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Notes de lecture

Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds

Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019, 301 p.
Thomas Welsford
p. 231-235
Référence(s) :

Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019, 301 p.

Texte intégral

1To write about the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) – otherwise known as the Dashnaks – and the other Armenian revolutionary movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has generally been to take a side. While diasporic and post-independence Armenian writers cast the Dashnaks, Hunchaks and similar such groups as selfless freedom fighters struggling to redeem the motherland from bondage, most Turkish and Azeri scholars depict them as violent criminals steeped in the blood of their innocent victims. Even outside the confines of nationalist historiography, moral judgement is pervasive: in Soviet-era catalogue entries for materials held at the Georgian National Archive in Tbilisi, references to the Dashnaks identify them damningly either as a “bourgeois-nationalist party” or a ‘counter-revolutionary’ one. A resultant historiography premised on clashing moral viewpoints and seeking either to celebrate Armenian revolutionary activities or to condemn them has tended to yield more heat than light: amidst competing polemics about how the Dashnaks were good or bad, one is left with little sense of the ways in which they may have been interesting.

2In recent years a number of works have started to redress this state of affairs. By forensically tracing the circulation of men, money and weapons, scholars such as Gabriel Moumdjian and Varak Ketsemanian have approached the Armenian revolutionary movement as a phenomenon to be not judged but anatomised. Drawing on a diverse range of sources reflecting the perspective both of Armenian revolutionary groupings and of the imperial entities against which they were aligned, they furthermore show how Dashnaks and others were part of a trans-regional revolutionary network, whose influence extended far beyond the territory of the Armenian homeland. To the list of such transformative works we can now add Houri Berberian’s Roving Revolutionaries, a superb exploration of how the ARF and other Armenian groups experienced and contributed to the revolutions in Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Iran that together took place over the years 1905-1911. Carefully researched and clearly written, Roving Revolutionaries sets out to decentre – or re-centre – the Armenian revolutionary movement, abstracting it from narratives of national liberation or national culpability and instead situating it against the wider turn-of-the-century backdrop of what Benedict Anderson calls “the age of globalization”.

3The result is a fascinating study in connected history. Rather as Sebouh Aslanian’s From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean shows how increased trans-continental connectivity in the age of the early modern empires enabled the Armenian merchants of New Julfa to establish commercial networks extending all the way from Isfahan to the Philippines and Mexico, Berberian shows how accelerated mobility in the age of the steamship and the telegraph enabled revolutionaries and revolutionary ideas to traverse imperial frontiers with ever greater ease, thereby rendering the fate of one empire increasingly contingent upon the fate of its neighbours. That the Russian, Ottoman and Iranian revolutions were not mutually isolated episodes has of course long been understood, and an opening chapter (pp. 1-46) on “Connected Revolutions” confines itself largely to a survey of the existing historiographical and social science literature on the subject, as background context for the story to follow. In chapter 2, “Active and Moving Spirits of Disturbance” (pp. 47-105), Berberian moves to the heart of her theme, tracing the role of Armenian activists in connecting these revolutionary milieus. Relating the careers of Kristapor Mikayelian, Rostom, Simon Zavarian and other prominent ARF members, she considers how such individuals availed themselves of advances in mobility to pursue the party’s agenda wheresoever was most useful. While all three aforementioned men were born in Russian-ruled Transcaucasia, they all spent time in the Ottoman Empire, and Rostom played a prominent role also in the constitutional revolution in Iran; all three men furthermore spent extended periods of time in Europe, where Mikayelian and Rostom were responsible for cultivating ties with the Macedonian independence movement, and where in 1905 Mikayelian, preparing a bomb with which to assassinate Sultan Abdulhamid, managed to blow himself up on a hillside outside Sofia.

4One of the pleasures of Berberian’s account here is the Zelig-like picture it offers of interactions between her Armenian protagonists and other prominent members of the early 20th-century revolutionary and intellectual international: reading about the variety of visitors to the ARF’s Western Bureau in Geneva, one is put in mind of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, where James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin are forever bumping into one another on the backstreets of 1917 Zürich. But Berberian is of course concerned here with something more significant than mere happenstance: such encounters were in fact to have a determinative role upon the subsequent course of events. To illustrate this, she moves in chapters 3 and 4 from a biographical mode of writing to a more conceptually framed intellectual history, showing how exposure to external currents of thought influenced Armenian political discourse. In chapter 3, “Circulation of Ideas and Ideologies” (pp. 106-143), she considers how Armenian activists engaged with ideas about constitutionalism and federalism. Calls for constitutional reform and – to a somewhat lesser extent – for federal restructurings of government were a common feature of early 20th-century revolutionary movements, featuring widely in Turkish and Iranian reform programmes as well as the socialist writings of Karl Kautsky and the Austro-Marxists. Through a careful reading of works by Garegin Khazhak and others, Berberian considers how ARF ideologists took such ideas and reworked them into their own political agendas.

5If Berberian’s purpose here were just to examine the Dashnak party’s cosmopolitan intellectual filiations, this in itself would be rewarding enough. But she goes further. Writers were not uniform in their attitudes towards constitutionalism and federalism, she shows, and Hunchak writers such as Stepan Sapah-Giwlian took much more critical views than their Dashnak peers, whose support for constitutional and federal programmes the Hunchaks condemned as submission to a hegemonic status quo. In thus contrasting their attitudes towards the constitutionalist and federalist agendas, Berberian ably highlights the often-overlooked differences in ideological alignment between the Dashnak and Hunchak party programmes. Ideas, she shows, actually meant something. Chapter 4, “Connected through and beyond Reading” – this, incidentally, a title that could apply with equal justice to the previous chapter, just as that one’s title could apply to this – (pp. 145-182) pursues these themes further, considering the ways in which Armenian revolutionary movements engaged with the ideology of socialism. While most historiography treats the Dashnaks and Hunchaks simply as nationalist parties, to be praised or damned as such, Berberian reminds us that their nationalist aspirations in fact drew heavily upon socialist thought – in her paraphrased account of Sapah-Giwlian’s argument, “socialism is a part of and not apart from the struggle in the [Russian] empire” (p. 165) – and both parties developed close ties to the Georgian Social Democrats and Russian Socialist Revolutionaries. But a commitment to socialism did not entail mute acquiescence to an external party line, and Armenian revolutionary theorists often came up with ideological refinements of their own. In his work Hosank’ner (Currents), published in Geneva in 1910, the Dashnak theorist Mikayel Varandian criticised much of the socialist ideology currently circulating within the Russian Empire, and proposed instead the writings of Jean Jaurès and some of the Austro-Marxists as inspiration for a socialism in distinctly Armenian colours. As informed participants in a trans-regional marketplace of ideas, Dashnak and Hunchak thinkers were able to draw critically upon the ideas that were most useful to them and their parties, and to plot their own course within this age of revolutions.

6By teasing out the range of theoretical references and allusions to be found in Varandian’s Hosank’ner, Berberian shows with unmatched clarity how the Armenian revolutionary movement can be understood only within a wider political and intellectual context. Given her book’s avowed focus on the role of Armenians in this revolutionary age, however, it is perhaps worth remembering what else was happening in 1910 at the time of Hosank’ner’s publication. Dashnaks in the Russian Caucasus were being subjected to a fierce tsarist crackdown that had started in 1908, and which showed no signs of abating even after the ARF resolved in 1909 to drop the anti-tsarist campaign it had begun in 1905: large numbers of Armenians convicted of revolutionary activities were being exiled to the Volga-Ural region and Siberia, where many of them would die. In Ottoman Turkey, the ARF’s tactical accommodation with the Committee of Union and Progress was weakening, and in 1912 would break down entirely. And in Iran Dashnak and Hunchak activists by 1910 were becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Iranian government that they had helped to establish the year before. Roving Revolutionaries has little to say about any of these events: for a work subtitled Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian and Ottoman Worlds, it is surprisingly unconcerned with how the outcomes of said revolutions actually impacted upon Armenian revolutionary politics – or indeed upon a wider Armenian population that often suffered at the hands of those very revolutionary groupings that were claiming to protect it. But readers can trace these outcomes elsewhere – for the Iranian case, in Berberian’s own excellent Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 – and rather than carp at what Roving Revolutionaries does not do, we should appreciate its achievement in reframing Armenian revolutionary politics as a transregional phenomenon.

7Fifteen years ago, Benedict Anderson dazzlingly showed how in the career of the Filipino novelist José Rizal connections between fin-de-siècle revolutionary movements in the Philippines and Cuba become apparent. Roving Revolutionaries shows how the career of Rostom, say, similarly highlights some of the surprising connections to be found between events in Transcaucasia, Iran, Bulgaria and Switzerland. Like the other ARF founders, Rostom is of course a figure who has already been the subject of multiple publications, and one wonders what further surprises might transpire from analysing the careers of other, less widely exposed revolutionary activists: further work in the ARF archives in Watertown – which one hopes in the future will become more widely used by researchers – as well as in archives in Turkey and the former Soviet Union remains a priority. Whoever takes up such a project will find Houri Berberian’s magnificent Roving Revolutionaries an inspiring example to follow.

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Thomas Welsford, « Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds »Études arméniennes contemporaines, 13 | 2021, 231-235.

Référence électronique

Thomas Welsford, « Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds »Études arméniennes contemporaines [En ligne], 13 | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2021, consulté le 23 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/eac/2694 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/eac.2694

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