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THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Oleg KUZNETSOV
Ph.D. (Hist.), Associate Professor, Deputy Rector for Research, Higher School of Social and Managerial Consulting (Institute) (Moscow, the Russian Federation).
NATIONAL-RELIGIOUS EXTREMISM AND POLITICAL TERROR OF NATIONALISTS AS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE ETHNOGENESIS OF ARMENIAN ETHNICITY (ESSAY ON SOCIAL-POLITICAL HISTORY)
Abstract
The author traces the ethnogenesis of the Armenian people and analyzes its content to demonstrate how organized national and religious extremism, political
terror, and terrorism affected the vector and intensity of social modernization of Armenian ethnicity between the last quarter of the nineteenth and the late twentieth century.
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KEYWORDS: ethnogenesis, social modernization, Armenian Apostolic Church, the Armenian Apostolic clergy, secularization, national-religious extremism, political terrorism, Dashnaktsutiun, Gnchak, ASALA, JCAG, the Republic of Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Introduction
Until 1991, the Armenians did not have full-fledged national statehood. This means that from the point of view of most of the classical and contemporary teachings about the state and law they, at no time, were a political nation, that is, a state-forming ethnicity. Deliberate ruin of the Soviet Union partially orchestrated from abroad gave the Armenians the opportunity to form the sovereign Republic of Armenia, which has been functioning for a quarter of a century now.
Two-and-a-half thousand years ago, the Kingdom of Greater Armenia existed, a fact confirmed by numerous artifacts recovered by an archeological endeavor in the western part of Asia Minor. To my mind, the Republic of Armenia of our days with its formally democratic regime cannot be described as a legal heir to theocratic Greater Armenia in the same way as Israel, the contemporary Jewish state, is not an heir to Hellenic Judea. Both republics differ in many respects from their semi-legendary theocratic predecessors of antiquity. There are cultural, spiritual, and religious ties between the past and present, but this should not be taken to mean that there was or is legal succession between these two Armenian states, which allegedly establishes the right of the Armenians to territories outside the state borders of the Republic of Armenia recognized by international law.
The Dashnak Republic of Armenia of 1918-1920 can be hardly regarded as a more or less comprehensible effort at building and maintaining the national statehood of the Armenians. From the first day of its existence (28 May, 1918), it was no more than the seat of a regional armed conflict, which it stirred up itself by moving against its neighbors one by one. With no more or less adequate structure of state administration and more or less coordinated economic infrastructure, the leaders of Dashnaktsutiun, after seizing power in the new state, launched a military campaign against the republic's neighbors in an effort to resolve domestic problems by taking their property and resources. Armenians acted in the best traditions of the nomadic armies led by Genghis Khan. In the seventeenth century, Wallenstien, Austrian field marshal, did not hesitate to plunder subjugated peoples to feed his own armies, either. This proves beyond a doubt that at that time the Republic of Armenia had no even marginally efficient state institutions.
Here is proof of the above. In November-December 1918, the Armenians moved against the Georgians to gain control over Samtskhe Javakhetia and Akhalkalaki, its center. Beaten off by the Georgians (who, to tell the truth, had Germany and later the U.K. on their side), they retreated. In mid-May 1919, having failed in Georgia, the Armenian nationalists moved toward Nakhchivan, part of the recently proclaimed Araz Republic, liquidated by the Armenian forces after a month of fighting. Local clashes continued from mid-May to 10 August, 1919 when the sides signed a truce, under which Azerbaijan restored its military control over Nakhchivan. Hostilities were rekindled in March 1920 in Zangezur and Nagorno-Karabakh where Armenians and Azeris lived side by side. After 28 April, regular units of Soviet Russia joined the struggle on the side of the Azeris. As could be expected, the Dashnaks were defeated in early August and the territory of the contemporary Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic returned to the jurisdiction of Soviet Azerbaijan according to a letter of Chairman of Nakhchivan Revolutionary Committee M. Bektashev to Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. Nariman Narimanov. Defeated in the east, the government of Arme-
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nia composed of members of Dashnaktsutiun sealed its fate. Turkey, which until the Sovietization of Azerbaijan was guarantor of its security and state sovereignty, attacked Armenia in the south and returned the lands Armenia had occupied in 1918 to Turkey's jurisdiction. In the war with Turkey, which lasted from 23 September to 2 December, 1920, the Republic of Armenia ruled by the Dash-naks suffered a crushing military and political defeat. The Armenians avoided just retribution from their Transcaucasian neighbors (which had earlier been victims of Armenian attacks) by removing from power the terrorists of Dashnaktsutiun (its member Drastamat Kanaian, Defense Minister of Armenia, was involved in the assassination in 1905 of Prince Nakashidze, Governor of the Baku Province and, in 1907, of Maksud Alikhanov-Avarskiy, Governor-General of the Tiflis Province). On 2-3 December, 1920, Armenia became part of Soviet Russia, thus saving its administrative legal sovereignty and avoiding the fate of a Caucasian nation without a legal status because of its small numerical strength.1
The defeats the Dashnak Republic of Armenia suffered in the wars of 1918-1920 were determined by the level of social development of the Armenian ethnicity of the early twentieth century. At that time, social organization of the Armenians was not developed enough to build an efficient statehood. This, in turn, can be explained by the social history of the Armenians in the Middle Ages and Modern Times, when practically all the leading political nations of our time were taking shape.
Millet at-Arman in the Medieval History of the Muslim East
In the fifth century, the Armenians began living in diasporas spread across the entire Muslim ecumene: Persia, the Ottoman Empire, including the territories now occupied by the Balkan states (from the late fourteenth century onwards they belonged to the Ottoman Empire), those areas of North Africa that remained under the empire's protectorate, and the Crimean Khanate, one of the vassals of the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman and the Crimean-Tatar administrations considered the Armenians to be millet at-Arman, a self-administered group of non-Muslims or zimmi. In the Ottoman Empire, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, and Jews belonged to the same category; they formed their own millets (a religious corporation of Orthodox Christians who were subjects of the Empire was called millet at-Rum). In other words, in the Ottoman Empire, the Armenian, just as the East- or West European and Judean, identity was rooted in confessional rather than national affiliation—not blood, but religious kinship, and the corresponding church rites.
Under the Shari'a, the legal cornerstone of the Ottoman and Persian empires, non-Muslims (zimmi) could not own land and fill official posts relating to feudal land ownership. They were excluded from civil service, be it administrative, military, fiscal, quartermasters, etc. and were obliged to pay jizya (the money thus collected was used to maintain the army and buy weapons). At first (at the time Muslims had conquered certain territories), jizya was interpreted as "redemption money" paid by zimmi. As the Islamic state was gradually becoming a centralized hierarchical structure, jizya acquired the meaning specified above. In this way, the interests of the state and its non-Muslim population were counterbalanced—the state kept its janissary troops, which protected all the subjects of the Ottoman Empire, irrespective of their faith, while the non-Muslims preserved their religions
1 For more details about the history of the Dashnak Republic of Armenia, see: Istoria natsionalno-gosudarstvennogo stroitelstva v SSSR, 1917-1978, in 2 vols., third revised edition. Vol. 1. Istoria natsionalno-gosudarstvennogo stroitelstva v SSSR v perekhodny period ot kapitalizma k sotsializmu (1917-1936), Mysl Publishers, Moscow, 1979; R.G. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times. In 2 vols. Vol. II, Foreign Dominion to Statehood: The Fifteenth Century to the Twentieth Century, Palgrave Macmillan, Los-Angeles, 2004; A.T. Minassian, La république d'Arménie. 1918-1920: La mémoire du siècle, Brussels, 1989.
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and independent churches by helping maintain the armed forces or local administrations that had janissary units under their command.
Jizya was strictly per capita and was collected in all Islamic countries. To guarantee its collection, it was gathered by the hierarchs of religious corporations who were duty bound to keep the lists of their co-religionists living either in the empire or its individual districts. In other words, fiscal obligations were officially imposed upon any church (there are no churches in Islam) either Orthodox, Catholic, or Armenian Apostolic—it had to register its followers and collect annual jizya, which went either to the treasury of the sultan (in Istanbul and in Rûm, the empire's European domains in the Balkans), or to the treasuries of walis or pasha, rulers of provinces (vilayets) who were accountable to the sultan for the way the money was used. This made the non-Muslim clergy in the Islamic countries an intermediary of sorts between official power and their religious communities, that is, a semblance of administrative power.
This meant that non-Muslims in the Muslim countries lived under administrative and police control of the local authorities not favorably disposed to non-Muslims; on the other hand, they were legally subordinated to their own clergy—the material prosperity of each member of non-Muslim confessions and that of his family directly depended on the clergy. This prompted the conclusion that in the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate, the non-Muslim clergy had much wider powers and rights than their Muslim colleagues; they were much more involved in state and public life of the empire than the clergy in the Christian countries. The Armenian Apostolic priest elected or invited by the community fulfilled the following three functions: his priestly functions, which made him part of the church hierarchy; administrative functions as the headman directly involved in the developments inside the community; and fiscal functions as the official who contacted local Muslim administrations through tax collection. He controlled all channels of interaction between the local ethnic-religious community and the outside world. In plain words, its members totally depended on him. This pattern of everyday life of the Armenian ethnicity in the Ottoman Empire survived for at least five centuries, which explains the exceptionally great role of the Armenian Apostolic clergy in everyday and public life of the Armenians as members of one of the millets of the Ottoman Empire.
In the Persian Empire, the Armenian Apostolic clergy had much less power—with few exceptions (a fairly small sect of Zoroastrians), jizya was collected by the local administrations according to the lists supplied by Armenian priests. It was a per capita and, partly, an income tax (at least in the eighteenth century). The Christian areas of Eastern Transcaucasia (Kartli-Kakhetia and Guria), though vassals of the Persian shahs, were completely autonomous in the administrative and religious respect and, therefore, paid no jizya. This explains why tax collection among the Armenians living in the inner areas of the Persian Empire was administratively similar to tax collection in other parts of the empire. The role of the Armenian clergy was limited to supplying lists of their co-religionists. This also meant that, as subjects of the Persian shah, the Armenians had much wider opportunities for social and economic development than the Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire.
The Armenians were absolutely free in the domains of the Crimean khans, which stretched to contemporary Transnistria and Malaya Kabarda. In his Tahiri-i Kyrym (History of Crimea), Ottoman statesman and writer of the latter half of the eighteenth century El Haj Muhammed As Seyyid Nejati Effendi (during the 1768-1774 Russo-Turkish War he served as quartermaster of the Crimea Corps routed in the fall of 1772) described everyday life of the local people. Each Armenian had to pay jizya of one kurush (one piaster) a year2; it was, in fact, a business license. After buying it, an Armenian could go into any type of economic activity, including slave trade and communal baths. Under the Karasubazar Pearce Treaty of 1 November, 1772, Crimea became a vassal of the Russian Empire, its
2 See: M. Nejati Effendi, "Zapiski Muhammeda Nedjati Effendi, turetskogo plennogo v Rossii v 1771-1775 gg., Transl. from the Turkish and introduced by V. Smirnov", Russkaya starina, 1894, Vol. 81, No. 3, pp. 113-114; No. 4, pp. 179-208; No. 5, pp. 144-169 (here quoted from: Russkaya starina, No. 4, p. 183).
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Armenian population being forced to move to the vicinities of Rostov-on-Don where they founded the city of Armavir. The Russian Empire acquired a large group of traders and artisans; after losing its Armenian trading and working population, the Crimean Khanate joined or was joined to Russia in 1783.
The above concise historical and ethnographic survey shows that in the Islamic ecumene, the Armenians were not a united people, but rather a multinational religious sect that brought together people from different ethnic and social groups. They lived in different countries and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gradually moved to the Russian Empire. Massive and organized resettlement of Armenians from Persia to the Russian part of Transcaucasia after the war of 1826-1828 and from the Ottoman Empire after the war of 1828-1829 can be described as part of the contribution the countries defeated by the Separate Caucasian Corps had to pay Russia. The change of the country did not affect either the morality or way of life of the members of this religious corporation. This interpretation of emigration of the Armenians living in different Muslim countries to Russia suggests that they preserved very specific relations inside the corporation rooted in many generations who had lived in these countries. Armenians remained loyal to them when dealing with the local Russian (Cossack or Malorussian) populations and never bothered to establish contacts with co-religionists who arrived from other Muslim countries.
The Armenian immigrants brought their way of life, customs, and beliefs, which differed greatly from the local ones, to their new homeland on the Don, in Taman, the Northern Caucasus, and Transcaucasia (Akhalkalaki and the Lori valley). This attracted much academic and administrative interest. In Volume 1 (Part 2) of his multivolume Istoria voyny i vladychestva Russkikh na Kavkaze (A History of War and Russia's Rule in the Caucasus), Lieutenant General Nikolay Dubrovin, an outstanding military historian, ethnographer, Perpetual Secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, member of the Military-Teaching Committee at the General Staff of the Russian Imperial Army, had the following to say about the everyday life and habits of the Transcaucasian Armenians:
"The Armenians who settled among the Tatars cannot be put into the same category with the Armenians who belong to the educated class scattered across the world or even with those who live in Georgian cities. The Armenians of the Muslim provinces differ but little from the Tatars, except in their religion. The majority of the Armenian villages look like groups of holes in the earth covered by earth and dug without any attempt at order; they are separated from one another by heaps of dung or stinking puddles; there are paths meandering between the holes, an excuse for homes, or going across their roofs. In some places, lower in the mountains there are orchards and small groves which cover up the mud and dirt of these villages. Very much like Tatars, the Armenians live in their underground holes together with their cattle and are obviously not bothered by their natural functions and habits. These Armenian homes serve as a cattle-shed and a place where children grow up. Hens and loud cocks roost there; at night they are especially unpleasant. Swarms of all sorts of disgusting insects greet everyone at the entrance to the saklia. "3
We can hardly doubt the evidence of one of the heads of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This confirms what was said above about the social, regional, and probably ethnic diversity of the Armenian ethnicity in Russia in the 1860s, which survived during the next two or even three decades. The above also confirms that most of the Armenians of Transcaucasia who had moved there from the Ottoman Empire two generations earlier were still living at the tribal level. In his book, Nikolay Dubrovin described the Armenians who lived in the territory now occupied by the Republic of Armenia as remaining at the lowest level of social evolution for about a century-and-a-half and who constituted the majority of the Armenians living at that time in the Russian Empire. Let me clarify— in 1830-1831, Russian troops moved up to a third of a million Armenians from the Ottoman Empire
3 N.F. Dubrovin, Istoria voyny i vladychestva russkikh na Kavkaze, in 8 vols. Vol. 1, Part 2, N.I. Skorokhodov Print shop, St. Petersburg, 1871, p. 403.
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to Russian Transcaucasia; two years earlier, in 1828, about 50 thousand were moved out of Persia; half a century earlier, no more than 15 thousand were moved out of Crimea.4 In this way, the Erivan Khanate (a Russian province since 1828) acquired a predominantly Armenian population. The same can be said about Samtskhe Javakhetia (now part of Georgia), previously homeland of the Muslim Mingrels.
The Armenians and Muslims had much in common with respect to their lifestyle and habits, although the Armenians were much more religious. In the last third of the nineteenth century, their religious identity was the only thing that distinguished them from the semi-nomadic Muslim peoples whose primitive lifestyle and primitive economic activities were more or less similar to their own. This raised the authority of the Armenian Apostolic clergy even higher than in the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate. In Russia, they organized relations between their multinational congregation and the local authorities; after settling in Russia, the Armenians remained a polyethnic religious sect guided by their clergy and its hierarchy. This situation was further consolidated by the fact that a large part of the autochthonous Turkic population of Transcaucasia was officially "Armenisized," so to speak. This primarily refers to the numerically smaller peoples (Tats and Udins) who belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church long before the arrival of Armenians from the Ottoman and Persian empires.
According to Marx, "social being determines consciousness"; this can be fully applied to the nature and content of the religious world outlook of the Transcaucasian Armenians in the last third of the nineteenth century. Unaware of the Marxian formula, Nikolay Dubrovin followed it when describing the religious rites of the Transcaucasian Armenians: according to what he wrote, a century-and-a-half ago, the Armenians were not "classical" Gregorian Armenians but common pagans who worshipped a pantheon of gods. Obliged to follow the rules and norms of official and bureaucratic political correctness prominent in the past very much like today, Nikolay Dubrovin wrote:
"Even though the Armenians embraced Christianity long ago, they moved certain traits of pagan rituals to the newly acquired religion. They made sacrifices to Mihr, patron of heroes fighting in the war who brought victory to the most courageous and daring... In our days, the Armenians celebrate Mihr either on the day of the Meeting of the Lord or on the eve. The feast is celebrated either inside the church or outside it, in the open...
"Many of the Armenians worship the sun, called Arev in Armenian. No matter what, there are still people who call themselves arevardi, that is, sons of the sun. Dying people are laid so that they face the east; the same applies to the dead when they are laid in the coffin. Burials are performed before sunset. Armenians also worship Anahita, the goddess of wisdom and glory who, as believed, patronized the Armenian Kingdom. Every year, when the roses are in full bloom, the Armenians celebrated the day of this goddess. This is called Vartavar. On that day, the Armenians decorated temples, statues, public places, and even themselves. Today, the Armenians honor the goddess by decorating altars and sprinkling people gathered in the church with holy rose water. "5 This was what happened in the Armenian countryside (today the territory of the Republic of Armenia) in the last third of the nineteenth century!
Anyone who loves the Armenians and knows enough of the humanities may object to the above by saying that this phenomenon called syncretism was typical not only of the Armenians, but of practically all Christian churches. This is true. In his Yazychestvo drevnikh slavian (Paganism among Ancient Slavs), Academician Boris Rybakov wrote that religious syncretism was prominent during the transition from clans and tribes to the state when the upper crust embraced a monotheist religion
4 For more details, see: O. Kuznetsov, "Nashestvie ili iskhod? Pereselenie armian v Zakavkazie v 1830-1831 gg. v trudakh russkikh voennykh istorikov vtoroy treti XIX-nachala XX stoletia," IRS-Nasledie: Mezhdunarodny azerbaidzhansky zhurnal, 2012, No. 5 (59), pp. 56-61; No. 6, pp. 32-37.
5 N.F. Dubrovin, op. cit., pp. 409-410.
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as its ideology, while the grass roots remained pagan. This was typical of the Eastern Slavs in the tenth and up to the fourteenth century, the period when pre-Mongol and Golden Horde Rus was gradually becoming Christian. The same went on among the Transcaucasian Armenians in the mid-nineteenth century. This meant that earlier in their history they had no experience of national statehood, which makes Armenian deliberations about the lost Greater Armenia an ideological myth. The Armenian religious leaders have been using it for the last few centuries to establish and maintain their moral and financial control over their co-religionists. Christian and Armenian syncretism are very different in one respect—the former is a cult of a sacrifice. "So God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John: 3:16). This means that Christianity requires no material, let alone human, sacrifices. The cult of Mihr, the Armenian analogue of the great Olympian god of war Ares or Roman Mars, requires sacrifices, which contradicts Christianity and Christian ethics. Armenian theologians, past masters of scholastics, knew that, but either accepted or deliberately encouraged this practice that coincided with their corporate interests.
My conclusion about the Armenians as a polyethnic religious sect or an ethnoreligious corporation that existed throughout the nineteenth and even in the early twentieth century was supported by Procurator of the Etchmiadzin Synod A. Frenkel, who presented his well-known memorandum about the state of affairs among the Armenians of the Russian Empire to the Holy Governing Synod in 1907. There is no reason to doubt his competence—his post presupposed that he performed the functions of a state inspector of the administrative and economic activities of the hierarchs and clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church in the territory of Russia. In other words, he knew much more than any other official of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Empire (between 1836 and 1917, the Armenian Apostolic Church was administratively guided by the Ministry's Department of Foreign Faiths). There is no reason to doubt what he wrote about the social structure of the Transcaucasian Armenians in the early twentieth century.
"Historically, Greater Armenia adopted Christianity in the fourth century; in the fifth century, it lost its political independence and was ruled for some time by Persians (Zoroastrians), Byzantium, Arabs, Seljuk Turks, and other conquerors. Different parts of what was Greater Armenia were divided among conquerors and lived, developed, and created their own special and Church relations maximally adjusted to the state order of their rulers. They gradually lost contact among themselves; for this reason each part insisted on the purity and unaltered nature of the dogmata of the Armenian Apostolic faith; the language, rights, and customs lost much of their national traits. In fact, the Turkish, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian Armenians, even if we look at our Transcaucasia alone, demonstrate a very interesting fact—the Armenians of Tiflis (Georgian influence), the Armenians of Akulis, Elisavetpol, and Karabakh (Persian influence) and the Armenians of Akhaltsikhe and Akhalkalaki (Turkish influence) can barely understand each other; marriages between them are very rare.
"The historical fate of the Armenian nation has proven incontrovertibly the complete inability of this nation to create its own independent state, a state organism; its absolute inability to perceive the true principles of higher civilization, since for several millennia not one luminary of science and art has been registered. Greater Armenia of the old times did not leave us a single code of national laws, not counting the Code of Laws of learned monk Mkhitar Gosh, a pathetic compilation of the laws of Moses, Byzantine, and bits and pieces of Armenian folk customs. "6
6 Russian State Historical Archives (hereinafter RGIA), rec. gr. 821 "Department of Spiritual Affairs of Foreign Faiths of the Ministry of the Interior of the Russian Empire," inv. 7 "Armenian Apostolic Faith. 1836-1917," f. 96 (180/139) "Notes and Information about the Armenian Apostolic Church in Russia and Its Clergy, about the Activities of the Etchmiadzin Synod and the Attitude to It of the Catholicoses of All Armenians, about the Property and Religious Structures, etc. 1864-1911)," sheet 254.
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The Place Held by the Armenian Apostolic Clergy in the Life of Armenian Ethnicity
The state of affairs described above can primarily be explained by the very specific social and legal status of the corporation of the Armenian Apostolic clergy in the social system of Armenian religious-ethnic society, which exhibited two very specific features that distinguished it from its colleagues of other churches and confessions. First, membership in this corporation was never hereditary because of strict celibacy. The priests of the Armenian Apostolic Church had no legal children; this means that there were no hereditary Armenian Apostolic priests in the Russian, Ottoman, and Persian empires, in which the principles and norms of the feudal law were strictly observed. The corporation reproduced itself by drawing fresh forces from all the social groups of the Armenian religious community (millet). Priests of any confessions were expected to be well versed in the religious affairs and know much more than the basics of literacy and bits and pieces of science. Knowledge of the dogmata of the faiths and church services were a sort of educational census that distinguished the priests from the other members of the same Church—the congregation and the laity, which depended on their much more educated spiritual pastors. Adequate education required and requires today a fairly long period of learning—from five to ten years; this means that ordinary people who had no money to support themselves while studying stood no chance of becoming priests. For centuries, the corporation of Armenian Apostolic priests was replenished with younger sons or nephews of trading families, that is, the social group that concentrated the wealth of the Armenian ethnoreligious corporation, the prototype of the Armenian ethnicity. This explains why throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Armenian clergy was replenished from among the trade and usury social stratum across the Russian Empire, particularly the Transcaucasian provinces and districts.
The social status and way of life of the Armenian clergy was strongly affected by the fact that by the early twentieth century it had accumulated public property of the Armenians (not as an ethnicity but as a religious sect) in the form of legal right to this property or direct and indirect management. Not infrequently, Armenian families entrusted their property to the clergy or agents of the Church hierarchy. This property was unrelated to either religious or any other confessional activities; it was, in contemporary terms, commercial real estate set up to derive profit. Transferred to the Church, it was exempt from taxation, which increased its profitability. This meant that Armenian industrialists and traders were functioning under much better conditions than the other entities of business activities, particularly the Russian national bourgeoisie taking shape at the turn of the twentieth century. This practice was not invented in Russia—it was brought to it by Armenian migrants from the countries where they had lived for many centuries. According to contemporary Armenian authors, early in the twentieth century the Armenian Apostolic Church owned property in the Russian Empire amounting to the huge sum of 113 million rubles,7 mainly formed by private donations or exploitation of commercial real estate.
In 1901, Chief Commander in the Caucasus Infantry General Prince Golitsyn pointed to this glaring injustice, which was damaging the economy of his region and the fiscal policy of the state in this part of the empire. He initiated a draft law On the Introduction of Direct Administrative Fiscal Control of the Russian Empire over the Property of the Armenian Apostolic Church not used for religious purposes and unrelated to the life of the clergy or burial rituals. For a year-and-a-half, he pushed his draft law through the corridors of power so that it should be approved and adopted by Emperor Nicholas II. On 12 June, 1903, the imperial law was enacted—it presupposed transfer of a great part of property and money of the Armenian Apostolic Church to state control. Formally,
7 See: L.I. Karapetian, "Iz istorii armianskikh politicheskikh partiy na Kubani v nachale XX veka," in: Armiane Severnogo Kavkaza, Collection of articles, Center for Pontic-Caucasian Studies, Krasnodar, 1995, p. 92.
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the law was a document of the Committee of Ministers confirmed by His Imperial Majesty, its full title being On Concentration of Management of the Property of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Russia in Government Departments and on the Transfer of Means and Property of This Church Used to Ensure the Functioning of the Armenian Apostolic Church Schools to the Ministry of Public Education.8
Under this law, the Russian state established its direct control over the real estate and money that belonged to the Armenian Apostolic Church by transferring them "from the management of the clergy and spiritual structures of this confession" to the management of the Minister of Agriculture and State Property (the real estate) and the Ministry of the Interior (finances); the "Armenian Apostolic Church preserved its right to this property and capital." Translated into common language, this meant that the government had finally decided to revise the property not taken into account before in order to avoid possible financial machinations by the uncontrolled Armenian clergy. The law transferred "the property and capital of the Armenian Apostolic churches, monasteries, spiritual organizations, and educational establishments", that is, the property of the churches, consistories, eparchies, schools, and other church structures to state control. The property enumerated in the law did not coincide with its religious character. For example, the Ministry of Agriculture and State Property was expected to assume management of "lands populated and unpopulated, irrespective of their status, as well as individual forests, meadows, pastures, fisheries, etc.," as well as "all houses and structures that belong to the Armenian Apostolic churches, clergy, and spiritual structures of this confession and are not needed for everyday use by the clergy and the above-mentioned structures." In other words, the state established control over all "non-core assets" unrelated to religious activities of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
The Church and the hierarchs and clergy retained control over church property. "The land under the buildings of churches, monasteries, chapels, etc. and under the buildings occupied by hierarchs, spiritual departments, city and village clergy and spiritual educational establishments; the land within church and cemetery fences and, finally, the plots of land used by clergy, as well as orchards, kitchen gardens, and pastures, but no more than three desiatinas (1 desyatina was equal to 10,925 square meters.—Ed.) at each church, not used for profit."
The law of 12 June, 1903 demonstrates that in the early twentieth century the Armenian Apostolic Church was a feudal landowner that concentrated in its hands the right of property (if not the right of ownership then the right of using and disposing) on at least part of the basic means of subsistence of the agricultural population that belonged to all sorts of Armenian territorial religious communities. In fact, throughout its functioning under the jurisdiction of the Russian imperial powers (that is, starting with the second third of the nineteenth century), the church hierarchy represented a social organization of the Armenian ethno-religious corporation patterned on late feudal society. As distinct from the Ottoman and Persian empires, in the Russian Empire, the clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church not only fulfilled administrative and fiscal functions when dealing with the official authorities, but was also the owner of land and other real estate of commercial nature. This means that de facto it played a social and economic role typical of that played by the beks and agalars, hereditary landed aristocracy among the Transcaucasian Muslims. In fact, the Armenian monks differed but little from moafs9 in terms of their legal status; priests in ordinary, from agalars; deans of churches, from beks; hierarchs (bishops and archbishops) from khans with the functions of a naib (administrator of provinces and districts). This means that in the Russian Empire the Armenian Apostolic Church not only symbolized but was the feudal hierarchy of the Armenian religious corporation within which the congregation—villagers and not very numerous city dwellers—were re-
8 See: Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiyskoy imperii. Sobranie tretye. 1881-1914, Vol. XXIII, 1903, Otd. 1, State Print Shop, St. Petersburg, 1905, No. 32156, pp. 778-779.
9 Moafs in Azerbaijan were small landowners freed from taxes in exchange of military service with their own equipment; weapons were supplied by the state. In this respect they were similar to the Cossacks of Russia.
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duced to the role of serfs in the countryside or tax-paying population in cities and towns obliged to work for the state and the Church.
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Armenian Apostolic Church functioned as a banking and usury structure for its own ethnicity. It regulated money flows and accumulated the financial surplus of the Armenian people not necessarily by legal means. The following place in the law of 12 June, 1903 hints that the Russian authorities knew about these financial irregularities: "The above order should also be established in the sphere of property and capital donated or bequeathed to these structures." The Armenian Apostolic Church observed and continues to observe celibacy. This meant that in the absence of direct and legal heirs, it had to appoint members of large rich families to religious posts which donated large sums to the church. This was tax evasion pure and simple, since the money transferred (donated) by a merchant to a priest never left the same family. In fact, at the turn of the twentieth century, the Armenian clergy members were not only feudal lords or even big landowners, but also typical members of the bourgeoisie who shamelessly used the church capital accumulated from donations of the credulous congregation to make themselves and their relatives rich. In this respect, the holy order of an Armenian Apostolic priest opened up wide vistas of commercial activity uncontrolled either by the state or the ethno-religious corporation of the Armenians, who were nothing short of slaves for their priests anyway. Taken together this guaranteed prompt enrichment.
The transfer of Church money to state control deprived the top crust of the Armenian ethnicity of more or less legal methods of tax evasion; from that time on the Armenian Apostolic clergy could no longer use Church money for commercial purposes, which transformed them from "masters of life" with a dominant influence into common bureaucrats kept by the state on an equal footing with the clergy of all other confessions of the Russian Empire. In other words, the law of 12 June, 1903 deprived the Armenian Apostolic clergy of the exclusive social and economic status to which it had been accustomed and also brought about two very important consequences. On the one hand, the clergy called on its congregation to fight the Government of the Russian state to force it annul the offending law and restore the status quo ante bellum. This raised the first wave of Armenian national religious terror. On the other hand, adoption and implementation of the law of 12 June, 1903 made it impossible for the Armenian Apostolic clergy to combine two social and economic principles—feudal (landowner-ship) and bourgeois (trade). In the changed social and political conditions, this dualism slowed down the development of the Armenians as an ethno-religious corporation by inviting administrative sanctions and even repressions, to say nothing of criminal extra-economic activities of a small group of Armenians (which took shape in the late nineteenth century) who justly considered the Armenian Apostolic Church to be an impediment to national development and progress.
Nationalists Snatch Control over the Armenian Ethnicity from the Church
Chronologically, secularization of Church property coincided with an upsurge of the Armenian anti-government movement in the Ottoman Empire. Its first shoots became obvious in the 1890s. It was not the Armenian Apostolic Church that organized and inspired protests—its privileged position gave it no reason to be displeased with the imperial authorities. The breeding discontent was the doing of fighters of all sorts of Armenian national-revolutionary organizations that appeared late in the nineteenth century not without help from Britain, Russia, and France. I am referring in particular to Gnchak (Bell), a Social Democratic party set up in 1887 in Geneva by a group of Armenian students from Russia and Dashnaktsutiun, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation set up in 1890 at a constituent congress in Tiflis out of basically extremist groups of Armenian members of Narodnaya Volya, Marxists, and anarchists. There was also the Armenikan party set up in the Ottoman Empire
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in 1885 in the city of Van. These parties were determined to establish an Armenian republic in Eastern Anatolia (the Ottoman Empire's Asian part) using every possible means and methods, including terror against the Turks in Transcaucasia and Hither Asia and those members of the Armenian religious corporation who refused to cooperate with them.
Points 8 and 11 of the section entitled "The Means [of revolutionary struggle]" of the first version (1884) of the Dashnaktsutiun political program looked at terror as one of the important instruments of revolutionary change. The program invited to "expose the members of power structures, turncoats, traitors, usurers, and all sorts of exploiters to terror" and "plunder and ruin government offices." The documents of the Gnchak party differed but little from the above and defined the aims as "propaganda, agitation, terror, organization, and peasant and worker activities."10 From the very beginning, the Armenian nationalists considered terror to be the most effective and most frequently used instrument of revolutionary struggle for Armenian national statehood in Eastern Anatolia. It implied that it should be used against the Turks and Armenians who sided with the Turks. This was not a slip of the tongue—in the specific economic, social, and political conditions of the early twentieth century, in which the Armenians lived and developed their ethnicity (the process described above in greater detail), terror was the most efficient method to push Armenians into revolutionary struggle.
In his 1907 memo mentioned above, Procurator of the Etchmiadzin Synod A. Frenkel wrote: "Until the eighteenth century when Russia started moving into the Near Muslim East, the absolute majority of the Armenians divided between Turkey and Persia never objected to Muslim power. Their situation was not worse than that of all other subjects of the sultan and the shah. The Armenians promptly found their niches in the ruling and financial spheres of their conquerors and practically monopolized trade and crediting.
"The Muslim rulers recognized the sovereignty of the Armenian catholicoses in the religious sphere. Armenian history knows many patriarchs who, supported by Turkish zaptys and Persian far-rashes (tax collectors.—O.K.), extorted huge sums from their congregation. One can imagine that this very specific arrangement flattered the Armenians' national pride since the omnipotent Catholi-cos created an illusion of the head of the people.
"Neither the Turks nor Persians interfered in the common Armenian law and order of self-administration of small units.
"The first third of the nineteenth century marked by a rise in the national awareness of many numerically small peoples could not but leave its mark on the Armenians. This is supported by the following: the series of successful wars Russia waged against Turkey and Persia, which ended in the alienation of several provinces with an Armenian population, kindled the hope among the Armenians of finally shedding the Muslim yoke. National self-awareness among the Armenians developed along the lines common to all other subjugated peoples. Patriots and public figures concentrated on restoring and creating literature, national theater, and art and stirring up national pride through examples (albeit apocryphal) of the courage of ancestors, etc. "11
The above suggests that neither in the Ottoman nor Persian empires were the Armenians assimilated in the administrative and religious respect. What is more, they were fully integrated into the empires' economic life and even monopolized several economic branches. We should bear in mind, however, that the social and economic success of members of the Armenian religious corporation was limited to families of traders and usurers closely related to the hierarchs of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Since these entrepreneurs and industrialists also used Church money in their commercial activities, they enriched the Church hierarchy. The latter did nothing to educate the congregation
10 The Armenian Revolutionary Movement, 1963, p. 110 (quoted from: J. McCarthy, C. McCarthy, Turks and Armenians: A Manual on the Armenian Question, Committee on Education Assembly of Turkish American Association, Washington D.C., 1989, p. 33).
11 RGIA, rec. gr. 821, inv. 7, f. 96, sheet 258.
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morally or intellectually—the ignorance and social backwardness of the ordinary people guaranteed them domination over the co-religionists, the cornerstone of their economic (trade and usury) might.
The Armenian clergy and the merchants and usurers connected with them were not ready to pay for realizing the idea of an Armenian republic in Eastern Anatolia, which would have buried their theocracy and plutocracy. Violence and extra-economic coercion were the most adequate instruments to be used to push them onto the road of struggle for this idea. By this I mean methods of personal terror that could be described as terrorism if aimed at state or public figures (the Armenian Church hierarchs belonged to the latter category). The Armenian nationalist revolutionaries were fully aware that to set up an Armenian republic in Eastern Anatolia they must fight the Ottoman Empire and primarily the bigotry and all the other negative traits of the ethno-religious mentality of the Armenians. The revolutionaries were open about their choice of terror as the main instrument of shaping and educating the Armenian ethnicity.
To be realized, Armenian national statehood with ta republican form of governance in Turkish Transcaucasia needed civil society as the social cornerstone of a new mono-ethnic state. To achieve this, it was necessary to transform the polyethnic Armenian religious corporation or sect into a united people brought together not by religious, but by a qualitatively different (material) principle unrelated to religious metaphysics. The road to it lay through an alternative reality of the Armenians being free from the omnipresent and omnipotent Armenian Apostolic Church. In other words, the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries had to invent and realize a method through which they could replace the Armenian Apostolic Church in the Armenian ethno-religious corporation. In this way, they would gain two strategic advantages. On the one hand, this plan did not require additional forces and assets. It was enough to replace the members of one social corporation (Church) with the members of a political corporation to destroy the old and erect a new social structure. The competence of the leaders and those whom they led remained practically the same. On the other hand, control over the congregation would give the revolutionaries control over the Church hierarchs and Church property (at least the part unrelated to religious functions and activities). In fact, the Armenian revolutionaries intending to realize their political ideal of an Armenian national state had to pursue an administrative policy in relation to the Armenian Church similar to the one the Russian Empire pursued in the Caucasus in line with the law of 12 June, 1903.
The above suggests that to succeed the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries had to completely modernize the Armenians to transform them from a polyethnic religious sect still living in the late nineteenth century into a full-fledged ethnicity or people, the self-identification of whom rested on social and political rather than religious dominants. At that time, the Armenians had no dominants that could be used as common moral (or, at least, intellectual) landmarks. The revolutionaries had to formulate them and impose them on the Armenians (still a religious sect) in order to rule out all possible social-political alternatives to a mono-national republic in Transcaucasia. Destruction of the Armenian way of life in the Muslim environment was the first step toward the desired goal; a blood feud between Armenians and Muslims was stirred up; the Armenian territorial religious communities forgot their local specifics and self-sufficiency to pool forces, this time not for religious reasons. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Armenians began closing ranks in the face of collective responsibility for the atrocities committed by their co-religionists against the Muslims in the Ottoman, Russian, and Persian empires. So-called blind terror was used to replace religious with national consolidation. In 1895-1907, the Armenian nationalist fighters of the Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun parties ignited religious and ethnic clashes in the Armenian settlements; they attacked Muslim villages, plundered them and, at opportune moments, killed the local people, mainly women, children, and old people, the easiest prey.
The list of crimes of this sort is well known; it appeared in numerous publications of Turkish and Azeri authors,12 so there is not much sense in quoting it here. These crimes had several common
12 See: R. Mustafaev, Prestupleniia armianskikh terroristicheskikh i banditskikh formirovaniy protiv chelovechestva (XIX-XX vv.): kratkaia khronologicheskaia entsiklopedia, Elm, Baku, 2002; B. Najafov, Litso vraga. Istoria armianskogo
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or even typical features which, taken together, can be described as "criminal specifics" that pointed to the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries and distinguished them from similar crimes perpetrated by political extremists (anarchists, members of Narodnaya Volya, Revolutionary Social Democrats, and others) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historical evidence points to five important typical features present in all crimes of the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries known to history, which they committed in the relatively short period of time.
First, they operated in the Ottoman and Russian empires in localities where Armenians lived in compact communities and where the share of Muslims was relatively small (no more than 10 to 15 percent). There were no Muslim pogroms in the Erivan Province of the Russian Empire with a predominantly Armenian population. This meant that the Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun fighters preferred localities where Armenians were on their side, albeit unwillingly, and could be subjected to administrative and military repressions, which they were unable to resist, for helping criminals. Villages with predominantly Muslim populations were shelled or set on fire; local people were killed in great numbers with exceptional or even deliberate cruelty; the troops dispatched to restore law and order were shelled from Armenian villages. The earliest provocations of Armenian nationalists took place in the Ottoman Empire and go back to July-August 1894 when they stirred up an Armenian-Turkish conflict in Sason, a mountainous area of what is now Turkish Kurdistan. On 18 September, 1895, mass riots, in which small arms were used, flared up in Bab Ali, an exclusive area of Istanbul where the palace of Sultan Abdul Hamid II was located. A month later, clashes between Armenians and Turks and pogroms shattered the environs of Akhisar, Trabzon, Bayburt, Bitlis, and Erzurum in Eastern Anatolia (Turkish Transcaucasia). It was at the same time that Armenians rioted in Zeytun (today Suleymanli on the southern Mediterranean coast of Turkey); a month later, Armenians clashed with Turks and Kurds in the southeastern provinces (vilayets) of the Asian part of the Ottoman Empire— Diyarbakir, Arapgir, Urfa, Malatya, Kharberd, Sivas, Ayntap, and Mara§.
The ideologists of Armenian nationalism from among the leaders of Gnchak and Dashnaktsu-tiun expected that these crimes would isolate the Armenians from the other local peoples and invite retributions from their Muslim neighbors and repressions from the imperial authorities. The Armenians had to stop feeling like part of the local social landscape to become aware of their responsibility for the crimes committed by others. The feeling of religious conformism, highly developed among the Armenians, was replaced with a feeling of collective involvement in criminal activities and collective responsibility for them, no longer as members of a religious corporation, but as an ethnicity. In fact, these crimes should have changed the paradigm of the Armenians' national-religious self-awareness and taught them to regard themselves as a new social and political entity, a people led by a party of nationalists.
I do not claim the honor of pioneering the thesis that the crimes of the Armenian nationalists in villages, towns, and large cities with predominantly Muslim populations and seemingly accidental murders of peaceful people were intended as provocations in the hope of inviting repressions against the Armenians to widen the gap and stir up antagonism between them and the local people. This honor belongs to William L. Langer, an American who wrote The Diplomacy of Imperialism published in 1951, in which he argued that the revolutionary leaders of Armenians probably expected to draw attention to the Armenian question through the sufferings of the Armenians caused by their terrorist activities.13 Half a century later, Walter Laqueur said the same in his Age of Terrorism and The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction. He has concretized the idea that the Ar-
natsionalizma v Zakavkazie v kontse XIX-nachale XX v., Elm, Baku, 1993; Prestupleniia armianskikh terroristicheskikh i banditskikh formirovaniy protiv chelovechestva: XIX-XXI vv.: kratkaia khronologicheskaia entsiklopedia, Institute of Human Rights NANA, Compiled by A. Mustafaeva et al., Elm, Takhsil, Baku, 2013; F.P. Hyland, Armenian Terrorism: The Past, the Present, the Prospects, Westview Press, Boulder, 1991; The Armenian Atrocities and Terrorism, Assembly of Turkish-American Association, Washington, 1999.
13 See: W.L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism. 1890-1902, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1951.
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menian revolutionaries of the 1880s-1890s expected that their attacks on the Turks would invite cruel reprisals which, in turn, would radicalize the Armenians and probably invite a West European intervention of the Ottoman Empire.14 I completely agree with both authors—they put in a nutshell the tactics of the Armenian nationalists of the turn of the twentieth century and correctly identified their place among the other methods of struggle in the context of the ethnogenesis of the Armenians among the other peoples of the Ottoman Empire.
Second, the fighters of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun committed their crimes (at least in the Russian Empire) in places populated by Armenians who had moved in the 1830s from the Persian Empire or who earlier belonged to its political orbit. This is confirmed by the so-called Armenian-Tatar massacre of 1905-1906; the term belongs to Vladimir Mayevskiy, an official of the Foreign Ministry of Russia, who between the 1880s and 1914 served as vice-consul in several administrative centers in Eastern Anatolia. In this capacity, he could observe the inner mechanisms of the notorious Armenian Question present in the domestic and foreign policies of the Russian and Ottoman empires. During World War I, as an official for special missions in the office of the quartermaster general at the headquarters of the Caucasian Front, he consulted the Russian military command on how to rule the occupied territories of the Ottoman Empire. In 1915 he published his book Armiano-tatarskaia smuta na Kavkaze kak odin iz fazisov Armianskogo voprosa15 (The Armenian-Tatar Discord in the Caucasus as One of the Aspects of the Armenian Question), in which he arranged the facts and looked into the causes of the Armenian-Azeri conflict of the early twentieth century. (Until 1926, the Azeris of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were officially called Transcaucasian Tatars.)
The tragic events of that time claimed about two thousand lives; the harshest clashes took place in Baku in February and August 1905 and in Nakhchivan in May 1905. Armenians and Azeris also clashed in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Elisavetpol (Ganja), and Shusha, that is, in areas populated by Armenians who moved there in the 1830s from Persia. They refused to regard the Erivan Armenians who had come from the Ottoman Empire and replenished the ranks of Dashnaktsutiun fighters as belonging to the same ethnicity or even as their co-religionists.16 The nationalists of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun worked hard to draw them into the orbit of terror; they were much crueler than in the Ottoman Empire, where the enmity between the Armenians and Turks was much more obvious than in the Russian part of Transcaucasia. Those who moved to the Central Caucasus from Persia were higher up the social ladder in Persia; after moving to Russia, they remained higher socially, culturally, and economically than the former Turkish Armenians. They did not need the Armenian Apostolic Church to fit into the region's social and economic context. This meant that this part of the Armenian ethnicity (which can be conventionally called Baku-Karabakh) remained isolated in its everyday life. In order to draw it into the new emerging ethnicity, the ideologists and fighters of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun provoked clashes between Armenians and Azeris. Though highly damaging (in 1905, according to American Turcologist Tadeusz Swi^tochowski, the clashes in the territory that is now the Azerbaijan Republic ruined 158 Azeri and 128 Armenian settlements17), they were not enough. A series of murders of
14 See: W. Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, Little, Brown, Boston, MA, 1987; Idem, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction, Oxford University Press, New York, 2000.
15 See: V.F. Mayevskiy, Armiano-tatarskaia smuta na Kavkaze kak odin iz fazisov Armianskogo voprosa, Printed in the Print shop of the Caucasian Military District, Tiflis, 1915.
16 This is explained by the continued existence in the early twentieth century of several religious centers with the functions of autonomous administration of individual parts of the ecumene of this ethno-religious sect. There was the Etchmiadzin Catholicosate, formally the leading element in the structure of the Armenian Apostolic Church; there were also autocephalous Sis Catholicosate and Istanbul Administration of the Bishopric (for more details, see: P. Werth, "Glava tserkvi, poddanny imperatora: Armianskiy katolikos na perekrestke vnutrenney i vneshney politiki imperii, 1828-1914," in: Konfessia, Imperia, natsia: Religiia i problema raznoobraziia v istorii postsovetskogo prostranstva, Compiled and edited by I. Gerasimov, M. Mogilner, A. Semenov, Novoe izdatelstvo, Moscow, 2012, pp. 165-206).
17 See: T. Swi^tochowski, Russia and Azerbaijan: A Borderland in Transition, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 40.
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highly placed Russian officials, which transformed the ethnic regional conflict into a nationwide one, did the job.
Third, at the turn of the twentieth century, hierarchs of the Armenian Apostolic Church conspired with the Armenian nationalists to organize criminal acts in the Ottoman and Russian empires for the sake of transforming the Armenian ethno-religious corporation into a single nation. Church officials allowed fighters of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun and those who paid them to use churches and houses belonging to the Church and rented them out to keep weapons and explosives. The earliest fact of this cooperation is dated 18 June, 1890, when the Ottoman gendarmes found a store of small arms in the Surb Astvatsatsin (Holy Mother of God) Church in Erzurum. In an effort to prevent the discovery of the crime, local Armenian extremists killed one of the gendarmes and lost 20 of their fighters in an exchange of fire. In 1903, in the course of the inventory of the possessions of the Armenian Apostolic Church under the law of 12 June, weapon storages were found in Armenian churches. The first of them was discovered purely by chance by officials of the Ministry of State Property on 2 September, 1903 at the Cathedral of Surb Grigor Lusavorich in Baku.18 The find confirmed the suspicion that the Armenian hierarchs were prepared to commit the bloodiest of crimes to preserve the property they owned or managed. They were prepared to arm and raise their congregation against the Russian Empire, the officials of which were benevolently disposed to them.
The Armenian Church, which allowed the Armenian nationalist revolutionaries to draw it into anti-government activities and which rebuffed the attempts of the imperial government to establish control over Church property and money through large-scale Armenian Muslim pogroms in Russian Transcaucasia, lost much more than it gained. After allowing Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun to use churches and commercial real estate, the Church could not re-establish its control, even though in 1907 the law of 12 June, 1903 had been annulled on the insistence of Vicegerent of the Caucasus Count Vorontsov-Dashkov. The Armenian revolutionaries established their control over the Church's property and money in a way similar to what the Russian Empire supposed to do. The types of control differed in one very important respect—the Russian Empire preserved de jure and de facto the Church's right to property on real estate and money and merely demanded detailed reports of their use. The functionaries and fighters of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun pushed the Church aside and used its real estate and money as they saw it fit. Moreover, the leaders of political groups of Armenian nationalists snatched the status of spiritual and intellectual leader of the Armenians from the Armenian Apostolic Church. The Church was left with the function of a representative of the Armenian ethnicity, which it lost when the Russian and Ottoman empires were replaced with secular Bolshevist Soviet Russia and Kemalist Turkey. Ideological domination was moved from the Church to the political institutions of the Armenians, an inevitable and civilizationally determined shift. Moreover, it meant that the process of social transformation of the polyethnic religious corporation of Armenians into a new ethnicity had been completed. This happened after World War I, which supplied the Armenian people with another unificatory idea of a collective tragedy caused by military and political repressions of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 against their ethnoreligious corporation, later described as "Armenian genocide."
Fourth, the local structures of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun combined revolutionary radicalism, national religious extremism, and political terrorism with crimes against property—racketing, plundering, and extortions. Contemporary Armenian authors do not hesitate to write about this. L. Kara-petian, for example, in his painstakingly researched article "Iz istorii armianskikh politicheskikh partiy na Kubani v nachale XX veka" (From the History of Armenian Political Parties in the Kuban Area in the Early Twentieth Century) offers amazing facts about the criminal activities of the Armenians in this region of the Russian Empire: "Expropriations and terror figured prominently in the tactics of Dashnaktsutiun. There is a lot of archival information about the extortion of large sums. If
' See: R. Mustafaev, op. cit., p. 14.
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the victims refused to pay, they were exposed to extreme measures. On 22 June, 1906, in Armavir, Ambartsum Ovnatov killed merchant N. Shakhnazarov who refused to pay 10 thousand rubles... In the Bezymianny District, Agasin encouraged expropriations from Russians. The committee received no more than half of the sum (this means that the extortionists retained the second half as compensation for their troubles.—O.K.). The ranks of expropriators were swelling with provocateurs and blackmailers, which did nothing for the party's image. This explains why in 1907 the problems of expropriations were repeatedly discussed at party meetings. However, it was decided to continue the expropriations under the Party' s strict control, otherwise those who violated the rules of expropriation should either be expelled from the party or punished by death. In the summer of 1907, an unknown Armenian fell victim to this decision. Enokh Ter-Avetisiants, one of the members of the Armavir group, was punished by death for appropriating party money."19 This means that in the early twentieth century, revolutionary activities were funded by racketeering and extortion of money from their coreligionists and people of other nationalities who had the misfortune to be their neighbors. The fighters also lived on this "income."
The anti-government actions and the crimes of the Armenian nationalists of the late nineteenth-first decade of the twentieth century were of dual nature, which set them apart from other types of revolutionary activity of the time. On the one hand, they were ethnocentric, while on the other, transnational. This is explained by the fact that for a long time the Armenian ethnoreligious corporation remained scattered across many countries and was partly kept together by the ideological leadership of the Armenian Apostolic Church. This meant that potential fighters could be found anywhere in the world to commit crimes to alienate the local Armenian community from local society.
Not infrequently, Armenian fighters born in Russian Transcaucasia committed crimes in the Ottoman or Persian empires. There are also documents saying that in the early twentieth century ethnic Armenians, citizens of the United States, came to the Caucasus to teach local fighters how to make and use explosives. The earliest incident of this sort is dated 29 August, 1903, when an Armenian John Nakhikian, an American citizen, came to Kars where in the apartment of a certain Tanoev, not far from the barracks of the 155th infantry Quba Regiment, he killed himself and the apartment owner when making hand grenades out of hand-made explosives.20 The history of Armenian terrorism brims with similar examples. I selected this particular incident to demonstrate that, from the earliest days, Armenian terrorist revolutionary activities were of a transnational nature, state borders being no impediment. Procurator of the Etchmiadzin Synod of the Armenian Apostolic Church A. Frenkel had the following to say about this in 1907: "There are reasons to believe that between the thirties and eighties of the last century, our government at least ignored or probably found profitable close ties between the Armenian organizations of Russia and Turkey. Weapons, ammunition, huge sums of money, and Armenian volunteers freely crossed the border from Russia to Turkey.
"Political Armenian refugees found shelter in our border areas; today there are over 50,000 such refugees in the Caucasus. Half of these uninvited guests have no legal documents; most of the criminals in the Eastern Caucasus are Turkic Armenians. Indifference to the solidarity between the Russian and Turkic Armenian organizations has produced other dangerous fruit. For seventy years, three or four generations of Armenian youth were brought up on the idea of opposition to the government (even though it was the Turkish government); they were taught to think politically and became accustomed to the idea that struggle against the authorities was possible and even legitimate. When Armenian schools in the Caucasus were closed down, Armenian young people moved to Switzerland and Germany in huge numbers to return as accomplished socialists. The ideas of socialism are very popular among urban Armenians; an Armenian living in a city has no motherland to be proud of, only the bitter realization that his people remained in slavery for 1,300 years and that he is hated by all
9 L.I. Karapetian, op. cit., pp. 89-90.
1 See: R. Mustafaev, op. cit., p. 13.
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as a parasite. This historical legacy and national baggage make it easy to move to the International and preaching of unity ofproletarians of all countries. The Armenian revolutionaries have acquired a pretext. In the 80s-90s, it became clear that dangerous ideas were planted in Armenian schools; it was noticed that there was an interconnection between the Etchmiadzin Patriarchate and the non-Russian autochthonous and foreign revolutionary organizations, as well as defects in managing the Armenian church and monastery properties.
"Those who ruled the Caucasus at that time passed the well-known decision to close down Armenian schools; for the same reason, the Patriarch was deprived of his personal right to deal with questions of marriage, language, oaths of allegiance, expropriation of church property, etc. This was enough to raise the Armenian masses against the Russian government. By that time, the Armenian revolutionary forces had been trained well enough and were ready both morally and materially. In their leaflets, they merely replaced 'Turkey' with 'Russia.' Today, Turkish Armenians (fidais) cross the Russo-Turkish border into Russia very much like several years ago when the Russian Armenians brought weapons and moved volunteers into Turkey. "21
Two factors made Armenian political criminal activity transnational. First, the Armenian nationalists could count on support and encouragement from the Russian Empire and many of the West European countries (France and Britain in particular). Seen from their capitals, Armenian political extremism looked like an organized force that could undermine the military, strategic, and geopolitical position of the Ottoman Empire in Hither Asia and the Middle East to open the doors for consolidated European influence. Second, the Armenian Apostolic Church did a lot to consolidate the ranks of Armenian extremists: at the turn of the twentieth century, it transferred the revenue created from its property or the property it managed to Gnchak, which operated mainly in the Ottoman Empire, and to Dashnaktsutiun, which preferred to operate in the Russian Empire. These two extremist organizations would have hardly been successful without Church money. Encouragement of Armenian national extremism or at least the laisser-faire policy of the Russian Administration in the Caucasus ended with the Armenian-Tatar massacre of 1905-1906, which tarnished the political image of Russia in the Muslim world and damaged the economy of Transcaucasia practically beyond repair.
Armenian Genocide as a Unifying Factor
During World War I and immediately after it, the Armenians became completely isolated from their neighbors in the social and economic structure of Transcaucasia (both Russian and Turkish). This is explained by the armed conflicts the Republic of Armenia led by Dashnaktsutiun was waging with its neighbors. The regular armed units of the Armenian nationalists were not so much fighting the regular armies of their enemies as murdering local Muslims in great numbers and plundering their property. They were especially active in Turkey and Azerbaijan. I will not cite facts and figures here to support the above; instead I refer my readers to other authors.22 I will limit myself to saying that these crimes caused cruel retribution (by the military of the Ottoman Empire in particular) from the governments of the countries whose people were affected. The scope of military and police repressions against the rioting Armenian population in the rear of the field army did not allow the rioters to influence the course of
21 RGIA, rec. gr. 821, inv. 7, f. 96, sheets 260-261.
22 See: V.F. Mayevskiy, op. cit.; R. Mustafaev, op. cit.; B. Najafov, op. cit; Prestupleniia armianskikh terroristicheskikh i banditskikh formirovaniy protiv chelovechestva: XIX-XXI vv.: kratkaia khronologicheskaia entsiklopedia; S.A. Rustamova-Takhidi, March 1918 g. Baku. Azerbaidzhanskiepogromy v dokumentakh, Indigo- Press, Baku, 2009; Idem, Kuba. Aprel-May 1918 g. Musulmanskie pogromy v dokumentakh, Indigo-Press, 2010; F.P. Hyland, op. cit.; T. Swiçtochowski, op. cit.; The Armenian Atrocities and Terrorism.
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war and its results. Later, these repressions and the related deportation of Armenians from the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Marmara coasts to the desert areas of Northern Iraq were described as "genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire." This, however, causes doubts for several reasons.
Without going into legal technicalities (at that time there was no legal term "genocide," therefore suppression of mutinous population was not banned by international law), let me point out that the military-police operation began on 24 April, 1915, on the eve of an operation of the Entente in the Mediterranean. On 25 April, 1915, the united French, British, and Russian navy landed the Australian-New Zealand Army Corps of the British colonial armed forces on the Gallipoli peninsula. It was expected to move toward the European part of Istanbul. Soldiers of the Armenian worker detachments in the Ottoman marine fortresses and forts along the Dardanelles had been instructed to riot and block the coastal batteries to allow the united Navy of the Entente to enter the Sea of Marmara. On 19 April, German military intelligence informed the Turks about this. It was decided to act using military and police forces to prevent a riot and liquidate the organizers. This was done outside Istanbul and later around the largest coastal cities—Trabzon, Sinop, and Izmir.23 This meant that the military and police operation against the Armenians in April 1915 was carried out to prevent an armed riot in support of the approaching enemy. Presented by Armenian authors, it was an act of malice against peaceful population.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, the so-called "Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire" developed into an Armenian unificatory idea that produced two important results in the course of Armenian ethnogenesis and final consolidation of Armenians. On the one hand, the idea created the dominant of ethnic or even ethnopolitical self-identification of the Armenians, no matter where they lived. On the other, the subject of the notorious genocide replaced the previously dominant idea of ethnoreligious unity of all Armenians. In this way, the Armenian ethnicity acquired a new organizational structure—the ARF Dashnaktsutiun moved into the place occupied by the Armenian Apostolic Church, the consolidating structure until the early twentieth century. In 1920, Dashnaktsu-tiun won the battle with the Gnchak functionaries and the Armenian clergy for the right to dominate the Armenian ethnicity. In this way, the Armenians discarded the old garbs of sectarian religious unity typical of feudalism and moved toward political unity under the leadership of a political institution, a party of organized minority that imposed its will on the non-organized majority, a natural and, therefore, inalienable part of the bourgeois world order.
For three quarters of a century, punishment of the Turkic people for the Armenian nationalists' own inability to acquire national statehood in 1910-1920s remained their idée fixe and the criterion of the political mainstream, against which the subjective (individual) or even collective adequacy were measured. In other words, all those who accepted "Armenian genocide" as part of the contemporary history of the Turkic Republic were hailed as friends of the Armenian ethnicity, while those who refused to accept this idea were subjected to intellectual or even financial obstruction. This preserved the monochrome "friend-foe" idea of the world, another confirmation of the rigidity of the psychological ethnosocial attitudes of the bulk of the Armenian ethnicity. At the same time, other peoples acquired an image of Armenians that they found hard to accept. The Armenians became even more isolated and lost all chance of becoming assimilated with the rest of the world. In fact, this is a new stage in the evolution of the ethnic psychology of the Armenians. In the past, the feeling of collective responsibility for the crimes committed by a small and closely knit corporation of nationalist revolutionaries against Muslim people was artificially imposed on the entire nation. Today, there is a feeling of collective resentment of the retribution for the earlier crimes.
23 For more details, see: A.G. Bolnykh, Morskie bitvy Pervoy mirovoy: Tragedia oshibok, ACT, Moscow, 2002; A.K. Ko-lenkovskiy, Dardanellskaia operatsia, Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo, Moscow, Leningrad, 1930; J.S. Corbett, H. Newbolt, Naval Operations: History of the Great War Based on Official Documents, in 5 vols., Longman, London, 1920-1931, 1938, 1940; Alan McCrae Moorehead, Gallipoli, Perennial Classics, 2002; E. Falkenhayn, Die Oberste Heeresleitung, 1914-1916 in ihren wichtigsten Entschließungen, E.S. Mittler, Berlin, 1919; A.E. Montgomery, The Anzac Illusion: Anglo-Australian Relations during World War I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
The idea of "Armenian genocide" has another important feature, which moves it from the social political to the historical criminological sphere. Practically throughout the entire twentieth century, from the early 1920s to the early 1990s to be more exact, the Armenians exploited the mythologeme to justify their continued terrorist and other criminal activities, not only against the Turkish Republic and its citizens, but also against those countries and nations of Europe that fought and punished the Armenian nationalists. This meant that propaganda of the responsibility of the Turks and Azeris for the so-called Armenian genocide that allegedly took place in the 1910s justified and still justifies and even encourages terrorism of Armenian nationalists. In the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century, they committed 300 crimes (not counting the military crimes committed during the war in Nagorno-Karabakh).24 This contradicts Art 1 of the Federal Law of the RF on Opposition to Extremist Activities of 25 July, 2002 No. 114-FZ,25 which describes "public justification of terrorism" as extremism. This makes the thesis of "Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire" an outcrop of extremism; indeed, it remains prominent in the history of the Transcaucasian peoples and for many years has been provoking nationalist Armenian terrorism in many countries.
Those who study the propaganda of this thesis should pay attention to its commercial aspect, which has not yet received the attention it deserves. Closer scrutiny will reveal certain absolutely legal mechanisms of funding Armenian extremist activities and its self-reproduction as any other successful commercial enterprise. A fundamental work by Candan Badem Bibliography of Turkish-Armenian Question16 published in two languages offers a survey of the efforts poured into the propaganda of the "Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire" all over the world. The author has collected and annotated 4,450 titles in Turkish, Russian, English, French, German, Armenian, and several other languages published in different countries between the end of the nineteenth century and 2006 dealing with various aspects of Armenian-Turkish confrontation in the Ottoman Empire, which is described as the Turkish-Armenian Question in contemporary Turkish historiography (an alternative to the Armenian thesis of "genocide").
An analysis of the materials collected between the two covers shows that nearly half of the books (over 2,200 titles) dealing with the Turkish-Armenian Question/Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire were published between 1975 and 1995, the years when ASALA (The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia) and JCAG (Justice Commandos of the Armenian Genocide) were especially active. It was during these two decades that one book per week on the history or contemporary state of Turkic-Armenian and Armenian-Turkic confrontation was published somewhere in the world. This can be described as the biggest propaganda operation that brought money to those who organized it, the ideological impact of which, however, being much more modest. The ASALA and JCAG terrorist activities made the books, which explained the reasons behind the terror, very popular; books by different authors were published in huge numbers, which made the publishers and authors rich. It seems that several scores of acts of terror, which cost very little, produced an impressive commercial effect in the form of over two thousand books on this very special subject. Placed in the context of macroeconomics, this was one of the most efficient global promotion campaigns of commercial products of media and printing industry in the history of mankind.
It is hardly moral to look at Armenian terrorism as a commercial enterprise—this will insult the memory of its victims. However, the fact that the ASALA and JCAG terrorist activities added to the commercial success of these books confirms that Armenian terror was used not only for ideological and political purposes, but also (unintentionally) for social and economic purposes, including those that brought money. The ASALA and JCAG cannot be likened to ethnic criminal groups of the Cosa
24 See: "The Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia: A Continuing International Threat," A Research Paper, available at [http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/D0C_ 0005462031.pdf].
25 See: Sobranie zakonodatelstvaRossiyskoy Federatsii, 29 July 2002, No. 30, Art 3031; 8 July 2013, No. 27, Art 3477.
26 See: C. Badem, Turk-Ermeni Sorunu Biblyografyasi (in Turkish) and Bibliography of Turkish-Armenian Question, Aras, Istanbul, 2007.
THE CAUCASUS & GLOBALIZATION
Nostra or Camorra type—these were purely economic enterprises without ideological or political ambitions (even though the ethnic traditions of the autochthonous population of Naples and Sicily were very prominent). The ASALA and JCAG fighters structuralized the diaspora and the relations inside it; on the other hand, they built a social hierarchy dependent on social origins and services to the ethnicity as a whole and the social groups inside it.
By the latter quarter of the twentieth century, political terrorism had developed into a consolidating factor. The Armenian diaspora had to close ranks around the transnational organizational structures of Gnchak and Dashnaktsutiun, which provided the ideological ("responsibility of the Turks for the Armenian genocide of 1915") and political protection of the illegal activities of ASALA and JCAG. In this way, the diaspora was transformed from a network of local marginal communities, which hoped to preserve their national and cultural identity, into a global political corporation strong enough to address the centuries-old task of building a mono-ethnic Armenian state in Transcaucasia. It had the main social prerequisite—structurally organized people ready to fight for its statehood and the corresponding status of a political nation. A war of terror as an instrument used to address this geopolitical task was launched by the diaspora's fighters first against the official authorities of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region of the Azerbaijan S.S.R. (1988-1989) and, later, against the Azeri people and the developing social structures of the Azerbaijan Republic (1990-1991). After a while this war developed into a full-scale conflict between the two states (1991-1994); the hostilities were suspended, but the causes and repercussions (Armenian occupation of a large part of the territory of the Azerbaijan republic) have not yet been defused by political and diplomatic means. The Armenian aggression of 1988-1994 against Azerbaijan can be described as an apogee of the process of social transformation of the Armenian people from a polyethnic religious sect (the century-long social development of which remained at the level of clan and tribal relations) to the state of a fully-fledged political nation, which set up and preserved for a fairly long time its mono-ethnic statehood.
Conclusion
By way of summing up the above, we should recognize that for a century-and-a-half, the Armenian political nation took shape to the accompaniment of shooting and explosions, a road dotted by political assassinations and terrorist acts. Social transformation and modernization of the Armenian people were driven by national religious extremism and political terror; otherwise, it could not have leapt from the Early Middle Ages into industrial society within one century, a very short period by historical dimensions. This feat of unrivaled or even revolutionary intensity claimed hundreds of thousands Armenian, Muslim and European lives.
This was an objective historical process that cannot be described as bad or even reprehensible— each political nation has travelled its own path and exhibited its own specific features, which set it aside from all others. The Russian nation developed through passionate Orthodox messianism coupled with the idea of reviving the empire of Genghis Khan under the scepter of a Christian monarch. The German nation was built "by iron and blood," as the first Chancellor of German Empire Otto von Bismarck put it. The American nation is, in fact, a mercantile conglomerate of European émigrés, British slave traders, and the slaves they gradually brought to North America. The Armenian nation, as we know it, appeared on the political map of the world twenty-five years ago. It is a logical product of national religious extremism and political terrorism consistently carried out from the last quarter of the nineteenth to the late twentieth century. This is how it will be described in all textbooks of recent political history some fifty years from now.
