Early history of Armenian revolutionary politics is replete with myths and suppositions. Both Armenian and Turkish scholars focus on the later revolutionary movements when the movements reached certain maturity in terms of organizational framework and political power in the 1890s. They fail to pay attention to the ways in which earlier intra-communal conflicts based on class antagonisms and tensions between urban and rural areas interacted with these emerging ethnic projects. A close examination of the early period of the revolutionary politics, however, draws a different historical picture. Before the emergence of centrally organized revolutionary parties in the late 1880s and 1890s, many dissident groups existed throughout the region. They were acting primarily against local social and economic problems, without necessarily envisioning a salvation of their “nation” from their “Muslim overlords”. This paper aims to bring a fresh approach to our understanding of early Armenian revolutionary politics by contextualizing them within the political and social developments in the Ottoman society in the 1860s and 1870s. The paper examines uncovering of a clandestine Armenian organization by Ottoman state authorities in the city of Erzurum in 1882. The exposure of the organization was important for various reasons: first, a group of dissident Armenians had formed an organization locally before the rise of revolutionary-nationalist parties in the region; second, the members of the organizations and its leadership were peasants and artisans; third, it was the first time in the local community that peasants had a presence in city politics; and last but not least, it was also the first time that ethno-national themes and a distinct anti-state stance were voiced in the region. Based on Ottoman, Armenian and British sources, the paper will focus on the organization, mobilization of the movement and its attempt to consolidate ethnic identities. It will show that, the emergence of revolutionary politics was not as an alien ideology imported from abroad. Instead it was materialization of a nascent form of political thought which emerged a) as a reaction to elite-dominated local politics b) as an alternative to and in tandem with the imperial ethnicity, Ottomanism, that it eventually replaced. It argues that such early and under-examined local movements paved the way for the modernization of Armenian politics—its transition from a traditional, elite-based, and local phenomenon, to mass politics with participation by non-elite groups, and eventually to a “national” phenomenon, transgressing the province-center dichotomy and cutting across class boundaries.