Financing the Armenian revolution

[Eddie]

Here a note on a very interesting subject that I will fill out for Groong.

Eddie

 

Financing the Armenian Revolution

 

Though its title suggests a comprehensive treatment, Hovik Grigorian’s nevertheless fine booklet ‘The Problems of Arming and Financing the Armenian Liberation Struggle’ (pp113, 2004, Yerevan) deals primarily with the Armenian National Liberation Movement’s (ANLM) resort to the forcible taxation of the Armenian merchant and trading class comfortably settled in the Diaspora, in Constantinople and Smyrna, in Tbilisi and Baku, in Moscow and Petersburg and beyond in Paris, London and even New York elite so that it could finance its political and its military work in defence of the fiercely exploited and impoverished peasant and artisan masses in historic Armenia.

 

Grigorian handles the issue with confidence and intelligence and so prompts further thought on the peculiarities of modern Armenian national development and particularly of class relations within this process. He does not ignore the threats, terror and executions that were involved. He does not glorify nor does he vilify. Neither does he brush under the carpet the murkier criminal dimension with its register of bandits, thieves and adventurers who joined the bandwagon to line their own pockets. But as he sets a foundation for his examination Grigorian convinces us in the face of increasingly aggressive and destructive Ottoman assault on the Armenian population of historic Armenia the ANLM as a matter of national life and death was compelled to consider speedy and effective ways to obtain the large sums necessary support popular resistance against well financed marauding and murderous Ottoman state forces.

 

Routine fundraising of which Hovik Grigorian gives interesting examples, among them the sale photos of famous guerrillas could not bring in sums adequate to the task. From where to then obtain the means was the question? Here Grigorian touches on what is perhaps an important intellectual weakness of the ANLM. Believing that it represented the whole nation irrespective of class it turned to those who evidently had ample resources, the Armenian elite. ‘In the early stages’ writes Grigorian ‘the Armenian movement’ had ‘great expectations from the Armenian wealthy’, expectations raised further by noting that the liberation movement in the Balkans that they closely followed was indeed supported by ‘dedicated and patriotic representatives’ of ‘a wealthy stratum of society’.

 

In formulating its expectations the Armenian movement however did not account for the peculiarity of the Armenian elite that though hugely wealthy was as hugely unwilling Armenian to do anything for the masses in Armenia. The revolutionary leadership was to discover this truth rapidly. Leading figures in both the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and the Social Democrat Hnchak Party (SDHP) speak with contempt for the Armenian elite’s stubborn refusals. ARF founder member and theoretician Kristapor Mikaelyan is particularly scathing:

‘Why get enraged only at Europe’s indifference. Throughout the year what did the Armenian do….who heard the cries of the starving, the wailing of the orphans, who heard his brothers’ pleas for guns and bread. What did the Armenian bourgeois do, the Armenian youth, the intelligentsia, the well-to-do and thinking segment of the Armenian people?’ (p41)

 

Mikaelyan goes on to note that despite ‘the empty Turkish state treasury’ the Ottoman state managed to supply ‘funds with which to…station its forces’ in the very centres of Armenian resisance, Van, Zeitun and Sassoon. In contrast the Armenian wealthy does not lend a hand to its people not ‘because it cannot’ but but because ‘it does not want to and does not even think of supplying money to obtain guns for fighters.’ (p42) As Grigorian’s account shows the Armenian elite was so hostile that it organised ‘co-ordinated resistance’ and in addition readily resorted to betraying revolutionaries to the Ottoman and Tsarist states.

 

Grigorian at one point bemoans but does not seek to explain why unlike the Greek and Bulgarian national movement, the Armenian never enjoyed consistent and substantial backing from any significant section of its own national elite. Any elucidation of reason must note most centrally in contrast to the Balkan national bourgeoisie the Armenian elite had no substantial segment rooted in its homeland. It was a Diaspora elite not a national one. Its home, its sources of wealth, its needs and its interests were tied into and fashioned by their location in distant foreign imperial cities. They had therefore no objective reason and felt no need or desire to open their money bags to help the peasant and artisan in Armenia for whom they generally reserved only contemptuous disdain.

 

With the absence of any direct structural relationship to its historic homeland and to the mass of the Armenian peasants and artisans, the Armenian merchant and trading class was a national class only in a very narrow, restricted and deformed sense. This Mikael Nalpantian had already recognised back in the 1850s writing that the:

‘Armenian merchants and their trade do not represent anything national and have absolutely no relation to Armenia's national interest...Armenian merchants are essentially servants of European powers...and let me be frank, people called merchants are in reality only intermediaries servicing others rather their own people.’

 

This Diaspora elite happily and sometimes even enthusiastically financed education and enlightenment in Diaspora Armenian communities where it needed the services of educated Armenian men and women. But the needs of the homeland poor concerned it hardly ever, and when it did it was only as a pool to suck cheap labour into Baku, Tbilisi or Constantinople or when revolutionary upheavals among peasants and artisans in the homeland disturbed its peaceful accumulation in the imperial capitals.

 

Grigorian indirectly supports such an explanation when he deals with the response of the Armenian elite in Tbilisi and Baku during the 1905 Armenian-Azeri clashes. There he shows it to have been willing and generous to the ANLM. The reason is self evident. The ‘eastern Armenian rich proved relatively generous in its contribution to the defence of Armenians in the Caucuses’ and ‘this was quite natural’ as the Armenian elite ‘grasped by that such means it was also defending its own life and wealth’. This reality, the author notes applied particularly to the elite in Baku the centre of Armenian-Azeri clashes. Where its direct interests were concerned the Armenian elite, like bourgeois classes anywhere, demonstrated its readiness to seek cover behind the nation’s fighters and where necessary even finance them.

 

In the Caucasus the Armenian elite had direct and immediate interests to defend. But in the core of historic Armenia there were none that were significant. So in relation to historic Armenia and its native people this elite was stubborn in its refusal to offer financial assistance to the ANLM. But as the condition of the Armenian population became increasingly desperate the revolutionary movement decided, reluctantly in the case of the ARF, to embark on a programme of forced taxation backed up with terror and execution when necessary. To some extent the campaign produced effective results securing substantial funds with which the movement was able to direct to areas of greatest need such as Sassun, Van and elsewhere.

 

 

Through its campaign of forced taxation the ANLM represented in a certain sense a mediated link or relation between the Armenian trading and merchant class in the Diaspora and the peasant and artisan masses at home. In this instance representing the mass of the population the revolutionary movement’s demand for money can be seen not just as a distorted expression of nation formation but one can say even a mediated and indirect form of class conflict. For by means of force, in this instance threat, terror and violence, the ANLM was bending the Armenian bourgeoisie in the Diaspora to demands that served not the Armenian bourgeois class but the artisan and peasant class. It served the national interest, but in this instance the nation had no significant native Armenian elite. It was, perhaps unusually, a people’s nation!

 

As he set a context for his account Grigorian outlines some of unprecedented his essay is also a polemic against an important axis of the Turkish falsification of the history of the ANLM. Contrary to falsifiers who represent the ANLM as instruments financed by foreign powers, the Armenian movement received no state aid or financial support from any of the imperial powers seeking inroads into the Ottoman Empire, neither from France, Britain, Germany or Russia. Indeed Grigorian notes, whilst liberation movements in the Balkans received material and financial aid from Tsarist Russian in particular, the Armenian received nothing and was in addition systematically undermined, shunned, abused and betrayed by all imperialist powers.

 

In a significant aside with lessons for our own day Grigorian notes that the ANLM required significant funding not just for its political and military organisation in the homeland but for propaganda work to counter the Ottoman state’s lucratively funded and systematic global anti-Armenian propaganda campaign. Abdul Hamid in particular spent millions on mendacious vilification of the Armenian liberation movement. The tradition of Turkish state sponsored falsification is old and continues to this day. To its shame and disgrace neither the Armenian state nor the elite does anything to react.

 

Eddie Arnavoudian

2 July 2010