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The Armenians from Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars

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The Armenians from Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars The Armenians From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars RAZMIK PANOSSIAN HURST & COMPANY, LONDON THE ARMENIANS To my parents Stephan and Sona Panossian RAZMIK PANOSSIAN The Armenians From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars HURST & COMPANY,LONDON First published in the United Kingdom by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd, 41 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3PL Copyright © by Razmik Panossian, 2006 All rights reserved. Printed in India The right of Razmik Panossian to be identified as the author of this volume has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyight, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A catalogue record for this volume is available from the British Library. ISBNs 1-85065-644-4 casebound 1-85065-788-2 paperback ‘The life of a nation is a sea, and those who look at it from the shore cannot know its depths.’—Armenian proverb ‘The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.’—Hugo of St Victor (monk from Saxony,12th century) The proverb is from Mary Matossian, The Impact of Soviet Policies in Armenia. Hugo of St Victor is cited in Edward Said, ‘Reflections on Exile’, Granta, no. 13. CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgements page xi 1. Introduction 1 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND DEFINITIONS 5 A brief overview: going beyond dichotomies 6 Questionable assumptions: homogenisation and the role of the state 10 The Armenian view 12 Defining the nation 18 — The importance of subjectivity 20 — The importance of modernity 24 — The characteristics of nations 28 2. The Initial Building Blocks: From the ‘Beginning of Time’ to the 17th Century 32 MYTHS, KINGS, CHRISTIANITY AND THE ETHNIE FROM NOAH TO MOVSES KHORENATSI 33 The conversion to Christianity 42 The alphabet and the Golden Century 44 The paradigm of rebellion: the Battle of Avarayr 46 Movses Khorenatsi and the writing of history 49 Theoretical interlude: the concept of ethnie 52 THE NEXT THOUSAND YEARS…57 Arab rule 58 The Bagratuni dynasty 59 The Turkic invasions 60 The ‘Diasporan Kingdom’ of Cilicia 63 Subjects of empires, again: maintaining identity as a religious community 66 3. Merchants, Diasporan Communities, and Liberation Attempts: the 17th to the 19th Century 75 PREPARING THE GROUNDWORK, I: MERCHANT COMMUNITIES AND DIASPORAN CENTRES 76 vii viii Contents New Julfa 78 India 80 Europe 82 Constantinople 83 Tiflis 86 Diaspora/merchant communities and national identity 87 — Diaspora merchants as the financiers of culture, learning and identity 87 — Armenian printing 90 Theoretical interlude: print capitalism 94 PREPARING THE GROUNDWORK, II: THE MKHITARIST BROTHERHOOD 101 PREPARING THE GROUNDWORK, III: EARLY ATTEMPTS AT LIBERATION AND RUSSIAN RULE 109 The precedent of rebellion 110 — Initial attempts 110 — Israel Ori 111 — Davit Bek 112 — Joseph Emin 115 The Russian conquest of Eastern Armenia 119 4. A Multilocal Awakening: The Consolidation and Radicalisation of Collective Identity in the 19th Century 128 THE MULTILOCAL ARGUMENT 129 LANGUAGE 132 In the west 134 In the east 135 LITERARY CULTURE 137 In the west 138 In the east 142 POLITICAL IDEOLOGY 147 In the west 148 In the east 153 In Ottoman Armenia 160 Theoretical interlude: intellectuals and phases 180 5. Revolutionary Parties and Genocide, Independence and Sovietisation: Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries 188 NATIONALISM THROUGH OTHERS: RELIANCE ON EXTERNAL FORCES 189 Contents ix THE ‘RELIGIOUS’ DIMENSION IN SECULAR NATIONALISM 194 POLITICAL AND REVOLUTIONARY ORGANISATIONS 200 Early attempts at organisation 200 The Armenakans and their continuations 201 The Hnchakian Party 203 The Armenian Revolutionary Federation 205 Armenian Marxists/Social Democrats 210 REVOLUTIONARY ACTIVITIES 214 Protests and terrorism 214 Intra-community activities 217 Self-defence—in east and west 219 Alliance with the Young Turks 223 THE GENOCIDE 228 THE INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC AND SOVIETISATION 242 6. Differing Identities: Soviet Armenians, Diaspora Armenians, 1921–87 262 DYNAMICS IN SOVIET ARMENIA 266 The federal structure and centre-republic relations 267 Modernisation and national identity 270 Theoretical interlude: identity and modernisation 273 Soviet nationalities policies 274 Demographic issues and the homogenisation of Armenia 277 A national and nationalising political elite 282 The gap between ideology and reality 286 CREATING A DIASPORAN NATIONAL IDENTITY 291 Diasporan mobilisation 294 Education as the means 297 Language as the marker 299 Ideology as the directive 300 The social milieu as the setting 303 A new diasporan identity and its politics 306 Theoretical interlude: the modern diaspora 311 7. Strengthening National Identity,Soviet Style, 1921–87 319 1965: A TURNING POINT 320 THE KEY FACTORS AND MECHANISMS IN BUILDING NATIONAL IDENTITY 323 The dissident movement 323 x Contents Historiography 327 Art and literature 333 — Republic first, diaspora second 338 Language 342 Textbooks and education 345 Monuments and rituals 348 Church and religion 350 Theoretical interlude: the state-culture nexus 356 REPATRIATION AND FORMAL ARMENIA-DIASPORA RELATIONS 358 A divided diaspora and Soviet Armenia’s links with it 365 ARF-Soviet Armenia relations 371 STAGNATION AND DISSATISFACTION 376 IDEOLOGY AS A GAME 379 8. Conclusion: a Multilocal Nation Continues 384 Bibliography 395 Armenian language sources 395 Non-Armenian language sources 407 Archival material 432 Electronic sources 432 Formal interviews 433 Index 437 MAPS Historic and present-day Armenia xviii Arshakuni Armenia, 1st–5th centuries AD 56 Ottoman-Persian treaty,1639 74 Russian Expansion into South Caucasus, 1774–1878 127 The Western (Ottoman) Armenian provinces, 1878–1914 215 Soviet and Independent Armenia, 1920 to the present 359 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My grandfather Hagop Panossian,who was generally known by the Turkish honorific title Onbashi (corporal), spoke six languages without having any formal education beyond primary school. He had two mother tongues: Armenian and the local village dialect of Kessab (Kesap), a ‘language’ incomprehensible to outsiders that is a mixture of old and new Armenian at its root with much Turkish and Arabic vocabulary, peppered with Persian, Greek and even the odd French and English words. He knew Turkish,since he grew up in what was then the Ottoman empire. He spoke Arabic, because his village—a six hundred year old Armenian settlement in the diaspora—became part of Syria. English was picked up in the United States,where he migrated to as a labourer in the early 1910s, and he learnt French when he joined the French Legion during the First World War to fight against Ottoman armies. After the War he resettled in his native village,being the only survivor in his immedi- ate family of the Armenian Genocide. In contrast, as I was growing up in Lebanon in the 1970s I was supposed to learn one language properly: Armenian. Of course the ‘natural’ process of picking up languages continued for many indi- viduals based on the circumstances of diasporan life, but there was a clear policy and an exerted effort at the communal level to em- phasise Armenian as the language to master. Within one generation it had become the key cultural marker of national identity.Turkish was frowned upon as the language of the enemy.The village dialect was considered too parochial to teach the young. To be fair, the Armenian community school I attended recognised the impor- tance of learning other languages. French, Arabic and later English were taught—in that order and often badly—as second or ‘foreign’ languages. They were mere tools or skills, whereas Armenian was the ‘essence’ of identity. I do not wish to generalise this process of linguistic nationalisa- tion to all Armenians. However, it was—and is—an important xi xii Preface and Acknowledgements component of the construction of Armenian identity, particularly in the Middle Eastern communities and of course in Armenia. There are needless to say quite a few multilingual Armenians around the world, along with a large number of Armenians in the diaspora who do not speak the ‘national language’. But the emphasis on lang- uage as a ‘natural’ component of being Armenian is generally accep- ted, although the reality of hundreds of thousands of non-Armenian speaking Armenians in North America and Europe is leading to the re-evaluation of the link between language and national identity, at least in the diaspora. One important clarification must at once be made about the concept of ‘construction’ of identity. I do not at all imply that Armenian identity itself is a modern or artificial creation. Armeni- ans have existed for nearly 3,000 years as a distinct linguistic and ethno-religious community.And similar processes of collective iden- tity (re)formulation, as described above, have taken place before— for example, in the fourth and fifth centuries with Armenians’ con- version to Christianity and the invention of a unique alphabet. Even in adverse conditions, when they were living under the suzer- ainty of foreign powers, most Armenians maintained their separate cultural identity.This ancient identity was transformed into a mod- ern national identity between the eighteenth and twentieth centu- ries. It is in this context that I use the words construction, creation, evolution and formulation of identity,more or less interchangeably. National identity,like all other collective identities,is a socially con- structed reality. To use the metaphor of the family story above,this book analyses the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the historical transformation from the grandfather who spoke six languages to the grandson who was being taught one national language. The personal story demon- strates the change from one generation to the next; the collective history demonstrates the change from one century to the next.This book is concerned with the latter, with the evolution of Armenian national identity.
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