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Connecting Revolutions: Armenians and the Ottoman, Iranian, and Russian Revolutions
Abstract
In 1907, a skilled bomb maker and one of three founders of the leading Armenian revolutionary party (Dashnaktsutiun) of the late nineteenth century, Rostom (Stepan Zorian) sat with Iranian constitutionalist leaders and agreed to a deal. He consented to place the party at the service of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). Months later, Armenian revolutionaries took up arms against royalists trying to halt the progress of the constitutional revolution. Only two years earlier, Rostom had been far from the Iranian scene, in the Caucasus, during the Russian Revolution (1905), convincing his party comrades there to include the Caucasus in their revolutionary struggle. Fast forward three years to 1908, and Rostom took part in important discussions with Ottoman revolutionaries involved in the reinstatement of the constitution of that year. His geographic mobility, his sudden appearance at pivotal moments in three different states' revolutionary struggles, and his remarkable ease when operating in varied and dramatically different milieus are nothing short of striking. Yet Rostom was only one of many Armenians who made their way through the early twentieth-century revolutions in the Ottoman, Russian, and Iranian region, often participating in two or three of the revolutions. Their involvement points to a fascinating and heretofore unexamined and important feature of modern revolutions: the critical circulation of not just ideas but of individuals and material. A review of the biographies of these individuals, political party documents, and correspondence demonstrates how mobile, active, and dynamic many were in connecting all the major revolutions at the dawn of the twentieth century. Drawing on Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s contributions to a “connected histories” approach, I argue in this paper that the history of the region and its revolutionary struggles must be seen not as “autonomous” but as “interactive,” i.e., connected through the flow of elites, their ideas, and experiences. In that sense, the fact that Armenian revolutionaries and intellectuals as both local and “global” agents were literally (and at times figuratively) “all over the place,” collaborating in revolutionary activities, being influenced by, and influencing political culture as well as social and political ideologies, points to the connectedness of these revolutions as well as the need to study them “through one another, in terms of relationships, interactions, and circulation” (Michael Werner/Bénédicte Zimmerman). Through the examination of the circulation of individuals and ideas as exemplified but not limited to Armenians, the picture that emerges is one of transimperial connections and “connected revolutions.”
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries