[^1]**The Fourth Annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture**

Sponsored by the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern
Division

Mumford Room

James Madison Memorial Building

May 1, 1996

7:00 P.M.

**Program**

Ronald Grigor Suny is Professor of Political Science at the University
of Chicago. The grandson of the composer and ethnomusicologist Grigor
Mirzoyan Suni, and a graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia
University, he has taught at Oberlin College, the University of
California, Irvine, and Stanford University, and as first holder of the
Alex Manoogian Chair of Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan.
He is the author of *The Baku Commune, 1917-1918* (1972); *Armenia in
the Twentieth Century* (1983); *The Making of the Georgian Nation*
(1988, 1994); *Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History* (1993);
and *The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse
of the Soviet Union* (1993), as well as editor of several additional
publications. He is currently working on a study of the young Stalin and
the formation of the Soviet Union, and is completing an interpretive
history of the Soviet Union. Professor Suny has served as chairman of
the Society of Armenian Studies and is on the editorial boards of *The
Slavic Review*, *International Labor and Working-Class History*, *The
Armenian Review*, and the *Journal of the Society of Armenian Studies*.

"Welcome"

Dr. James H. Billington

Librarian of Congress

(Delivered by Dr. Carolyn Brown, Acting Director, Area Studies)

"Welcome"

Beverly Gray, Chief

African and Middle Eastern Division

"Armeniaca and the Library of Congress: 1994-1995"

"Introduction"

Dr. Levon Avdoyan

Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist

**Text**

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the fourth annual Vardanants Day
Armenian Lecture. My name is Levon Avdoyan and I have the honor of
serving you as the Armenian and Georgian area specialist in this great
institution.

I would like to begin by introducing to you Dr. Carolyn Brown, our
acting Director of Area Studies, who will read a message from Dr. James
H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who regrettably cannot be here
with us tonight. The Armenian collections of the Library of Congress are
in the custody of the Near East Section of the African and Middle
Eastern Division. After Dr. Billington's message, I would like to
introduce a close and steadfast friend of these collections, the chief
of that division, Ms. Beverly Gray.

Dr. Brown.

**"Welcome"**

James H. Billington

I take particular pleasure in welcoming each of you to he Library of
Congress on the occasion of the fourth annual Vardanants Day Armenian
Lecture, presented by the Near East Section. Vardanants Day, in its
celebration of the Armenian people's hard earned right to
self-determination, has remained a focus for Armenians everywhere. Our
collections, so useful in the study of all things Armenian, are
dedicated to preserving and providing access to the past, present and
future socio-historical, political and cultural materials from Armenian
and from the many cultures and civilizations of the Middle East with
which it has interacted for millennia. To this end, the Near East
Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division has shown wonderful
tenacity in adhering to and expanding its mission for the enlightenment
of Congress, the American people, and the international governmental and
scholarly communities.

I am sure that you will find the lecture by my colleague, professor
Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago, who is known for his keen
sense of observation and his scholarly objectivity, both enlightening
and stimulating, and indicative of the high level of original and
innovative scholarship on the ancient and modern history of Armenia
which our generation is producing.

I invite each of you to return often to the Library to consult both the
Armenian and our other rich collections for your personal and
professional research. We are truly here to serve you.

**"Welcome"**

Beverly Ann Gray

I welcome you to this event that has become an established, and highly
anticipated annual program in the African and Middle Eastern Division's
calendar. I also bring greetings from our friend and colleague, Dr.
George Atiyeh, the Head of the Near East Section, who due to illness,
cannot be with us this evening.

The Armenian collection has been an integral part of the Near East
Section throughout its fifty years as a section in the Library of
Congress. Beginning with only four hundred or so books I the 1940s, the
collection began to grow as a result of the combined efforts of the
Library of Congress and of a special committee founded for that purpose
in the late 1940s and chaired by Mr. Arthur H. Dadian. Since that time,
and recently as a result of a generous grant from Mr. Dadian's estate
made by his wife, the late Marjorie Dadian, the Armenian collections
have grown into the thousands, and are now thriving.

The Library of Congress is many things, but chief among these aspects of
this great institution are its collections. They are its core of our
service-past, present and future, to Congress, to the nation, and to the
international community as well. From those collections spring our
special programs, such as tonight's Vardanants Day lecture, as well as
the innovative scholarship typified by Dr. Suny.

We remain committed to the continued growth and maintenance of these
collections, of which the Armenian materials in our custody form and
integral and vital part.

Again, welcome to you.

**"Armeniaca and the Library of Congress: 1994-1995"**

**Levon Avdoyan**

I realize that you have come to be stimulated intellectually by our
guest's presentation this evening, but as is the custom on this
occasion, I hope you will allow me to give a brief report on the
activities focused on the various Armenian collections since we last
convened.

We have progressed nicely both in our acquisitions and in the processing
of materials. Of note is the receipt of the three-volume microfiche set
of rare, selected Armenian sources that was published by IDC. Truly
massive in number-over 8,000 fiche- this set includes important and rare
Armenian texts and studies. Even in the simple act of processing
materials one can find items of great interest-in arranging, for
instance, the over 200 volumes of nineteenth and early twentieth century
Armenian almanacs and calendars from Constantinople, Nor Nakhjewan,
Moscow and from other places of the Armenian Diaspora, I was struck by
the wealth of historical and social information-almost totally
unstudied-available in each of these works. These are items begging for
scholarly investigation. And so it goes with most of our materials.

In terms of newer items, our newly acquired approval plan dealer, ATC
International, has supplied us with publications from the republic of
Armenia, and our Overseas Operations Office in Cairo continues to
acquire and send us Armenian materials from the entire Middle East.
Through these ongoing efforts and projected acquisitions trips by
Library of Congress staff, we intend to continue growing both in
quantity and in quality.

It remains only to remind you, by reiterating the thoughts of Dr.
Billington and Ms. Gray, that these research collections are here to be
sued, by Congress, by government agencies, by scholars, by laymen, in
short, by you.

"Introduction"

And now, on to the heart of the evening. This introduction brings me
pleasure both on a professional and on a personal level. Too often these
days do we take history as merely a story attractively written or
narrated. We forget that the word history has little to do with a story,
but actually means an inquiry. The bare bones of Dr. Ronald Grigor
Suny's professional life, as shown in the biography we have rather dryly
furnished in tonight's program, show how well suited he is to historical
investigation: Educated at Swarthmore, with a doctorate from Columbia
University, holder of the first Alex Manoogian Chair of Armenian Studies
at the University of Michigan, visiting professor at Stanford and now
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Author and
editor of numerous scholarly works, all known for meticulous research,
keen analysis and a spirit of objectivity that guarantees their utility.

Professor Suny has chosen to challenge us with a presentation temptingly
titled: "Nation-making, Nation-breaking, and the End of Empire: A New
Perspective on the Events of 1915." I am as eager as you to be tempted.

Dr. Suny.

**Nation-making, Nation-breaking, and the End of Empire:**

**A New Perspective on the events of 1915**

An historian can only be awed by the task of trying to speak about the
unspeakable. He or she is humbled by the enormity of what needs to be
understood. It seems presumptuous to try to write about the irrational
horrors of our century. We have not been trained to deal with the
pathologies of politicians that led to the millions of deaths in Ottoman
Turkey, Nazi Europe, or the Soviet Union. What tools do we have to
explain the mass violence that has become as ordinary on network
television as the fires and floods that fill the local news? Perhaps we
should not try. Perhaps we should await those singular voices that on
rare occasions find the right notes to convey unutterable pain. Maybe
those of us without the talents and moral vision of Tolstoy or Goya
should turn to lesser issues and not attempt to describe and analyze
events such as the Holocaust, the Great Purges, or the Armenian
Genocide.

But the work of historians, in my view, is precisely to remember, to
recover what might otherwise be lost, to reconstruct from the evidence
available the story of the paths that have led us to where we are, in
the hope that that social knowledge might help us do better in the
future. Perhaps this is a utopian thought, but my sense is that
understanding even the worst instances of human activity is essential as
a first step for liberating us from the ignorance and mystifications
that contributed in the first place to mass political violence. For
Armenians this need is particularly acute, for the tragedy that they
suffered at the beginning of the century is one of the great unknown
historical events of our time. Instead of public recognition and
scholarly analysis the Genocide of 1915 has been the double victim of
historical amnesia and deliberate distortion by pseudo-scholars and a
well-orchestrated campaign by the Turkish government. My talk this
evening is an attempt to recover the memory of that tragedy and to try
in some way to explain why it occurred.

Historians have analyzed the massive deportation and killing of hundreds
of thousands of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 as the conflict of
two exclusive nationalisms, the conflict of two people over a single
piece of territory, and this has been reconceptualized by those who
would deny that a genocide took place as a civil war between Turks and
Armenians. In this construction the victims become only one side in an
uneven struggle, and the perpetrators become the defenders of their
homeland and nation. What I will argue is quite different. Rather than a
civil war, which indeed never took place and exists only in the
imagination of professional falsifiers, the Genocide occurred when state
authorities decided to remove the Armenians from what had been their
historic homeland in order to realize a number of strategic goals \--
the elimination of a perceived Armenian threat to the war against
Russia, to punish Armenians for activities which the Turkish authorities
believed to be rebellious and subversive, and to realize their ambitions
to create a Pan-Turkic empire that would extend from Anatolia through
the Caucasus to Central Asia. The Genocide occurred at a moment of near
imperial collapse when the Young Turks made a final, desperate effort at
revival and expansion of the empire which they had reconceived as Turkic
rather than Ottoman. Nineteen-fifteen, then, can be understood in the
context of imperial decline, a radical reconceptualization of the nature
of the state along nationalist and Pan-Turkic lines, and the
radicalization of Young Turk policies in the fierce context of the First
World War.

Scholars have come to a general agreement over the last several decades
that we need to think about nations and nationalism differently. Rather
than fixed, objective, primordial categories, modern nations are the
product of hard work by intellectuals and political actors, scholars and
propagandists, who have applied their energies, not only to the mapping
of difference and boundaries, but to the construction of a useable past.
A principal trope of nationalist writers has been the recovery of what
has been lost, revival of what has lain dormant, and resurrection of
what appeared to be dead. But in the active imagining of communities and
inventing of traditions there has also been the forced silencing of
voices and the erasure of inconvenient memories.[^2] In the transition
from multinational empires to more homogeneous nation-states, those
serving the "progressive" development of nation-making and modernization
have transformed the demographic horrors of deportation, ethnic
cleansing, and genocide into inevitable, unavoidable, even necessary
civil conflicts. Consider the words of Princeton's great scholar of
Islam, Bernard Lewis, which can be read as a implied rationale for the
Turkish massacres of Armenians:

For the Turks, the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats.
From the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Greeks,
they could, however, reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant provinces
and bringing the Imperial frontier nearer home. But the Armenians,
stretching across Turkey-in-Asia from the Caucasian frontier to the
Mediterranean coast, lay in the very heart of the Turkish homeland \--
and to renounce these lands would have meant not the truncation, but the
dissolution of the Turkish state.[^3]

In what appears to be a cool and balanced understanding of why their
Ottoman rulers would have used mass violence against a perceived
Armenian danger, Lewis places the Armenians "nearer \[the Turkish\]
home" and "in the very heart of the Turkish homeland," employing
language that already assumes the legitimacy and actuality of a
nation-state. In this transparent paragraph Lewis subtlely rewrites the
history of Anatolia from a land in which Armenians were the earlier
inhabitants into one in which they become an obstacle to the national
aspirations of the Turks, who now can claim Anatolia, rather than
Central Asia, as their homeland. His language employs the logic of
nationalism as if it has a kind of universal relevance even in political
structures that evolved out of and still worked within a contradictory
logic of empire. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire was still an imperial state,
albeit already long existing within an international system of powerful
nation-states and an increasingly hegemonic Western conviction that the
nation, however defined, was the principal source of political
legitimacy. The nature of that system and its self-justifications were
changing, but Lewis' reading of a notion of ethnic homogeneity as the
basis for a national republic of the Kemalist type, which lay in the
future, into the moment of Armenian annihilation is ahistorical and
anachronistic. As he is well aware, in the last years of the empire
conflicting and contradictory ideas of Turkish nationalism, some deeply
racist, vied with Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islamism, and various strains of
Ottomanism in an ideological contest for new ways of reformulating the
state.

The Ottoman Empire, like other great empires, can be understood as a
composite state in which the metropole is distinct in some way from the
periphery, which is conceived or perceived by metropolitan or peripheral
actors as a relationship of justifiable or unjustifiable inequity,
subordination, and/or exploitation. What might be called the "imperial
paradigm" was a system in which the Turkish Sultan, by right of conquest
and divine sanction, ruled over subjects of various religions and
ethnicity in a structure of inequity and subordination that maintained
or reinforced difference. There was no idea from the fifteenth to the
eighteenth century of a single nation-state or of the various religious
and cultural communities in the empire having rights that limited the
power of the sultan. Each community or millet was respected as different
but subordinate to the ruling Ottoman elite. Only in the nineteenth
century did rival concepts of the nation and popular sovereignty,
equality under the law, political participation of all citizens, and
national self-determination undermine the legitimation formulas for
empire. But the imperial paradigm was challenged, not only by new
nationalisms of the subject peoples, but also by conflicting conceptions
of empire and nation from the ruling Turkish elites. Powerful rethinking
of history in the idiom of the nation had the effect of homogenizing
events and processes in a single, progressive narrative so that other
ways of understanding experience were lost.

In the Ottoman Empire ideas of the nation were both borrowed from
Western conceptions and reshaped by Turkish and Armenian thinkers and
actors. The nation may be thought of as the modern form of "imagined"
political communities that exists within a discourse that came together
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries around the notion
of bounded territorial sovereignties in which the "people" provide the
legitimacy to the political order.[^4] Though the discourse of the
nation began as an expression of state patriotism, through the
nineteenth century it increasingly became ethnicized until the "national
community" was understood to be a cultural community of shared language,
religion, and/or other characteristics with a durable, antique past,
shared kinship, common origins and narratives of progress through
time.[^5] While scholars have generally accepted that nations are
neither natural nor primordial but the result of hard constitutive
intellectual and political work of elites and masses, among the most
interesting questions to be explored is how they exist in particular
understandings of history, what stories are told to make the nation
appear as a stable subject moving continuously through time, fulfilling
a project over many centuries of coming to self-awareness.[^6] By the
twentieth century such imagined communities were the most legitimate
basis for the constitution of states, thought to be products of blood
and nature, displacing dynasties and religious and class discourses \--
and concurrently challenging alternative formulas for legitimation like
those underpinning empires.

It was precisely in the context of the dominant discourse of the nation
in the twentieth century that once-viable imperial states became
increasingly vulnerable to nationalist movements that in turn gained
strength from this new sense of state legitimation, namely that states
ought to represent, if not coincide, with nations. At the same time the
new nationalism coexisted with the rise of notions of popular
sovereignty, of democratic representation of subaltern interests, and a
fundamental tension arose between inequitable imperial relationships and
concepts of national democracy. Though liberal states with
representative institutions, styling themselves as democracies, could
(and were) effective imperial powers in the great overseas empires of
Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the great
contiguous empires of eastern Europe and the Middle East resisted
democratization that would have undermined the right to rule of the
dominant imperial elite and the very hierarchical and inequitable
relationship between metropole and periphery in the empire. While
empires were among the most ubiquitous and long-lived polities in
premodern history, they had operated within a different legitimating
paradigm. The powerful combination of nationalism and democracy proved
fatal to their continued existence in late modern times.

Within the discourse of the nation two kinds of arguments are made to
justify a people's claim to a piece of the earth's territory: an
historical argument of prior settlement, the idea of an original people;
or an argument of demographic dominance, the idea that a majority's
claim has precedence over those of minorities. The fact that Armenians
after 2500 years in eastern Anatolia had become a minority in the
overall population, and the Ottoman Turks who through conquest and
assimilation over 500 years in the region had become the dominant
population (and, along with other Islamic peoples, most importantly the
Kurds, a majority), powerfully underscored Turkish claims to the
territory. In the case of the Armenians only the first claim, that they
were the original settlers of the region, legitimized their claim to
Anatolia as homeland. Armenian nationalists made such a claim in the
late nineteenth century, and Turkish nationalists responded. Both of
these claims, which had no particular meaning in the older imperial
paradigm, resonated within a concept of the nation-state in which the
"people," however constituted, become the source of legitimacy.

## The Imperial State and its Armenian Subjects

In an insightful article Aron Rodrique warns against reading the whole
Ottoman experience in the light of the "modern period where the West
becomes a referent" and "when European powers became more directly
dominant and threatening."[^7] He suggests that, firstly, Islam in its
historical variation must be de-essentialized and that no easy
deductions be made from the [dhimma]{.underline}, the pact of toleration
of non-Muslims living under Islam, to the practices of the Ottoman
Empire throughout its entire existence. Secondly, that in the early
modern period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, "a
society existed\...where 'difference' instead of 'sameness' was
paramount," and there was almost no desire on the part of political
leaders to transform difference into sameness.[^8] The Ottoman political
world was distinct from the Western Enlightenment public sphere of a
value-neutral, universalistic ideal in which what is shared is
highlighted and the particular, that which is different, becomes a
problem to be resolved. Like Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis in their
ground-breaking collection on the non-Muslims of Ottoman Anatolia[^9],
Rodrique emphasizes that in the early Ottoman centuries discrimination
did not necessarily mean persecution. Difference was seen as normal and
normative, something natural to be accepted. "Persecution of
difference," he writes, "was not really acceptable. Since Ottoman rulers
did not like social disorder, they attempted to fix or freeze the
particular, but they did not change it."[^10] While distinguishing the
earlier centuries, where toleration and discrimination were largely free
from persecution, from the nineteenth century, Rodrique carefully treads
the fine line between romanticizing Ottoman practices and reading the
earlier experience in light of the later nationalist conceptualizations.
Yet in emphasizing the element of tolerance, he focuses less on the
effects of discriminatory power on non-Muslims. For Armenian scribes the
symbiosis of early Ottoman society was far less benign for the
[gavur]{.underline} (the unbeliever) than for the Muslims, and clerical
writers, like Manuel of Garahisar, noted that Armenians had to endure
the oppressive rule of the Turks "because of \[our\] immense sins."[^11]
The Armenian Church, itself institutionally tied into the Ottoman system
of governance, preached acceptance of the fate befallen the Armenians,
deference toward their rulers and social betters, both Muslim and
Armenian, and opposed rebellion of any kind. Yet even as they
legitimized the system in which their people lived, they remained aware
of the special burdens they bore.

The key difference in early Ottoman society was religion, rather than
ethnicity or language, which took on relevance only later. The
[millets]{.underline}, the various communities headed by religious
leaders that were systematized only in the nineteenth century, were
based on religion, rather than some idea of primal origin, language, or
culture. The state ruled over the millets indirectly and interfered
little, delegating much authority to the religious head of the millet.
Certainly no effort was made to break down the boundaries of these
communities and homogenize the population of the empire, or even
Anatolia, around a single identity. There was no "making of Ottomans" or
turning "peasants into Turks" in the Ottoman Empire, as there was to a
degree in the absolute monarchies of Western Europe or the French state
after the revolution of 1789. There was also no idea until the Tanzimat
reforms of the mid-nineteenth century of equality under the law, a
notion of equal citizenship for all members of Ottoman society.

Armenians in Anatolia were aware that they were a subject people, that
the ruling elite was Turkish and Islamic, and that even their
compatriots who succeeded in society and the state had to develop a
particular Ottoman cultural competence to advance. Difference was not
simply horizontal but vertical as well. It was the non-Muslim who
dismounted from his horse when a Muslim approached. As I have written
elsewhere,

Armenians and Turks coexisted in an unequal relationship, one of
subordination and superordination, with the Muslims on top and the
non-Muslims below. The sheer power and confidence of the ruling Muslims
worked for centuries to maintain in the Armenians a pattern of personal
and social behavior manifested in submissiveness, passivity, deference
to authority, and the need to act in calculatedly devious and disguised
ways. It was this deferential behavior that earned the Armenians the
title "loyal millet" in an age when the Greeks and Slavs of the empire
were striving to emancipate themselves through revolutionary action. The
Armenians in contrast worked within the Ottoman system and accepted the
burdens of Muslim administration without much protest until the second
half of the nineteenth century.[^12]

For many Armenian writers of the last two centuries the whole history of
the Armenians is one of the emerging nation, and earlier forms of
collective identity are usually understood in terms of that nation. Yet
if one takes seriously what Eric J. Hobsbawm would call a
"protonationalist" sense of community, earlier notions of community
should not be conflated with more modern notions. From the texts of the
fifth century it is evident that Armenians conceived of themselves as a
unique Christian community, with their own church set apart from the
Constantinople-centered church. For over a millennium Armenia was not a
single state; Armenian dynasties fought one another, allied with Arabs,
Greeks, Turks, or Persians at times against other Armenian
principalities. What linked this divided and dispersed people was a
religious and linguistic affiliation rather than political ties. Yet a
memory of Armenian political existence and of former glories was
maintained by clerical scribes in a textual tradition envied and
emulated by Armenia's neighbors like the Georgians. The literary
tradition became much more fragmented in the period after the Seljuk,
Mongol, and Ottoman invasions and settlements, and when the last
Armenian state of consequence fell in 1375, the Church remained as the
principal focus of identification and preservation.

In the early modern period energetic Church leaders attempted
sporadically to interest Western capitals in a crusade to liberate
Armenians from their Islamic rulers, the Ottomans and the Persians, but
with almost no results. Those sporadic Church-led diplomatic missions to
Rome, the courts of the German states, France, and Russia have been
integrated into a narrative of a "national-liberation movement" by later
writers, and in Soviet Armenian historiography the efforts by the meliks
of Karabakh or the self-appointed liberator Israel Ori have been
fashioned into a "Russian orientation" that served as justification for
the eventual tsarist conquest of eastern (Persian) Armenia and the
inclusion of Caucasian Armenia within the Soviet Union. Most of the
"liberationist" activity came from diaspora Armenians, merchants in
Persia, Europe, and Madras, India, interested in the restoration of an
Armenian state. The group of merchant activists in Madras wrote
political tracts that shifted the blame for the Armenian condition from
their own sinful past onto the despotism of foreign rulers. The
adventurer Joseph Emin, who travelled widely to interest Europeans in
the Armenian cause, indicted the Armenian clergy for their message of
passive acceptance of Muslim rule. But what is often not emphasized in
the histories of these efforts is their fragmentary nature, the
fragility or absence of connection between them, and the different
motivations and ambitions of the actors who have been homogenized into a
single, coherent movement.

As a dispersed people living in three contiguous empires and scattered
even further abroad by their mercantile interests, Armenians were much
more divided than united, separated by politics, distance, dialects, and
class differences. Linked primarily by religion and the Church, which
nurtured a sense of a lost glorious past and ancient statehood,
Armenians before the nineteenth century were a loose ethnoreligious
community with no overwhelming, coherent sense of being a nation in the
modern sense. Their clerical and merchant leadership in the Ottoman
Empire preached the fostering of Armenian religiosity, remembrance of
past glory, but enlightenment within the status quo, and deference to
the rulers that God had imposed upon them. The literary and cultural
revivalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,
particularly the Mekhitarist monks of Venice, saw themselves as
cultivating the national spirit through promotion of the language.
Father Ghevond Alishan, who himself had never been to historic Armenia,
wrote elegically about the landscape in which the ruins of ancient
churches were the inspiration for a revived national feeling. But even
as they promoted enlightenment and borrowed the idiom of the nation from
the West, the generation of religious teachers rejected the more radical
and democratic aspects of Western and East European nationalism that
they observed.

For Ottoman Armenians the great divide in the millet was between the
community in Constantinople and the bulk of Armenians, largely peasants
and petty craftsmen, living in the eastern provinces. While the wealthy
Armenians of the capital both influenced the patriarch and controlled
the National Assembly that dealt with certain aspects of millet affairs,
the provinces remained radically underrepresented. A frequent complaint
from the east was that Constantinople Armenians, as the leaders of the
community, were not fulfilling their obligation to care for the lower
orders. This alienation from the center was highlighted by the work of
bishop Mkrtich Khrimian, known widely as [hairik]{.underline} (Little
Father), in Van, the most Armenian of the towns of eastern Anatolia.
Khrimian edited a journal, [Ardziv Vaspurakani]{.underline} (The Eagle
of Vaspurakan \[the medieval Armenian name for the Van region\]), in
1858, exposed the suffering of his parishioners, and spoke vaguely of
Armenian self-defense. In 1869-1873 he served as Patriarch of
Constantinople and came into conflict with the more conservative forces
among the capital's Armenians when he attempted to increase provincial
representation in the National Assembly. The activist priest sent a
report in 1871 to the Porte enumerating the abuses of Armenians by
provincial authorities. His recommendation, in line with much of the
thrust of the Tanzimat reforms, was to strengthen the role of the
central authorities in the provinces, to rationalize the administration
of justice, and to guarantee equality of treatment and tolerance of
religious practices. Though he was supported by prominent liberal
Armenians, like Grigor Otian, who earlier had been an advisor to Midhat
Pasha and was president of the National Assembly, Khrimian could
overcome neither the Ottoman government's unwillingness to carry out
reforms in the provinces nor the conservative Armenians indifference
toward the provincial Armenians. In 1873 he resigned as Patriarch.

Appropriately for a dispersed people faced by three imperial
authorities, the nationalism of many Armenian thinkers was not primarily
territorial. Neither the clergy nor the powerful conservatives in the
capital, who benefitted from their privileged positions within Ottoman
society and close to the state, were interested in creating a
territorial nation. More broadly, Armenian leaders in Turkey hoped for
reform from above and spoke of their "benevolent government." Until the
end of the 1870s the sense of the nation for Ottoman Armenians was still
largely of an ethnoreligious community that needed to work within the
context of the empire to improve its difficult position. Encouraged by
the Tanzimat reformers and the theorists of Ottomanism, liberal
Armenians petitioned and pressured the Porte and tried occasionally to
enlist foreign support for reform.

The situation changed radically with the coming to power of Abdul Hamid
II (1876-1909), his abrogation of the Ottoman Constitution in 1876, the
Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and the turn toward repression of the
Armenians. As an Armenian national discourse took shape, the more
liberal and radical elements focused on the eastern provinces and the
poverty and oppression suffered by the Armenian peasantry. A sense of a
"fatherland" ([hairenik]{.underline}) developed among Armenian writers,
and a distinction was drawn between [azgasirutiun]{.underline} (love of
nation), which heightened the sense of a cultural nation beyond a
specific territory, and [hairenasirutiun]{.underline} (love of
fatherland), with emphasis on the people in Armenia
([haiastantsiner]{.underline}). Men like Bishop Garegin Srvantstiants,
who had long complained about the distance of Constantinople Armenians
from the "fatherland," and Arsen Tokhmakhian, who later turned to
revolution, celebrated the Armenians of historic Armenians who had
"preserved the faith and suffered because of it."[^13] Imbued with a
deeply populist nationalism, centered on the peasants of eastern
Anatolia, Armenian intellectuals travelled as teachers to the east in an
effort characterized as [depi Haiastan]{.underline} (To Armenia). The
government responded by removing prominent teachers, like Mkrtich
Portukalian in Van and Martiros Sareyan in Mush, from their home
provinces and exiling Khrimian to Jerusalem.

Increasingly Turkish authorities interpreted any manifestation of
cultural revival or resistance, however individual or local, as an act
of national rebellion. The government restricted the powers of the
Armenian National Assembly , accepting only [takrirs]{.underline}
(petitions) dealing with churches and monasteries. The state prohibited
all forms of national expression, banning the word
[Haiastan]{.underline} (Armenia in Armenian) in print and forbidding the
sale and possession of pictures of the last Armenian king, Levon V, who
had lost his throne in 1375. Instead of being the "loyal millet,"
Turkish officials and intellectuals began to look upon Armenians as
unruly, subversive, alien elements who consorted with foreign powers.
The conservative Muslim clergy, long alienated by the Frenchified
reformist bureaucrats among the Turks, were offended by the behavior and
wealth of the most visible Armenians, those merchants who lived in the
capital, particularly lived in Europeanized districts like Galata, and
affected Western manners or even took foreign citizenship.

Though the overwhelming majority of Armenian leaders wished to work
within the Ottoman system, on a number of discrete occasions they made
overtures to the Russians and the British. In 1872 merchants in Van
requested that the Russian government send a consul to their city to
guarantee "the safety of trade routes and protection of religion, lives,
and goods of the down-trodden Chrisitian people of Vaspurakan."[^14] Six
years later, in the aftermath of the war with Russia, the Patriarch
Nerses Varjabedian made contact with the Russians at San Stefano and
sent Khrimian to Berlin to plead the Armenian case before the Great
Powers. When the Russians were forced by Europe to retreat from their
demands on Turkey, the Patriarch attempted to interpret the new role
taken by Britain in the most positive light.

The self-narration by Armenian nationalists of the Armenian experience
in the Ottoman Empire was of a people conquered by foreign invaders,
made captive in their own ancient land, oppressed by unjust and cruel
rulers, yet all the while maintaining their essential Armenian religious
culture and yearning to be free. As with other nationalist
constructions, Armenian writers emphasized the continuity of the
national self moving through time, overcoming adversities, martyred for
the faith, victimized by a government imposed upon them. As historians
and novelists melded together discrete and disjointed events into a
coherent story that was almost always about the nation, they argued that
the empire was an illegitimate and archaic polity that prevented the
full expression of the nation's aspirations. Writers translated the
defense of Christianity in the fifth century by Vartan Mamikonian
against the Persians into a defense of nation and fatherland, so that
the story was less about religious martyrdom and salvation after death
and more about national resurrection in this life. Resistance by the
local Armenians (sometimes in alliance with non-Armenians!) of Zeitun in
Cilicia to protect tax exemptions granted more than 200 years earlier by
the seventeenth-century Sultan Murad IV were scripted in a more modern
idiom of rights and national oppression. The local was turned into the
all-national. Social bandits and brigands, like Avo near Van or Arabo
and Micho near Taron, became rebels and freedom-fighters.[^15] The very
creation of a coherent national narrative that effaced the complexities
of interethnic coexistence within the empire and stigmatized the kind of
cosmopolitan adjustment to imperial life in which the Armenian merchants
had flourished and Armenian Christianity had maintained its authority
reinforced the sense of difference between Turks and Armenians. Distance
between peoples increased; borders between them hardened; and sharing in
the commonalities of Ottoman culture and life became suspect on both
sides. By the late nineteenth century both the nationalists in their
narration of the past and present, and the defenders of the Ottoman
state interpreted events through the prism of the nation.

While Armenian clerics taught submission and deference and often allied
with state authorities to persecute those modernizing intellectuals who
attempted to bring Western enlightenment to young Armenians, the
despotic Abdul Hamid II brought the reform period of the Tanzimat to an
end and eliminated moderate and liberal alternatives within the system.
By the 1880s a significant minority of Armenians conceived of revolution
as the only means to protect and promote the Armenians. A new idea of
the Armenian nation as secular, cultural, and based on language as well
as shared history challenged the older clerical understanding of
Armenians as an ethnoreligious community centered on faith and
membership in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Faced by what they saw as
the imminent danger of national disintegration, the Armenian radicals
turned toward self-defense, the formation of revolutionary political
parties, and political actions that would encourage Western or Russian
intervention into Ottoman affairs. For the young nationalists revolution
was the "logical conclusion" of the impossibility of significant reforms
coming from the state.[^16]

Small self-defense circles formed in the Armenian provincal communities
in the 1880s \--among them, [Bashtban Hairenyats]{.underline} in Erzerum
in 1881-1882 and [Sev Khach]{.underline} in Van in 1882. Young people
were inspired by Portugalian's [Armenia]{.underline} published in
Marseilles in 1885, which called for Armenian independence, and two
small parties, the Armenakans in Van and the Hnchaks, founded in Geneva,
were influenced by his message. The movement involved dozens, sometimes
hundreds of people in small, scattered groups. But the national
revolutionary intellectuals, many of them from Russian Transcaucasia and
influenced by Russian populism, found it extremely difficult to activate
the Ottoman Armenian peasantry, their chosen constituency.[^17] Abdul
Hamid's alliance with Kurdish notables and the formation of the Hamidiye
regiments in the eastern provinces made a bad situation worse for the
Armenians. By the time a third \-- and eventually dominant \-- Armenian
revolutionary party, the [Hai Heghapoghakan Dashnaktsutiun]{.underline},
emerged in the 1890s, rather than equal subjects in an Ottoman state,
Armenians had become the double victims of state authorities and local
Kurdish lords. Rather than reform, repression became the government's
preferred strategy for maintaining the decaying imperial arrangement.

In 1894 clashes between Kurds and Armenians in Sassun led to the
intervention of state troops and the killing of hundreds of Armenians.
This violence would later be read by Armenians as the first stage of a
series of massacres that would culminate in the genocide of 1915. But
the massacres in eastern Anatolia in 1894-1896 can be seen as part of an
effort by Abdul Hamid II to restore the old equilibrium in interethnic
relations, in which the subject peoples accepted with little overt
questioning the dominance of the Ottoman Muslim eleite. Yet the sultan's
own policies of centralization and bureaucratization, as well as his
strategic alliance with Muslim Kurds against Christian Armenians, did as
much (if not more) to undermine the customary system of imperial rule as
did the emerging revisioning of nationality borrowed from the West.

The Sultan defended his actions to the British as necessary for
maintaining order:

His Imperial Majesty treated the Armenians with justice and moderation,
and, as long as they behaved properly, all toleration would be shown to
them, but he had given orders that when they took to revolt or to
brigandage the authorities were to deal with them as they dealt with the
authorities.[^18]

The Sultan's language would be repeated by other officials and would
echo in the justifications of the Young Turks and the apologist
historians who would later attempt to reconceive of state-initiated
massacres as "necessary," figments of Armenian imagination, or a
Muslim-Christian civil war. Yet the continuity between events should not
obscure the difference between Abdul Hamid's essentially conservative
and restorationist policy toward unruly subjects and the Young Turks'
far more revolutionary attempt to remove surgically a major irritant.
Though images of Armenians as subversive and alien, and habits of
violence as a means to keep order, deeply affected Ottoman mentalities
and practices, the subsequent Young Turk policy of systematic
deportation and the attendant murder of hundreds of thousands of
Armenians in 1915 were not simply a continuation of earlier policies but
a fundamentally more radical program of restructuring the empire in line
with the hybrid ideological formulations then in play.

The revolutionary nationalism of the Armenian committees and parties was
exaggerated by both the revolutionaries themselves and by their
opponents. While they struggled to convince villagers of the "Armenian
cause," and threatened businessmen who refused to contribute to their
movement, the Armenian nationalists were forced to rely on a handful of
activists, many from Persia and Russia. Over time they succeeded in
reshaping the understanding of the Armenian position in the empire.
Their reading of the Armenians' fate was more broadly accepted.
Repression of revolutionary demonstrations in Istanbul or of peasants in
the mid-1890s seemed to confirm the analysis of the nationalists. In the
period after 1908 the Armenians elected nationalists to the Ottoman
Parliament, where they collaborated with (and competed with) the Young
Turks. Resented by the more conservative clerical and merchant leaders
in Constantinople, the revolutionary nationalists became the de facto
leaders of a nation that they had helped to create through their
teaching, writing, and sacrifice.

## From Ottomanism to Nationalism

Notions of nation are intimately intertwined with notions of the modern,
and in the modernization paradigm the "rise" of nationalism and a
necessary, if not inevitable, development of the nation is involved in
the progressive transition from "traditional" society to modern.
Western-language writing on the late Ottoman period has been heavily
influenced by the theories and language of modernization that have
constructed a teleological narrative leading to national revolution.
Indeed, Kemalist Turkey has been an exemplar in the literature of a
relatively-successful process of modernization, with a Western-style
political system, a secularized culture, and capitalist economic
development. Part of the modernization process in the Turkish case was
the redefinition of the political community from a multinational one in
which Islam gave authority to the rulers to one based on an ethnically
homogeneous nation that would frequently be defined in terms of "race."
"The Turkish revolution," writes S. N. Eisenstadt, "completely rejected
the religious basis of legitimation and attempted instead to develop a
secular national one as the major ideological parameter of the new
collectivity."[^19]

The Turkish revolutionary elite, including those that emerged from the
Young Turk committees to lead the Kemalist movement, grew out of an
intellectual milieu in the last decades of the nineteenth century that
exalted science, rejected religion, and borrowed freely from Western
sociology in an effort to overthrow the autocracy of Abdul Hamid II and
to preserve the Ottoman state. Neither liberals nor constitutionalists,
the Young Turks were etatists who saw themselves as continuing the work
of the Tanzimat reformers \-- Mustafa Reshid Rasha, Mustafa Fazil Pasha,
Midhat Pasha \-- and the work of the Young Ottomans. According to Sukru
Hanioglu, the historian of the early phase of the movement, "The Young
Turk movement was unquestionably a link in the chain of the Ottoman
modernization movement as well as representing the modernist wing of the
Ottoman bureaucracy."[^20] Influenced by the ideas of Darwin, Claude
Bernard, Ludwig Buchner, even the phrenology of Gustave Le Bon (who
"proved" that intellectuals have larger craniums by doing research in
Parisian millinery shops), "the Young Turk ideology was originally
'scientific,' materialist, social Darwinist, elitist, and vehemently
antireligious; it did not favor representative government."[^21]

Most analysts argue that there was a shift in the Young Turk movement
from an Ottomanist orientation, in which emphasis was on equality among
the millets within a multinational society that continued to recognize
difference, to a more nationalist position in which the superiority of
the ethnic Turks (which was implicit in Ottomanism itself) and their
privileged position within the state was more explicitly underlined.
Earlier, Ottoman westernizers had hoped to secure western technology
without succumbing to western culture, somehow to preserve Islam but
make the empire technologically and militarily competitive with the
West. Reform had always come from above, from westernizing statemen and
bureaucrats, a response to a sense that the empire had to change or
collapse. Within Ottoman society the Muslims were the least prepared to
adopt western ways. Rather, there was uneven development of the millets,
and, as Hanioglu proposes, "superwesternization in the Ottoman capital
was led by non-Muslim inhabitants and followed by Muslims."[^22] I have
argued elsewhere that the visibility of better-off Armenians in the
capital and towns appeared as an intolerable reversal of the traditional
Muslim-[dhimmi]{.underline} hierarchy that, in turn, increased
resentments toward Christians.

The social hostility generated by the Muslims' inferior status in the
industrial and commercial world targeted Armenians in particular as
those who were Ottoman but suspiciously sympathetic to Europeans\....

Whatever resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may
have felt toward the people in towns \-- the places where they received
low prices for their produce, where they felt their social inferiority
most acutely, where they were alien to and unwanted by the
better-dressed people \-- were easily transferred to the Armenians.[^23]

If one thinks of nationalism as the primary identification with the
nation, rather than with supranational communities, like religion or
empire, or subnational communities, like tribes, clans, or regions, it
can be argued that nationalism was quite weak among Turks in the late
Ottoman Empire. The word "Turk," which referred to the lower classes of
rural Anatolia, was in the nineteenth century contrasted to "Ottoman," a
term usually reserved for the ruling elite. But at the turn of the
century Young Turk nationalists, like Ahmed Riza began to substitute
Turk for Ottoman.[^24] Ottomanist views were dominant among the first
generation of Young Turks, and attempts were made by both Young Turks
and Armenian revolutionaries to join in a common struggle. After Damad
Mahmud Pasha, brother-in-law of Abdul Hamid, fled to Europe with his two
sons, he made an agreement with the Dashnaks and published an open
letter urging joint action. The Dashnak newspaper,
[Droshak]{.underline}, wrote: "Dashnaktsutiun would not accept the
re-establishment of the Constitution of Midhat as a solution of the
Turkish problem, but look to a democratic federative policy as the way
out." The Armenian party "would fortify the Young Turks if first it
received a guarantee that the situation of the peoples would be
bettered."[^25] The more liberal Young Turks believed that an alliance
with the Armenians would reap a favorable response in Western Europe.
But the dual issue of an alliance with the Armenians and inviting
European intervention to secure the end of autocracy in the empire led
to a major split among the Young Turks. This incident illuminates the
ultimately unresolved tension among Young Turk activists between their
ecumenical Ottomanist impulses and the growing influence of an
exclusivist Turkish nationalism.

On February 4, 1902, the First Congress of the Ottoman Opposition opened
in Paris. The nationalist minority at the Congress, led by Ahmed Riza
categorically rejected foreign intervention and special arrangements for
the Armenians in the six eastern Anatolian vilayets, while the majority
led by Sabahaddin Bey favored such concessions as a basis for an
Armenian-Turkish alliance. When the majority came out in favor of
mediation by the Great Powers to implement the treaties that the
absolutist regime refused to execute, the minority essentially broke
with the rest of the movement. Efforts by the majority to appease the
minority failed. The Armenian delegates submitted a declaration that the
Armenian committees were ready to collaborate with the Ottoman liberals
to transform the present regime; that outside of common action, the
committees would continue their own efforts with the understanding that
their actions are directed against the present regime and not against
"the unity and the organic existence of Turkey;" and that their
particular actions will be directed toward implementation of Article 61
of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum of May 11, 1895 and its
annex.[^26]

Tensions and suspicions were high between the Armenians and the Turkish
opposition, and the Armenians could conceive of collaboration only with
the guarantee of special reforms in the east guaranteed by Europe. For
many Turks this was an outrageous demand. As Ismail Kemal, a member of
the majority, put it: "I recognize you not as an independent element but
as Ottomans. You have rights as Ottomans. \[However,\] you do not have
the right to bargain with us and make offers as if you were
\[representatives of a\] state."[^27] After this statement, the
Armenians walked out of the congress. Only later, after the Armenians
sent a letter to Sabahaddin Bey stating that they "were ready to
participate in all efforts to overthrow the present regime" and that
"they did not oppose the establishment of a constitutional central
administration that would execute" special reforms for the six
provinces, was a compromise reached between the majority and the
Armenians.[^28] The Young Turks even agreed that an Armenian was to sit
on their central committee. Ominously for the Armenians, however, the
minority at the Congress actually represented a powerful, even dominant
tendency, within the Young Turk movement that controlled most of the
committees and the newspapers.

In the years after the Paris Congress a Turkish nationalism based on
linguistic ties among Turkic peoples and notions of a common race grew
among Turkic intellectuals, like Yusuf Akcura, outside of the Ottoman
Empire and influenced those within. After the 1908 coup that brought the
Young Turks to power, a number of small nationalist organizations were
formed that put out occasional newspapers or journals \-- [Turk
Dernegi]{.underline}, [Genc Kalemler]{.underline}, [Turk
Yurdu]{.underline}, and [Turk Ocagi]{.underline}. But ideas of a Turkish
nation were not limited to Ottoman Turks or Anatolian Turks. They were
intimately connected to a Pan-Turkic ideal that celebrated the ties
between all the Turkic peoples, stretching from Anatolia through the
Caucasus and Central Asia. This was expressed most vividly in Ziya
Gokalp's famous poem "Turan:"

The fatherland for Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan,

The fatherland is a vast and eternal land: Turan!

Many of the Turanists argued for a purified Ottoman Turkish language,
freed of Arabic and Persian words, that would serve as the language of
this Turkic nation and also serve as the official language for the
non-Turkic peoples of the empire, those that made up the Ottoman millet.
The Young Turk government passed resolutions making Turkish the official
language of the empire, requiring all state correspondence to be carried
on in Turkish, and establishing Turkish as the language for teaching in
elementary and higher education, with local languages to be taught in
secondary schools.

Turkish nationalism, Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islam, and Ottomanism were all
part of a complex, confusing discussion among Turkish intellectuals
about the future of the Ottoman state and the "nation." The
supranational ideal of Ottomanism that posited a multinational
empire-state in which different peoples were treated equally never sat
comfortably with the growing emphasis on Turkish language and Turkism.
The nationalists criticized the thrust of the Tanzimat reforms and the
position of the Ottomanists. Gokalp tried to clarify the differences:

If the aim of Ottomanism ([Osmanlilik]{.underline}) was a
[state]{.underline}, all the subjects would actually be members of this
state. But if the aim was to construct a new [nation]{.underline} whose
language was the Ottoman language ([Osmanlica]{.underline}), the new
nation would be a Turkish nation, since the Ottoman language was no
other than Turkish.[^29]

The Young Turk government moved steadily away from Ottomanism toward
Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turanism. After the coup of 1913 and in the
first years of the World War, a more virulent form of expansionist
nationalism inspired the triumvirate that now governed the empire. As
Feroz Ahmad writes:

Pan-Turanism, like Pan-Islam, was an expansionist ideoogy which suited
the mood of the Young Turks, then in full retreat at the opposite front
\[in Europe\]\.... Turkish nationalism, centered around the Turks in
Anatolia, was in the process of development in 1914. It was to emerge
out of the defeats of in World War I, only after Pan-Turanism and
Pan-Islam had proved to be mere dreams.[^30]

The shift toward nationalism and Pan-Turanian expansionism presented the
Armenian political leadership with an extraordinarily difficult choice
\-- remaining in alliance with the Young Turks or breaking decisively
with the government. The Dashnaktsutiun decided to continue working with
the Young Turks, while other groups, notably the Hnchaks, rejected
collaboration. When war broke out in 1914, the Ottoman Dashnaks pledged
to fight for the empire and Ottoman Armenians joined the Ottoman army,
while across the border Russian Armenians volunteered for the tsarist
army. The Young Turk leaders' suspicions about Armenians as subversives
intensified with the initial defeats of the Ottomans in the Sarikamish
campaign of the winter of 1914. In the context of imminent collapse of
the empire in 1915, with the Russians threatening in the east and the
Australians and British landing at Gallipoli, the Ottoman government
decided to embark on a radical solution of the the Armenian problem.
Beginning in the first months of 1915 they demobilized Armenian soldiers
from the Ottoman Army, at first organizing them into work brigades and
then forcing them to dig their own graves before being shot. As rumors
spread of Turkish violence against Armenian villagers, Armenians in Van
organized to protect themselves in April. Their activity was painted as
a revolutionary uprising, and fighting broke out in the streets. The
advancing Russians took the city, but those Armenians who lived behind
Turkish lines now became the targets of a massive campaign to remove
them from the region. The argument often employed by Turkish leaders to
the Western and German diplomats who inquired and protested against the
treatment of the Armenians was that the precarious condition of the
empire and the requirements of self-defense of the state justified the
repression of "rebellion." One of the Young Turk triumvirs, Talaat
Pasha, revealed in a telling interview with the American ambassador,
Henry Morgenthau, the complex of reasons that influenced the decision to
eliminate Anatolian Armenians.

"I have asked you to come to-day," began Talaat, "so that I can explain
our position on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to
the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have
enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place,
they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate
state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our
enemies."[^31]

Though some Armenian historians have argued that the Genocide was the
final stage in a long history of Turkish oppression and massacre of
Armenians, with the implication that mass murder was part of a
widespread and popular exterminationist mentality, my own sense is that
the intensifying hostility toward Armenians need not have reached the
proportions of a genocide, save for the initiation and encouragement of
the state in the context of war. Rather than a long-planned and
carefully orchestrated program of extermination, the Armenian Genocide
was more a vengeful and panicky act of suppression that turned into a
opportunistic policy to rid Anatolia of Armenians once and for all,
eliminate the wedge that they provided for foreign intervention in the
region, and open the way for the fantastic dreams of a Turanian empire.
When the archives are opened, and if they have not been cleansed of
incriminating documents, I would not be surprised to find not a single
decision to deport the Armenians but a series of decisions, one more
radical than the other, that fed on each other until demobilization and
sporadic executions and repressions turned inexorably into a massive
program of physical extermination.

Nationalism at the end of the Ottoman period reinforced and
essentialized differences between the peoples of the empire. Religious
distinctions were transmuted into national and racial differences, far
more indelible and immutable than religion, by both the Armenians and
the Turks. At the same time economic competition in a hard economic
environment and struggles among Turks, Kurds, and Armenians over the
limited resource of land intensified interethnic tensions. Stereotypes
on both sides had long existed, but changes in relative status,
particularly the perceived reversal of the Muslim-[dhimmi]{.underline}
hierarchy, created the kinds of fear and anxiety about the future than
political entrepreneurs could exploit. Ultimately the launching of
genocidal violence in 1915 came, not from the accumulating tensions, but
from the initiative of the state. When the Young Turk government decided
to demobilize Armenian soldiers, attack the villages around Van and then
the city itself, arrest Armenian intellectuals and parliamentarians in
Istanbul (April 24, 1915), and order the deportations of their Armenian
subjects, the state removed all legal restraints on violence toward
Armenians, indeed, encouraged theft and murder, punished those who
protected the Armenians, and created a cycle of violence that grew from
the local to the whole of eastern and central Anatolia. Again, here too,
Talaat is as effective a witness as the victims of his crimes. In
posthumously published memoirs he states:

The Porte, acting under the same obligation, and wishing to secure the
safety of its army and its citizens, took energetic measures to check
these uprisings. The deportation of the Armenians was one of these
preventive measures.

I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully
everywhere. In some places unlawful acts were committed. The already
existing hatred among the Armenians and Mohammedans, intensified by the
barbarous activities of the former, had created many tragic
consequences. some of the officials abused their authority, and in many
places people took preventive measures into their own hands and innocent
people were molested. I confess it. I confess, also, that the duty of
the Government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, or at least
to hunt down and punish their perpetrators severely. In many places,
where the property and goods of the deported peole were looted, and the
Armenians molested, we did arrest those who were responsible and
punished them accordining to the law. I confess, however, that we ought
to have acted more sternly, opened up a general investigation for the
purpose of finding out all the promoters and looters and punished them
severely\....

The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical, and
yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they had
the general approval behind them. They were numerous and strong\....

Their open and immediate punishment would have aroused great discontent
among the people, who favored their acts. An endeavor to arrest and to
punish all those promoters would have created anarchy in Anatolia at a
time when we greatly needed unity. It would have been dangerous to
divide the nation into two camps, when we needed strength to fight
outside enemies.[^32]

There is much we yet need to learn about the ordering and organization
by the center of the Genocide, but the witnesses \-- diplomats,
soldiers, and missionaries \-- and the victims have left a documentary
record of the genocidal effects of the state's policies that only the
most callous and deceitful of people can deny.

By the end of the war ninety percent of Ottoman Armenians were gone,
killed, deported to the deserts of Syria, or refugees in the Caucasus or
Middle East. The number of dead is staggering \-- somewhere between
600,000 and 1,000,000 killed in the more conservative estimates \-- and
the event shocked European and American opinion. Armenians were now seen
as historic victims, the "starving Armenians," pitiful refugees to be
fed and protected by the West. In the 1930s writers spoke of the
Armenian "holocaust," and in the early 1940s when he invented the word
"genocide," Raphael Lemkin applied it to two twentieth-century events
\-- the Turkish deportation and massacres of the Armenians in 1915 and
the German annihilation of Europe's Jews.

Sadly for Armenians, the Genocide has been eliminated from the story of
the end of the Ottoman Empire. The events of 1915 have fallen into a
"memory hole" between the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the Kemalist
Revolution of 1919-1922. Nationalist readings and those by modernization
theorists have, without confronting it, transformed an act of mass
murder into a foundational moment of nation-building. Genocide has been
covered over by the ground floor of the Kemalist republic. But even as
the heirs of Kemal try to repress new claimants to eastern Anatolia, the
Kurdish national movement, they are foced to listen to the voices of
those who refuse to remain quiet, the descendents of those Armenians who
could not leave Anatolia. History is the spectre that haunts the world
today. Memory preserves the revenge of the past. And, as the experience
of many former empires and their national successor states has shown,
not understanding and coming to terms with the past infects the present
and cripples the future.

[^1]: ^\*^

[^2]: At two recent conferences \-- an SSRC workshop, "The End of
    Empire: Causes and Consequences," at the Harriman Institute,
    Columbia University, November 20-21, 1994, with a projected volume
    to be published by Westview Press; and a conference on "The
    Disintegration and Reconstitution of Empires: The USSR and Russia in
    Comparative Perspective," at the University of California, San
    Diego, January 10-12, 1996, with a projected volume to be published
    by M. E. Sharpe \-- papers by distinguished scholars Serif Mardin
    and Dankwart Rustow dealing with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire
    failed to mention the deportation and massacres of the Armenians.

[^3]: Bernard Lewis, *The Emergence of Modern Turkey* (Oxford: Oxford
    University Press, 1961; 2nd edition, 1968), p. 356.

[^4]: For discussion of the nation as "imagined community," see Benedict
    Anderson, *Imaginated Communities, Reflections on the Origin and
    Spread of Nationalism* (London: Verso, 1983).

[^5]: Eric J. Hobsbawm, *Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme,
    Myth, Reality* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
    Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Etienne
    Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, *Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous
    Identities* (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86-106.

[^6]: See, for example, Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and
    Ideology," from Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, *Race,
    Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities* (London: Verso, 1991), pp.
    86-106; Benedict Anderson, *Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
    Origin and Spread of Nationalism* (London: Verso, 1983).

[^7]: Aron Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire:
    Interview by Nancy Reynolds," *Stanford Humanities Review*, V, 1
    (1995), p. 82.

[^8]: Ibid.

[^9]: Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), *Christians and Jews in
    the Otoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume I:
    The Central Lands* (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982).

[^10]: Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance," p. 85.

[^11]: *Mair ts'utsak' hayeren dzeragrats' matendaranin Mekhitariants' i
    Venetik*, vol. I (Venice, 1914), p. 321; cited in Gerard
    Libaridian*[, The Ideology of Armenian Liberation. The Development
    of Armenian Political Movement Before the Revolutionary Movement
    (1639-1885)]{.underline}* (Ph D dissertation in history, University
    of California, Los Angeles, 1987), p. 31.

[^12]: "Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an Understanding of the
    Armenian Genocide," in Ronald Grigor Suny, *Looking Toward Ararat:
    Armenia in Modern History* (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
    Press, 1993), p. 101.

[^13]: Libaridian, *The Ideology of Armenian Liberation*, p. 191.

[^14]: Ibid, pp. 145-146.

[^15]: This is the sense of much of the argumentation in Libaridian. For
    Armenian writers divisions among Armenians are treated in two ways:
    either ignored altogether, so that the nation becomes a homogeneous
    whole, or as an unfortunate deviance toward disunity that damaged
    the national cause. Libaridian, on the other hand, emphasizes class
    divisions among Armenians and proposes two forms of oppression on
    the people \-- by alien and incompetent Ottoman rulers and by the
    exploitative and self-interested Armenian upper classes, the clergy,
    rich merchants and bankers. He inverts the usual treatment of the
    Church as the unifier and major force for preservation of Armenian
    culture and argues that the Church oppressed Armenians, not only
    through taxation and as political agents of the Porte, but through
    their hold on culture and education.

[^16]: "Logical conclusion" comes from Libaridian.

[^17]: See Ronald Grigor Suny, "Populism, Nationalism, and Marxism among
    Russia's Armenians," in *Looking Toward Ararat*, pp. 63-78.

[^18]: Letter of Sir P. Currie to the Earl of Kimberley, Great Britain,
    Foreign Office, *Turkey, no. 1 (1895), (Part I) Correspondence
    Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Part I. Events at
    Sassoon, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush* (London, 1895), pp.
    20-21.

[^19]: S. N. Eisenstadt, "The Kemalist Regime and Modernization: Some
    Comparative and Analytical Remarks," in Jacob M. Landau, *Ataturk
    and the Modernization of Turkey* (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
    1984), p. 9.

[^20]: M. Sukru Hanioglu, *The Young Turks in Opposition* (New York and
    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 17.

[^21]: Ibid., p. 32.

[^22]: Ibid., p. 10.

[^23]: Suny, *Looking Toward Ararat*, pp. 107, 108.

[^24]: Hanioglu, *The Young Turks in Opposition*, p. 216. This occurred
    around 1902 at the time of the Congress of Ottoman Oppositionists in
    Paris.

[^25]: Ibid., p. 150.

[^26]: Ibid., p. 193. "This text," writes Hanioglu, "reveals how
    antithetical the vantage point of the members of the Armenian
    committees was to the rest of the movement and how they had divorced
    themselves from the notion of 'liberaux Ottomans' by emphasizing
    their willingness to work with them." (193) In my own reading, this
    Armenian declaration makes a clarification, which Sabahaddin Bey
    then declared had been accepted by the majority \-- that the clauses
    of the treaties signed by the Sublime Porte must be implemented.

[^27]: Ibid., p. 195.

[^28]: Ibid., p. 197.

[^29]: Cited in Masami Arai, *Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era*
    (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 61.

[^30]: Feroz Ahmad, *The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and
    progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914* (Oxford: Oxford University
    Press, 1969), pp. 154-155.

[^31]: Henry Morgenthau, *Ambassador Morgenthau's Story* (Garden City,
    NY: Doubleday Page, 1918), pp. 336-337.

[^32]: Talaat Pasha, "Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat Pahsa," *Current
    History*, XV, 1 (October 1921), p. 295.