Armenia: The Survival of a Nation 2nd ed. (Garland Studies in Historical Demography)

391 Pages·1990·2.14 MB·English

by  Christopher J. Walker

[Front cover]
ARMENIA
The
Survival
of a
Nation
Revised Second Edition
CHRISTOPHER J. WALKER
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ARMENIA
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ARMENIA
The Survival of a Nation
Revised Second Edition
CHRISTOPHER J. WALKER
[ROUTLEDGE Logo]
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© 1980 Christopher J. Walker
New Material © 1990 Christopher J. Walker
Routledge, 11 New Fetter Lane,
London EC4P4EE
First published in England in 1980
Revised edition first published in England in 1990
Reprinted 1991
Printed and bound in Great Britainby
Mackays of Chatham PLC, Chatham, Kent
British LibraryCataloguing in Publication Data
Walker, Christopher J, 1942-
Armenia: the survival of a nation. – Rev. 2nd ed
I. Armenia, history
I. Title
956.62
ISBN 0-415-04684-X
Auden material on page 121 courtesy of Faber & Faber Ltd.
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Contents
List of maps 7
Introduction 11
PROLOGUE
1. Theatre of Perpetual War 19
PART I: THE REALM OF THE TSARS
2. Northern Light 37
3. The Infirmities of Autocracy 64
PART II: THE REALM OF THE SULTANS
4. Empires in the West, from the Ottomans to the British 85
5. No Help Came 121
6. The Rebirth of Oghuz 177
7. The Death of Turkish Armenia 197
PART III: COLLAPSE OF EMPIRES
8. Striving to Create a Republic 243
EPILOGUE
9. Peace on the Plain of Ararat 339
10. Confronting Denial 379
11. Perestroika and Karabagh 391
Biographical Notes 409
Select Bibliography 459
Index 467
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Maps
1. Armenia in Ancient and Medieval Times 22
2. The Caucasus in the Early Nineteenth Century 44
3. Baku 72
4. The Romanov–Ottoman Frontier in Asia, according to the Treaties of Adrianople, San
Stefano and Berlin 113
5. Administrative Divisions in Ottoman Armenia after 1878 122
6. Sasun 137
7. Constantinople 152
8. Armenia and the Transcaucasian Disputed Territories 271
9. Cilicia 293
10. The Kemalist War, September–November 1920 307
11. President Wilson's Award, November 1920 316
12. Soviet Armenia 340
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Although we are small and very limited
in numbers, not a powerful people, and
many times have been subjugated by
foreign kingdoms, yet too, manydeeds of
braveryhave been performed in our land
which are worthyofrecord, but which
no one has troubled to write down.
Movses Khorenatsi,
History of the Armenians, I, 3
(c. AD 480)
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Introduction
Today, on a map of the world, the only region shown as Armenia is the Soviet republic of
Armenia – 29,000 square kilometres, smaller than Belgium, about the same size as Albania.
This is a fraction, which Armenians themselves put at one-tenth, of the historic land of
Armenia, and of the region shown as 'Armenia' on maps of sixty or more years ago. Even
Mount Ararat, closely identified with Armenia throughout her history, towering today over
the Armenian capital of Yerevan and represented on the Soviet insignia of the republic, now
stands in Turkey.
About three million Armenians live in Soviet Armenia, half their world-wide number.
Approximately a million live in other parts of the USSR, especially in the neighbouring
republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. Upwards of half a million live not in other Asiatic
counties, where snow-capped peaks surmount harsh plateaux, but in North America,
especially in Massachusetts and California. Another quarter of a million live in Syria and
Lebanon. A somewhat smaller amount live in Iran. Other Armenian communities, from
Buenos Aires to Shanghai, make up the totalpicture.
The Armenian dispersion, or ëspiurk, is an ancient phenomenon. Enterprising
Armenians have for centuries sought their fortunes in lands other than their own – although
theyhave seldom lost their connections withand affection for their mother country. However
the majority of dispersed Armenians did not leave their land voluntarily. From the time of
Armenia's loss of sovereignty over her lands, many centuries ago, until the present borders
were fixed in 1921, the country has been characterised by misrule, by invasion, by imperial
rivalry and in more recent times by outright and deliberate massacre. The refrain of a well
known Armenian song, addressed by an Armenian far from home to a crane flying overhead,
goes: 'Do you bring good news from our land?', but it is expressed with such doleful
melancholy that the singer knows the answer as he puts the question. Misrule, deportation
and massacre swelled the communities in North America and Syria–Lebanon to their present
large numbers.
Soviet Armenia is the inheritor of what was known, before the first world war, as
Eastern, or Russian, Armenia. What of Western, or Turkish, Armenia? For Armenians the
land today – known simply as eastern Turkey – is a terrible, scalding emptiness, where, apart
from a tiny handful of their compatriots, living in remote and isolated communities, only
ruined churches and heavily overgrown villages testify to the former presence of the native
population of the once fruitful and flourishing land. Deportation and massacre have all but
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denuded the region of its Armenian inhabitants. To be a Western Armenian is, with few
exceptions, either to be dead or in exile. Nevertheless the spirit, and to a remarkable extent
the culturaltradition, ofthe Western Armenians live on, whether in Lebanon (with increasing
precariousness), or in Paris, Boston and Los Angeles. Even though Western Armenians live
in intensely cosmopolitan cities, many of them – but not all – have the knack of keeping alive
their historical traditions and their devotion to their homeland, now lost to them. These things
are to them, in the words of the poet Hovhannes Tumanian, their sea of treasure, which,
despite the many attempts to drain it from them, has always survived intact.
Non-Armenians, if they think of Armenians at all, think of them as entrepreneurs and
businessmen; but throughout Armenia the largest class was, until the catastrophes earlier this
century, the peasantry. Until then this class constituted probably 70 per cent of the entire
Armenian population. Few European travellers bothered to search them out in their villages;
so the notion grew up, fostered by the superficial, snobbish impressions of men such as Sir
Mark Sykes, who carried with them imperial and racist prejudices to all corners of the globe,
of the Armenian only as an entrepreneur, with all the middleman's vices. Those travellers
(such as H. F. B. Lynch) who actually bothered to visit the people in their villages gained an
entirelydifferent picture. But the myth of the eternalmiddleman has proved strong.
One cannot deny that Armenians make good businessmen; and this in turn has led to
another myth – that of the Armenian Jew. Several non-Armenian writers, of varying degrees
of literacy, have written of this semi-mythical creature; a recent popular book on the 1920s
ascribed this identity to Michael Arlen senior (né Kuyumdjian), author of the best-selling
novel The Green Hat. In fact the number of Jews in Armenia, in the past and present, is very
small indeed, and a number of those are of the Karaite sect, considered to be outside the
mainstream of Judaism.
Almost without exception, Armenians are Christians, although often in a sociological
rather than a religious sense. Their devotion to their ancient Church as the main embodiment
of their traditions, and as the one institution which remained alive when their country was
enshrouded in the night of alien empires, is immensely strong. During the centuries when
Armenia was divided between theocratic despotisms, the Church became the only
mouthpiece for the people. Today, too, the Church has more than a theological significance.
It is also an important point of reference for an individual's personal identity. Many
Armenians hold that, in a profound way, their children are not fully Armenians until they are
baptised by their Church. Even party officials in Soviet Armenia have been known to ask for
the baptism of their children.
If Christianity holds a somewhat paradoxical position in the world-wide community
of Armenians today, so does Soviet Communism. Expatriate Armenians of all political hues
have expressed pride in Soviet Armenia, and many of the most capitalistic of them would be
appalled by the thought of the
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collapse of the Soviet regime in Armenia. In this way expatriate Armenians differ radically
from expatriate Russians, Ukrainians or Georgians. Armenians see Armenia, protected by
Soviet power, as a small part of their ancient, continuously inhabited country which has
survived against incredible odds. If the alternative to obliteration is the Soviet regime, then
long may it live. Westerners, living in secure, stable countries with well defined borders may
find this acceptance of Soviet rule rather shocking; if so, they will have to make a gigantic
imaginative leap into a world where nothing was secure: not life, livelihood, sex or property;
a world too where the defenceless civilian population was frequently subjected to brutal
inhumanities by representatives of its own government, and where armies ignorant of any
rules of warfare swept through the land, bringing fire, wreckage and death. In these
circumstances the survival of Soviet Armenia appears as a miracle. In the context of
Armenian's history, Stalin's purges are historical memories which, although tragic, were
transient. The Armenian culture and language have survived in Soviet Armenia, and are even
flourishing there (despite attempts by the bureaucrats to enforce Russian as the language of
government). When this is set against the ruin and desolation of Western Armenia, and
against the pitiless manner in which it was carried out, the average Armenian's pride in Soviet
Armenia becomes understandable.
The central and most critical issue, the activating principle which unites almost all
Armenians – a people not given to unity – whatever their political affiliation, whether living
in America, Europe or Asia, is that a great crime was committed against them by Ottoman
Turkey in the early part of this century, which has gone unrecognised and unpunished. In the
first world war and its aftermath they lost perhaps one-third of their world-wide population
through deportation, deliberate starvation and outright massacre. The size of this catastrophe,
and the calculated manner in which it was carried out, have given the memory of the events a
stabbing, unresolved quality to the average aware Armenian. Other historical events can
perhaps be passed over, but 1915 is an unhealed wound – the year that the Armenian people
were cut down and uprooted from their native land. Earlier decades had foreshadowed this
event, and it has coloured all Turko–Armenian perceptions thereafter. It remains unexorcised.
From 1828 until the first world war Armenia was divided between two opposing empires,
those of Russia and Turkey. It became usual to speak of 'Russian Armenia' and 'Turkish
Armenia' – although at the popular level there was a common outlook among both peoples,
based on their adherence to their Church. This division of Armenia between the domains of
tsar and sultan has dictated the structure of this book. After an opening chapter, establishing
the ancient and medieval background, there follow two chapters showing the development of
Russian Armenia to 1914 and giving a brief glance at the military campaigns in the Armenian
highlands. Turkish Armenia, and the
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Armenian question as an international issue, take up the next four chapters. (There is a little
overlap with the Russian chapters, but this is, I think, outweighed by the gain in clarity.) All
strands are unified for the period ofthe Republic of Armenia, and the final working out of the
Armenian question, including the French occupation of Cilicia. The year 1921, which fixed
the present frontiers and which froze the Armenian question into immobility, is in an
important sense the year in which the door was slammed shut on Armenians; so my last
chapter, on Soviet Armenia and the dispersion since then, is only an epilogue.
This book developed from a general interest in the later Ottoman empire, and from a
realisation that there was very little on Armenians in modern times. It was really quite hard to
find out in any detail what actually happened. Since the subject of modern Armenia seemed
to be covered by such a cloak of obscurity – whether from our universities, where the subject
cannot be taught since it falls outside the strait-jacket ofthe syllabuses, or from the press – it
took only a little persuading for me to embark on the subject.
'The author bespeaks the reader's patience with the hard names which he will encounter in
perusing this work' (Eli Smith, Missionary Researches in Armenia, 1834). Armenian proper
names pose certain problems. Some are difficult to pronounce, since they place a number of
consonants together without an intervening vowel. And there is no single accepted manner of
pronouncing the language: the western dialect (traditionally of Constantinople and Turkish
Armenia) differs from the eastern (which is spoken in Soviet Armenia today, and by the
Armenian communities of Iran and India). For example a famous Armenian medieval
dynasty is known as the 'Bagratuni' to easterners, and as the 'Pakraduni' to westerners.
Authors who strive for precise and scholarly consistency transliterate into the eastern form;
but in my opinion this loses the flavour of many western names and makes them
unrecognisable. So I have adopted my own formula: where possible (and where the original
is known to me) I have transcribed proper names from Eastern Armenia according to eastern
pronunciation, and Western according to the western. Names of individuals whose activities
take them to both east and west appear in the eastern form; and ancient and medieval names
are also given in the eastern form. Accepted English forms, such as 'Echmiadzin', are
exceptions to this rule. It goes without saying that I have avoided systems of transliteration,
spelling words instead so that the reader will approximate to their sounds by pronouncing
them as if they were ordinary English. Thus ch is pronounced as in 'church'. Slight problems
are posed by kh and gh, which respectively sound like the ch in Scots 'Ben Vorlich' and like
the r in the northern French pronunciation of 'Paris'. Armenian has an indeterminate vowel,
which sounds like the e in 'laurel'; this appears as ë. G is always hard, as in'gear'.
Place names pose certain other problems. In works in English, Armenia's present-day
capitalwas known as 'Erivan' until comparatively recently; yet to
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Armenians it has always been 'Yerevan', which is the form I prefer. Perhaps, by such
reasoning, Georgia's capital should appear as 'Tbilisi', but since Armenians, Russians and
English all knew it as 'Tiflis', that is the form I have preferred. I hope that thereby I have not
offended against Georgian national pride.
I would like to thank all who have assisted me in this work, principally the Winston Churchill
Memorial Trust, which awarded me a travelling fellowship to embark on my research.
Individuals to whom I am greatly indebted for help and advice include Garbis Armen; the late
Revd. Harold Buxton, of the Armenian (Lord Mayor's) Relief Fund; Garbis Essayan; E. V.
Gulbekian, who supplied me with many references, and corrected my translation of Vratsian's
account of the fall of Kars; Asatur Guzelian, whose library contains many out-of-the-way
items; Jacques Kayaloff, who reminisced to me about the battle of Sardarabad; Professor D.
M. Lang, whose understanding of the Caucasus has given me many insights; Zaven
Messerlian, who has tirelessly answered my letters and compiled the facts for the
biographical notes (pp. 379–428), for which I have done little more than act as editor; David
MacDowall, whose spirited knowledge of both Ottoman and military matters has been
uniquely valuable; Brian Pearce, who has located Soviet and other Russian sources for me;
Zohrab Shamlian; and Hayastan Vartanian. I must also add my parents, who have been
unfailing in their support. Thanks too to Sara Harper for typing the manuscript. To Tim
Harvey, who has painstakingly drawn the maps and designed the jacket, any expression of
gratitude will always fall short. To all these, and friends and acquaintances who have been
generous in comments, ideas and criticisms, I am most grateful, but should add that
responsibility for everything in the book is mine alone.
I would like also to thank the librarian and staff of the London Library; and the keeper
of Public Records for permission to reproduce extracts from documents in the Public Record
Office which are Crown Copyright.
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Prologue
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1. Theatre of Perpetual War
Fromthe earliest period to the present hour, Armenia has been the theatre of perpetual
war –Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ch. 47.
Millennia ago, as the earth was cooling, parts ofits crust had hardened while the rest was still
contracting inwards. The regions created by this primal solidification include the vast plains
ofEuropean Russia and Siberia. The force exerted by the pressure of these immense tracts of
unyielding material upon the rest of the shrinking surface threw out the Asiatic mountain
chains, as layer was folded upon layer. In two areas, the Hindu Kush and Armenia, the
folding was particularly intense. Here the outward thrust from the north was met by a degree
of resistance from the south; the mountain ranges were most constricted, and vividly
articulated.
The distinctive nature of Armenia's landscape developed from this massive folding of
the earth's crust. Her most characteristic physical aspect is of volcanic tablelands, broken up
by soaring mountain systems topped by peaks of which Ararat is the highest. Many of the
tablelands are over 1,500 metres above sea level; and the soil itself is rich, black laval earth.
The folding of the crust too gave Armenia the specific direction of her mountain chains, for
since they reared up as a result of pressure from the north meeting resistance from the south,
they are spread out in a direction from west to east; so that, although her mountains give the
impression of a fortress, it is a fortress exposed on those two sides. Throughout Armenia's
historythe most serious invasions and the heaviest disruption have almost always come from
east or west.
If the conqueror was tempted to invade, the climate did not encourage him to linger.
Long, bitterly cold winters result from the extreme elevation of the plateaux, with snow lying
for as long as eight months. On several occasions the Armenian winter has trapped rash
generals: Lucullus was caught in 68 BC, an Ottoman Turkish army was forced to desist from
trying to seize Yerevan from the Persians in 1616, and, most notably, the Turkish war
minister, Enver Pasha, taking personal command, was defeated at Sarikamish in 1914–15 less
by the Russian army than by the cruel weather of the Armenian highlands. The intense cold
has passed into legend, too. The Turkish traveller Evliya Chelebi relates how a dervish, asked
whether there was any summer in Erzerum, replied:
ByGod, I remained there eleven months and nine and twenty days, the people
said that summer was coming, but I did not see it. It happened, however, that a cat,
which ran over the roofs of the houses, became froze there while in the act of running,
and remained so for the space of nine months, when the spring arriving, the cat began
to thaw, cried 'Miau!' and fell down.1
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When winter eventually cracks and slides, a beautiful landscape unfolds in many parts
of Armenia. Macdonald Kinneir, writing in a Theocritan vein, described the country thus in
1813:
The country is mountainous, diversified with extensive plains and beautiful
vallies, and the inhabitants are blessed not only with the necessaries but even the
luxuries of life. Almost every kind of grain is cultivated with success, and the
gardens, with which the towns and villages are surrounded, yield abundance of the
most delicious fruits, such as grapes, olives, oranges, peaches, apricots, nectarines,
mulberries, plumbs, apples, pears, walnuts and melons. Wax and honey are procured
from the mountains and raw-silk, hemp and cotton are exported to Constantinople and