly because the demographic issue has been closely tied to the politics of the "Armenian question," but according to the Armenian Patriarchate's census of 1913, the number of Armenians was slightly under two million. A smaller Armenian community existed in the Araxes valley and Ararat plain, as well as the South Caucasus — specifically Tiflis/Tbilisi, Yerevan, Kars, Elisavetpol, Batumi, and others — and hovered above one million. Relative to the number of Ottoman and Russian Armenians, a rather minuscule population of about seventy thousand Armenians resided in the provinces of Azerbaijan and Isfahan in Iran.
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a particularly transformative period for the region and for all three communities of Armenians but was notably more so in the case of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, where most Armenians lived. The period was punctuated by advances in and greater access to education, a journalistic and literary revival, and a changing political landscape at home and abroad, which simultaneously included reforms as well as persecution. Women in both the Ottoman and Iranian Armenian communities were instrumental in the spread of education, especially but not exclusively of girls, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Women formed charitable organizations; helped to establish kindergartens, primary schools, and secondary schools; and often provided students with tuition, clothing, and school supplies. One of the key driving forces behind the opening of secular Armenian schools starting in the late nineteenth century was the campaign to offset the influence of missionaries and curb the opportunities of assimilation. In the early twentieth century and in particular during the revolutionary early twentieth century in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, Armenian women of the uppermiddle and upper classes expanded their activism to the women's movement in an attempt to bring women's issues to the attention of women themselves and to raise their consciousness. Their organizations tried to educate women in politics and in Ottoman and Iranian constitutionalism, as well as inheritance rights, hygiene, and so forth. Especially significant were women writers Srpuhi Dussap, Sibyl (Zabel Asatur), and Zabel Yesayan, whose writings promoted justice and equity for women in the public and private spheres and educational and employment opportunities. Beginning in the late nineteenth century and early in the twentieth century, women's journals began to appear in Istanbul, Cairo, and Beirut. For example, journals such as Marie Beylerian's Artemis, which appeared in Cairo in 1901–3, and Hayganush Topuzian-Toshigian's Dzaghig Ganants (Women's flower), published in Istanbul in 1905–7, focused on women's issues. They encouraged girls' education and women's full participation in public life as a crucial part of national development.
The changes taking place among women and women's increased participation in public life were taking place in conjunction with other trends, especially in the Ottoman Armenian communities. In the mid-nineteenth century, a younger generation of Ottoman Armenians, mainly from Istanbul, returned from Europe, where they had pursued their education inspired and motivated by the French revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The struggle they waged along with guild members (esnaf) against the power of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the class of magnates (amiras) for control over the affairs of the community resulted in the adoption of the Armenian National Constitution in 1860.
The internal cultural and political awakening of the Armenian communities paralleled the Ottoman Empire's administrative, financial, and military breakdown and subsequent attempts to revitalize and preserve the Ottoman state. The Tanzimat (Reorganization) reforms, promulgated during the reigns of Ottoman sultans Abdülmecid I and Abdülaziz between 1839 and 1876 in an effort to safeguard the integrity of the empire and win over the loyalty of its subjects, promised among many other things that subjects would have equal obligations and opportunities regardless of religion. The reforms culminated in the promulgation of a short-lived Ottoman Constitution in 1876. However, the disparity between expectation and actual implementation and even increasing mistreatment and violence against the empire's Armenian population, most evident in the 1894–96 massacres of Armenians, led some Armenian leaders, like their Greek and Bulgarian counterparts, to seek assistance from Western European powers as well as from Russia. In fact, the Bulgarian case proved to be quite inspirational for Armenian activists despite the obvious differences in their situations. The majority of the Armenian population was dispersed between two empires, where Armenians remained a minority.
The internationalization of the Armenian question achieved by the Berlin Congress of 1878 did not bring about the implementation of reforms requested by the Armenians — that is, local self-government, civil courts of law, mixed Christian and Muslim militias, voting privileges for adult men, and the allocation of a large portion of local taxes for local improvement projects. Instead, the European powers — Great Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, Italy, and Germany — entrusted the Ottoman sultan to carry out reforms and report the empire's progress to the European states at the same time that they forced Russia out of the equation. Starting in the 1880s, Armenians no longer fully entrusted their fate to Europe, although hopes and efforts continued. They began to look outward for inspiration to their Bulgarian and Greek neighbors, who had been successful in carrying out revolutionary movements against the Ottoman Empire, and inward to themselves for the solution to the Armenian question. They began by organizing small self-defense groups (for example, in Van and Erzurum) and soon after coalesced around revolutionary political parties with the purpose of achieving reforms and local autonomy for Ottoman Armenians.
It was the South Caucasus, however, that produced the two most important and long-lasting Armenian political parties. Caucasian Armenian youth, unlike their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire who studied in France, pursued their education in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Dorpat/Tartu, Leipzig, and Berlin. Also, unlike their fellow Ottoman Armenians — the majority of whom, with the exception of residents of Istanbul and Izmir, worked on the land — Caucasian Armenians formed a substantial segment of the working class in the urban centers of Tiflis/Tbilisi (which was also a critically important intellectual center), Baku, and Batumi. Even Caucasian Armenian peasants had better access to all the advantages and drawbacks of urban life as these cities became the destination for those seeking work in factories. At the turn of the century, Caucasian cities grew and became transformed by market economies and industrialization, as well as railroads, telegraphy, and improvement of roads, forces of turn-of-the-century globalization to which we will return below. In turn, the growth of the Armenian bourgeoisie in the South Caucasian cities of Tiflis, Baku, and Batumi reflected a disparity between population size and dominant economic position, thus raising tensions between the Armenian bourgeoisie and the larger population of Georgians and especially Muslims, as manifested in the bloody clashes between Armenians and Azeris in 1905–6. These developments paralleled the enactment of Russification policies in the late nineteenth century and increasing Russian concerns about separatist movements in the provinces. The policies enacted under Tsar Alexander III (r. 1881–94) and Tsar Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917) led to restrictions on Armenian cultural, philanthropic, and political institutions as well as schools, and they culminated in the 1903 seizure of Armenian Church properties. The Russification policies and closure of schools also affected Armenian schools such as the Nersisian, Gevorgian, and Lazarian Academies, which had served the Caucasian Armenian community and contributed to producing Armenian literati as well as activists and revolutionaries, some of whom continued their education in Germany and Russia. Like their counterparts in the Ottoman Empire, Caucasian Armenians returned from their European sojourns strongly influenced by German and Russian intellectual trends and took leadership of the South Caucasian Armenian communities and, more important for us, the revolutionary movements.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Acknowledgments
A Note on Transliteration
1. Connected Revolutions: Local and Global Contexts
2. “Active and Moving Spirits of Disturbance”: Circulation
of Men, Arms, and Print
3. The Circulation of Ideas and Ideologies: Constitutionalism
and Federalism
4. Connected through and beyond Reading: Socialism across
Imperial Frontiers
5. “The Egoism of the Cured Patient”: (In Lieu of a)
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index