Dr. James H. Billington
Library of Congress
(Delivered by Dr. Carolyn Brown, Acting Director, Area Studies)

"Welcome"

Beverly Gray, Chief
African and Middle Eastern Division

"Armeniaca and the Library of Congress: 1994-1995"

"Introduction"

Dr. Levon Avdoyan
Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist

          Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the fourth annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture. My name is Levon Avdoyan and I have the honor of serving you as the Armenian and Georgian area specialist in this great institution.

          I would like to begin by introducing to you Dr. Carolyn Brown, our acting Director of Area Studies, who will read a message from Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, who regrettably cannot be here with us tonight. The Armenian collections of the Library of Congress are in the custody of the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division. After Dr. Billington's message, I would like to introduce a close and steadfast friend of these collections, the chief of that division, Ms. Beverly Gray.

          Dr. Brown

"Welcome"
James H. Billington

          I take particular pleasure in welcoming each of you to he Library of Congress on the occasion of the fourth annual Vardanants Day Armenian Lecture, presented by the Near East Section. Vardanants Day, in its celebration of the Armenian people's hard earned right to self-determination, has remained a focus for Armenians everywhere. Our collections, so useful in the study of all things Armenian, are dedicated to preserving and providing access to the past, present and future socio-historical, political and cultural materials from Armenian and from the many cultures and civilizations of the Middle East with which it has interacted for millennia. To this end, the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division has shown wonderful tenacity in adhering to and expanding its mission for the enlightenment of Congress, the American people, and the international governmental and scholarly communities.

          I am sure that you will find the lecture by my colleague, professor Ronald Suny of the University of Chicago, who is known for his keen sense of observation and his scholarly objectivity, both enlightening and stimulating, and indicative of the high level of original and innovative scholarship on the ancient and modern history of Armenia which our generation is producing.

          I invite each of you to return often to the Library to consult both the Armenian and our other rich collections for your personal and professional research. We are truly here to serve you.

"Welcome"
Beverly Ann Gray

          I welcome you to this event that has become an established, and highly anticipated annual program in the African and Middle Eastern Division's calendar. I also bring greetings from our friend and colleague, Dr. George Atiyeh, the Head of the Near East Section, who due to illness, cannot be with us this evening.

          The Armenian collection has been an integral part of the Near East Section throughout its fifty years as a section in the Library of Congress. Beginning with only four hundred or so books I the 1940s, the collection began to grow as a result of the combined efforts of the Library of Congress and of a special committee founded for that purpose in the late 1940s and chaired by Mr. Arthur H. Dadian. Since that time, and recently as a result of a generous grant from Mr. Dadian's estate made by his wife, the late Marjorie Dadian, the Armenian collections have grown into the thousands, and are now thriving.

          The Library of Congress is many things, but chief among these aspects of this great institution are its collections. They are its core of our service-past, present and future, to Congress, to the nation, and to the international community as well. From those collections spring our special programs, such as tonight's Vardanants Day lecture, as well as the innovative scholarship typified by Dr. Suny.

          We remain committed to the continued growth and maintenance of these collections, of which the Armenian materials in our custody form and integral and vital part.

          Again, welcome to you.

"Armeniaca and the Library of Congress: 1994-1995"
Levon Avdoyan

          I realize that you have come to be stimulated intellectually by our guest's presentation this evening, but as is the custom on this occasion, I hope you will allow me to give a brief report on the activities focused on the various Armenian collections since we last convened.

          We have progressed nicely both in our acquisitions and in the processing of materials. Of note is the receipt of the three-volume microfiche set of rare, selected Armenian sources that was published by IDC. Truly massive in number-over 8,000 fiche- this set includes important and rare Armenian texts and studies. Even in the simple act of processing materials one can find items of great interest-in arranging, for instance, the over 200 volumes of nineteenth and early twentieth century Armenian almanacs and calendars from Constantinople, Nor Nakhjewan, Moscow and from other places of the Armenian Diaspora, I was struck by the wealth of historical and social information-almost totally unstudied-available in each of these works. These are items begging for scholarly investigation. And so it goes with most of our materials.

          In terms of newer items, our newly acquired approval plan dealer, ATC International, has supplied us with publications from the republic of Armenia, and our Overseas Operations Office in Cairo continues to acquire and send us Armenian materials from the entire Middle East. Through these ongoing efforts and projected acquisitions trips by Library of Congress staff, we intend to continue growing both in quantity and in quality.

          It remains only to remind you, by reiterating the thoughts of Dr. Billington and Ms. Gray, that these research collections are here to be sued, by Congress, by government agencies, by scholars, by laymen, in short, by you.

"Introduction"

          And now, on to the heart of the evening. This introduction brings me pleasure both on a professional and on a personal level. Too often these days do we take history as merely a story attractively written or narrated. We forget that the word history has little to do with a story, but actually means an inquiry. The bare bones of Dr. Ronald Grigor Suny's professional life, as shown in the biography we have rather dryly furnished in tonight's program, show how well suited he is to historical investigation: Educated at Swarthmore, with a doctorate from Columbia University, holder of the first Alex Manoogian Chair of Armenian Studies at the University of Michigan, visiting professor at Stanford and now Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Author and editor of numerous scholarly works, all known for meticulous research, keen analysis and a spirit of objectivity that guarantees their utility.

          Professor Suny has chosen to challenge us with a presentation temptingly titled: "Nation-making, Nation-breaking, and the End of Empire: A New Perspective on the Events of 1915." I am as eager as you to be tempted.

          Dr. Suny.

Nation-making, Nation-breaking, and the End of Empire:
A New Perspective on the events of 1915

          An historian can only be awed by the task of trying to speak about the unspeakable. He or she is humbled by the enormity of what needs to be understood. It seems presumptuous to try to write about the irrational horrors of our century. We have not been trained to deal with the pathologies of politicians that led to the millions of deaths in Ottoman Turkey, Nazi Europe, or the Soviet Union. What tools do we have to explain the mass violence that has become as ordinary on network television as the fires and floods that fill the local news? Perhaps we should not try. Perhaps we should await those singular voices that on rare occasions find the right notes to convey unutterable pain. Maybe those of us without the talents and moral vision of Tolstoy or Goya should turn to lesser issues and not attempt to describe and analyze events such as the Holocaust, the Great Purges, or the Armenian Genocide.

          But the work of historians, in my view, is precisely to remember, to recover what might otherwise be lost, to reconstruct from the evidence available the story of the paths that have led us to where we are, in the hope that that social knowledge might help us do better in the future. Perhaps this is a utopian thought, but my sense is that understanding even the worst instances of human activity is essential as a first step for liberating us from the ignorance and mystifications that contributed in the first place to mass political violence. For Armenians this need is particularly acute, for the tragedy that they suffered at the beginning of the century is one of the great unknown historical events of our time. Instead of public recognition and scholarly analysis the Genocide of 1915 has been the double victim of historical amnesia and deliberate distortion by pseudo-scholars and a well-orchestrated campaign by the Turkish government. My talk this evening is an attempt to recover the memory of that tragedy and to try in some way to explain why it occurred.

          Historians have analyzed the massive deportation and killing of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 as the conflict of two exclusive nationalisms, the conflict of two people over a single piece of territory, and this has been reconceptualized by those who would deny that a genocide took place as a civil war between Turks and Armenians. In this construction the victims become only one side in an uneven struggle, and the perpetrators become the defenders of their homeland and nation. What I will argue is quite different. Rather than a civil war, which indeed never took place and exists only in the imagination of professional falsifiers, the Genocide occurred when state authorities decided to remove the Armenians from what had been their historic homeland in order to realize a number of strategic goals -- the elimination of a perceived Armenian threat to the war against Russia, to punish Armenians for activities which the Turkish authorities believed to be rebellious and subversive, and to realize their ambitions to create a Pan-Turkic empire that would extend from Anatolia through the Caucasus to Central Asia. The Genocide occurred at a moment of near imperial collapse when the Young Turks made a final, desperate effort at revival and expansion of the empire which they had reconceived as Turkic rather than Ottoman. Nineteen-fifteen, then, can be understood in the context of imperial decline, a radical reconceptualization of the nature of the state along nationalist and Pan-Turkic lines, and the radicalization of Young Turk policies in the fierce context of the First World War.

          Scholars have come to a general agreement over the last several decades that we need to think about nations and nationalism differently. Rather than fixed, objective, primordial categories, modern nations are the product of hard work by intellectuals and political actors, scholars and propagandists, who have applied their energies, not only to the mapping of difference and boundaries, but to the construction of a useable past. A principal trope of nationalist writers has been the recovery of what has been lost, revival of what has lain dormant, and resurrection of what appeared to be dead. But in the active imagining of communities and inventing of traditions there has also been the forced silencing of voices and the erasure of inconvenient memories. In the transition from multinational empires to more homogeneous nation-states, those serving the "progressive" development of nation-making and modernization have transformed the demographic horrors of deportation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide into inevitable, unavoidable, even necessary civil conflicts. Consider the words of Princeton's great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, which can be read as a implied rationale for the Turkish massacres of Armenians:

          For the Turks, the Armenian movement was the deadliest of all threats. From the conquered lands of the Serbs, Bulgars, Albanians, and Greeks, they could, however, reluctantly, withdraw, abandoning distant provinces and bringing the Imperial frontier nearer home. But the Armenians, stretching across Turkey-in-Asia from the Caucasian frontier to the Mediterranean coast, lay in the very heart of the Turkish homeland -- and to renounce these lands would have meant not the truncation, but the dissolution of the Turkish state.†

          In what appears to be a cool and balanced understanding of why their Ottoman rulers would have used mass violence against a perceived Armenian danger, Lewis places the Armenians "nearer [the Turkish] home" and "in the very heart of the Turkish homeland," employing language that already assumes the legitimacy and actuality of a nation-state. In this transparent paragraph Lewis subtlely rewrites the history of Anatolia from a land in which Armenians were the earlier inhabitants into one in which they become an obstacle to the national aspirations of the Turks, who now can claim Anatolia, rather than Central Asia, as their homeland. His language employs the logic of nationalism as if it has a kind of universal relevance even in political structures that evolved out of and still worked within a contradictory logic of empire. In 1915 the Ottoman Empire was still an imperial state, albeit already long existing within an international system of powerful nation-states and an increasingly hegemonic Western conviction that the nation, however defined, was the principal source of political legitimacy. The nature of that system and its self-justifications were changing, but Lewis' reading of a notion of ethnic homogeneity as the basis for a national republic of the Kemalist type, which lay in the future, into the moment of Armenian annihilation is ahistorical and anachronistic. As he is well aware, in the last years of the empire conflicting and contradictory ideas of Turkish nationalism, some deeply racist, vied with Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islamism, and various strains of Ottomanism in an ideological contest for new ways of reformulating the state.

          The Ottoman Empire, like other great empires, can be understood as a composite state in which the metropole is distinct in some way from the periphery, which is conceived or perceived by metropolitan or peripheral actors as a relationship of justifiable or unjustifiable inequity, subordination, and/or exploitation. What might be called the "imperial paradigm" was a system in which the Turkish Sultan, by right of conquest and divine sanction, ruled over subjects of various religions and ethnicity in a structure of inequity and subordination that maintained or reinforced difference. There was no idea from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century of a single nation-state or of the various religious and cultural communities in the empire having rights that limited the power of the sultan. Each community or millet was respected as different but subordinate to the ruling Ottoman elite. Only in the nineteenth century did rival concepts of the nation and popular sovereignty, equality under the law, political participation of all citizens, and national self-determination undermine the legitimation formulas for empire. But the imperial paradigm was challenged, not only by new nationalisms of the subject peoples, but also by conflicting conceptions of empire and nation from the ruling Turkish elites. Powerful rethinking of history in the idiom of the nation had the effect of homogenizing events and processes in a single, progressive narrative so that other ways of understanding experience were lost.

          In the Ottoman Empire ideas of the nation were both borrowed from Western conceptions and reshaped by Turkish and Armenian thinkers and actors. The nation may be thought of as the modern form of "imagined" political communities that exists within a discourse that came together in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries around the notion of bounded territorial sovereignties in which the "people" provide the legitimacy to the political order.‡ Though the discourse of the nation began as an expression of state patriotism, through the nineteenth century it increasingly became ethnicized until the "national community" was understood to be a cultural community of shared language, religion, and/or other characteristics with a durable, antique past, shared kinship, common origins and narratives of progress through time. While scholars have generally accepted that nations are neither natural nor primordial but the result of hard constitutive intellectual and political work of elites and masses, among the most interesting questions to be explored is how they exist in particular understandings of history, what stories are told to make the nation appear as a stable subject moving continuously through time, fulfilling a project over many centuries of coming to self-awareness.** By the twentieth century such imagined communities were the most legitimate basis for the constitution of states, thought to be products of blood and nature, displacing dynasties and religious and class discourses -- and concurrently challenging alternative formulas for legitimation like those underpinning empires.

          It was precisely in the context of the dominant discourse of the nation in the twentieth century that once-viable imperial states became increasingly vulnerable to nationalist movements that in turn gained strength from this new sense of state legitimation, namely that states ought to represent, if not coincide, with nations. At the same time the new nationalism coexisted with the rise of notions of popular sovereignty, of democratic representation of subaltern interests, and a fundamental tension arose between inequitable imperial relationships and concepts of national democracy. Though liberal states with representative institutions, styling themselves as democracies, could (and were) effective imperial powers in the great overseas empires of Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, the great contiguous empires of eastern Europe and the Middle East resisted democratization that would have undermined the right to rule of the dominant imperial elite and the very hierarchical and inequitable relationship between metropole and periphery in the empire. While empires were among the most ubiquitous and long-lived polities in premodern history, they had operated within a different legitimating paradigm. The powerful combination of nationalism and democracy proved fatal to their continued existence in late modern times.

          Within the discourse of the nation two kinds of arguments are made to justify a people's claim to a piece of the earth's territory: an historical argument of prior settlement, the idea of an original people; or an argument of demographic dominance, the idea that a majority's claim has precedence over those of minorities. The fact that Armenians after 2500 years in eastern Anatolia had become a minority in the overall population, and the Ottoman Turks who through conquest and assimilation over 500 years in the region had become the dominant population (and, along with other Islamic peoples, most importantly the Kurds, a majority), powerfully underscored Turkish claims to the territory. In the case of the Armenians only the first claim, that they were the original settlers of the region, legitimized their claim to Anatolia as homeland. Armenian nationalists made such a claim in the late nineteenth century, and Turkish nationalists responded. Both of these claims, which had no particular meaning in the older imperial paradigm, resonated within a concept of the nation-state in which the "people," however constituted, become the source of legitimacy.

The Imperial State and its Armenian Subjects

          In an insightful article Aron Rodrique warns against reading the whole Ottoman experience in the light of the "modern period where the West becomes a referent" and "when European powers became more directly dominant and threatening."†† He suggests that, firstly, Islam in its historical variation must be de-essentialized and that no easy deductions be made from the dhimma, the pact of toleration of non-Muslims living under Islam, to the practices of the Ottoman Empire throughout its entire existence. Secondly, that in the early modern period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, "a society existed...where 'difference' instead of 'sameness' was paramount," and there was almost no desire on the part of political leaders to transform difference into sameness.‡‡ The Ottoman political world was distinct from the Western Enlightenment public sphere of a value-neutral, universalistic ideal in which what is shared is highlighted and the particular, that which is different, becomes a problem to be resolved. Like Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis in their ground-breaking collection on the non-Muslims of Ottoman Anatolia§§,  Rodrique emphasizes that in the early Ottoman centuries discrimination did not necessarily mean persecution. Difference was seen as normal and normative, something natural to be accepted. "Persecution of difference," he writes, "was not really acceptable. Since Ottoman rulers did not like social disorder, they attempted to fix or freeze the particular, but they did not change it."*** While distinguishing the earlier centuries, where toleration and discrimination were largely free from persecution, from the nineteenth century, Rodrique carefully treads the fine line between romanticizing Ottoman practices and reading the earlier experience in light of the later nationalist conceptualizations. Yet in emphasizing the element of tolerance, he focuses less on the effects of discriminatory power on non-Muslims. For Armenian scribes the symbiosis of early Ottoman society was far less benign for the gavur (the unbeliever) than for the Muslims, and clerical writers, like Manuel of Garahisar, noted that Armenians had to endure the oppressive rule of the Turks "because of [our] immense sins."††† The Armenian Church, itself institutionally tied into the Ottoman system of governance, preached acceptance of the fate befallen the Armenians, deference toward their rulers and social betters, both Muslim and Armenian, and opposed rebellion of any kind. Yet even as they legitimized the system in which their people lived, they remained aware of the special burdens they bore.

          The key difference in early Ottoman society was religion, rather than ethnicity or language, which took on relevance only later. The millets, the various communities headed by religious leaders that were systematized only in the nineteenth century, were based on religion, rather than some idea of primal origin, language, or culture. The state ruled over the millets indirectly and interfered little, delegating much authority to the religious head of the millet. Certainly no effort was made to break down the boundaries of these communities and homogenize the population of the empire, or even Anatolia, around a single identity. There was no "making of Ottomans" or turning "peasants into Turks" in the Ottoman Empire, as there was to a degree in the absolute monarchies of Western Europe or the French state after the revolution of 1789. There was also no idea until the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century of equality under the law, a notion of equal citizenship for all members of Ottoman society.

          Armenians in Anatolia were aware that they were a subject people, that the ruling elite was Turkish and Islamic, and that even their compatriots who succeeded in society and the state had to develop a particular Ottoman cultural competence to advance. Difference was not simply horizontal but vertical as well. It was the non-Muslim who dismounted from his horse when a Muslim approached. As I have written elsewhere,

          Armenians and Turks coexisted in an unequal relationship, one of subordination and superordination, with the Muslims on top and the non-Muslims below. The sheer power and confidence of the ruling Muslims worked for centuries to maintain in the Armenians a pattern of personal and social behavior manifested in submissiveness, passivity, deference to authority, and the need to act in calculatedly devious and disguised ways. It was this deferential behavior that earned the Armenians the title "loyal millet" in an age when the Greeks and Slavs of the empire were striving to emancipate themselves through revolutionary action. The Armenians in contrast worked within the Ottoman system and accepted the burdens of Muslim administration without much protest until the second half of the nineteenth century.‡‡‡

          For many Armenian writers of the last two centuries the whole history of the Armenians is one of the emerging nation, and earlier forms of collective identity are usually understood in terms of that nation. Yet if one takes seriously what Eric J. Hobsbawm would call a "protonationalist" sense of community, earlier notions of community should not be conflated with more modern notions. From the texts of the fifth century it is evident that Armenians conceived of themselves as a unique Christian community, with their own church set apart from the Constantinople-centered church. For over a millennium Armenia was not a single state; Armenian dynasties fought one another, allied with Arabs, Greeks, Turks, or Persians at times against other Armenian principalities. What linked this divided and dispersed people was a religious and linguistic affiliation rather than political ties. Yet a memory of Armenian political existence and of former glories was maintained by clerical scribes in a textual tradition envied and emulated by Armenia's neighbors like the Georgians. The literary tradition became much more fragmented in the period after the Seljuk, Mongol, and Ottoman invasions and settlements, and when the last Armenian state of consequence fell in 1375, the Church remained as the principal focus of identification and preservation.

          In the early modern period energetic Church leaders attempted sporadically to interest Western capitals in a crusade to liberate Armenians from their Islamic rulers, the Ottomans and the Persians, but with almost no results. Those sporadic Church-led diplomatic missions to Rome, the courts of the German states, France, and Russia have been integrated into a narrative of a "national-liberation movement" by later writers, and in Soviet Armenian historiography the efforts by the meliks of Karabakh or the self-appointed liberator Israel Ori have been fashioned into a "Russian orientation" that served as justification for the eventual tsarist conquest of eastern (Persian) Armenia and the inclusion of Caucasian Armenia within the Soviet Union. Most of the "liberationist" activity came from diaspora Armenians, merchants in Persia, Europe, and Madras, India, interested in the restoration of an Armenian state. The group of merchant activists in Madras wrote political tracts that shifted the blame for the Armenian condition from their own sinful past onto the despotism of foreign rulers. The adventurer Joseph Emin, who travelled widely to interest Europeans in the Armenian cause, indicted the Armenian clergy for their message of passive acceptance of Muslim rule. But what is often not emphasized in the histories of these efforts is their fragmentary nature, the fragility or absence of connection between them, and the different motivations and ambitions of the actors who have been homogenized into a single, coherent movement.

          As a dispersed people living in three contiguous empires and scattered even further abroad by their mercantile interests, Armenians were much more divided than united, separated by politics, distance, dialects, and class differences. Linked primarily by religion and the Church, which nurtured a sense of a lost glorious past and ancient statehood, Armenians before the nineteenth century were a loose ethnoreligious community with no overwhelming, coherent sense of being a nation in the modern sense. Their clerical and merchant leadership in the Ottoman Empire preached the fostering of Armenian religiosity, remembrance of past glory, but enlightenment within the status quo, and deference to the rulers that God had imposed upon them. The literary and cultural revivalists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, particularly the Mekhitarist monks of Venice, saw themselves as cultivating the national spirit through promotion of the language. Father Ghevond Alishan, who himself had never been to historic Armenia, wrote elegically about the landscape in which the ruins of ancient churches were the inspiration for a revived national feeling. But even as they promoted enlightenment and borrowed the idiom of the nation from the West, the generation of religious teachers rejected the more radical and democratic aspects of Western and East European nationalism that they observed.

          For Ottoman Armenians the great divide in the millet was between the community in Constantinople and the bulk of Armenians, largely peasants and petty craftsmen, living in the eastern provinces. While the wealthy Armenians of the capital both influenced the patriarch and controlled the National Assembly that dealt with certain aspects of millet affairs, the provinces remained radically underrepresented. A frequent complaint from the east was that Constantinople Armenians, as the leaders of the community, were not fulfilling their obligation to care for the lower orders. This alienation from the center was highlighted by the work of bishop Mkrtich Khrimian, known widely as hairik (Little Father), in Van, the most Armenian of the towns of eastern Anatolia. Khrimian edited a journal, Ardziv Vaspurakani (The Eagle of Vaspurakan [the medieval Armenian name for the Van region]), in 1858, exposed the suffering of his parishioners, and spoke vaguely of Armenian self-defense. In 1869-1873 he served as Patriarch of Constantinople and came into conflict with the more conservative forces among the capital's Armenians when he attempted to increase provincial representation in the National Assembly. The activist priest sent a report in 1871 to the Porte enumerating the abuses of Armenians by provincial authorities. His recommendation, in line with much of the thrust of the Tanzimat reforms, was to strengthen the role of the central authorities in the provinces, to rationalize the administration of justice, and to guarantee equality of treatment and tolerance of religious practices. Though he was supported by prominent liberal Armenians, like Grigor Otian, who earlier had been an advisor to Midhat Pasha and was president of the National Assembly, Khrimian could overcome neither the Ottoman government's unwillingness to carry out reforms in the provinces nor the conservative Armenians indifference toward the provincial Armenians. In 1873 he resigned as Patriarch.

          Appropriately for a dispersed people faced by three imperial authorities, the nationalism of many Armenian thinkers was not primarily territorial. Neither the clergy nor the powerful conservatives in the capital, who benefitted from their privileged positions within Ottoman society and close to the state, were interested in creating a territorial nation. More broadly, Armenian leaders in Turkey hoped for reform from above and spoke of their "benevolent government." Until the end of the 1870s the sense of the nation for Ottoman Armenians was still largely of an ethnoreligious community that needed to work within the context of the empire to improve its difficult position. Encouraged by the Tanzimat reformers and the theorists of Ottomanism, liberal Armenians petitioned and pressured the Porte and tried occasionally to enlist foreign support for reform.

          The situation changed radically with the coming to power of Abdul Hamid II (1876-1909), his abrogation of the Ottoman Constitution in 1876, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and the turn toward repression of the Armenians. As an Armenian national discourse took shape, the more liberal and radical elements focused on the eastern provinces and the poverty and oppression suffered by the Armenian peasantry. A sense of a "fatherland" (hairenik) developed among Armenian writers, and a distinction was drawn between azgasirutiun (love of nation), which heightened the sense of a cultural nation beyond a specific territory, and hairenasirutiun (love of fatherland), with emphasis on the people in Armenia (haiastantsiner). Men like Bishop Garegin Srvantstiants, who had long complained about the distance of Constantinople Armenians from the "fatherland," and Arsen Tokhmakhian, who later turned to revolution, celebrated the Armenians of historic Armenians who had "preserved the faith and suffered because of it."§§§  Imbued with a deeply populist nationalism, centered on the peasants of eastern Anatolia, Armenian intellectuals travelled as teachers to the east in an effort characterized as depi Haiastan (To Armenia). The government responded by removing prominent teachers, like Mkrtich Portukalian in Van and Martiros Sareyan in Mush, from their home provinces and exiling Khrimian to Jerusalem.

          Increasingly Turkish authorities interpreted any manifestation of cultural revival or resistance, however individual or local, as an act of national rebellion. The government restricted the powers of the Armenian National Assembly , accepting only takrirs (petitions) dealing with churches and monasteries. The state prohibited all forms of national expression, banning the word Haiastan (Armenia in Armenian) in print and forbidding the sale and possession of pictures of the last Armenian king, Levon V, who had lost his throne in 1375. Instead of being the "loyal millet," Turkish officials and intellectuals began to look upon Armenians as unruly, subversive, alien elements who consorted with foreign powers. The conservative Muslim clergy, long alienated by the Frenchified reformist bureaucrats among the Turks, were offended by the behavior and wealth of the most visible Armenians, those merchants who lived in the capital, particularly lived in Europeanized districts like Galata, and affected Western manners or even took foreign citizenship.

          Though the overwhelming majority of Armenian leaders wished to work within the Ottoman system, on a number of discrete occasions they made overtures to the Russians and the British. In 1872 merchants in Van requested that the Russian government send a consul to their city to guarantee "the safety of trade routes and protection of religion, lives, and goods of the down-trodden Chrisitian people of Vaspurakan."**** Six years later, in the aftermath of the war with Russia, the Patriarch Nerses Varjabedian made contact with the Russians at San Stefano and sent Khrimian to Berlin to plead the Armenian case before the Great Powers. When the Russians were forced by Europe to retreat from their demands on Turkey, the Patriarch attempted to interpret the new role taken by Britain in the most positive light.

          The self-narration by Armenian nationalists of the Armenian experience in the Ottoman Empire was of a people conquered by foreign invaders, made captive in their own ancient land, oppressed by unjust and cruel rulers, yet all the while maintaining their essential Armenian religious culture and yearning to be free. As with other nationalist constructions, Armenian writers emphasized the continuity of the national self moving through time, overcoming adversities, martyred for the faith, victimized by a government imposed upon them. As historians and novelists melded together discrete and disjointed events into a coherent story that was almost always about the nation, they argued that the empire was an illegitimate and archaic polity that prevented the full expression of the nation's aspirations. Writers translated the defense of Christianity in the fifth century by Vartan Mamikonian against the Persians into a defense of nation and fatherland, so that the story was less about religious martyrdom and salvation after death and more about national resurrection in this life. Resistance by the local Armenians (sometimes in alliance with non-Armenians!) of Zeitun in Cilicia to protect tax exemptions granted more than 200 years earlier by the seventeenth-century Sultan Murad IV were scripted in a more modern idiom of rights and national oppression. The local was turned into the all-national. Social bandits and brigands, like Avo near Van or Arabo and Micho near Taron, became rebels and freedom-fighters.†††† The very creation of a coherent national narrative that effaced the complexities of interethnic coexistence within the empire and stigmatized the kind of cosmopolitan adjustment to imperial life in which the Armenian merchants had flourished and Armenian Christianity had maintained its authority reinforced the sense of difference between Turks and Armenians. Distance between peoples increased; borders between them hardened; and sharing in the commonalities of Ottoman culture and life became suspect on both sides. By the late nineteenth century both the nationalists in their narration of the past and present, and the defenders of the Ottoman state interpreted events through the prism of the nation.

          While Armenian clerics taught submission and deference and often allied with state authorities to persecute those modernizing intellectuals who attempted to bring Western enlightenment to young Armenians, the despotic Abdul Hamid II brought the reform period of the Tanzimat to an end and eliminated moderate and liberal alternatives within the system. By the 1880s a significant minority of Armenians conceived of revolution as the only means to protect and promote the Armenians. A new idea of the Armenian nation as secular, cultural, and based on language as well as shared history challenged the older clerical understanding of Armenians as an ethnoreligious community centered on faith and membership in the Armenian Apostolic Church. Faced by what they saw as the imminent danger of national disintegration, the Armenian radicals turned toward self-defense, the formation of revolutionary political parties, and political actions that would encourage Western or Russian intervention into Ottoman affairs. For the young nationalists revolution was the "logical conclusion" of the impossibility of significant reforms coming from the state.‡‡‡‡

          Small self-defense circles formed in the Armenian provincal communities in the 1880s --among them, Bashtban Hairenyats in Erzerum in 1881-1882 and Sev Khach in Van in 1882. Young people were inspired by Portugalian's Armenia published in Marseilles in 1885, which called for Armenian independence, and two small parties, the Armenakans in Van and the Hnchaks, founded in Geneva, were influenced by his message. The movement involved dozens, sometimes hundreds of people in small, scattered groups. But the national revolutionary intellectuals, many of them from Russian Transcaucasia and influenced by Russian populism, found it extremely difficult to activate the Ottoman Armenian peasantry, their chosen constituency.§§§§ Abdul Hamid's alliance with Kurdish notables and the formation of the Hamidiye regiments in the eastern provinces made a bad situation worse for the Armenians. By the time a third -- and eventually dominant -- Armenian revolutionary party, the Hai Heghapoghakan Dashnaktsutiun, emerged in the 1890s, rather than equal subjects in an Ottoman state, Armenians had become the double victims of state authorities and local Kurdish lords. Rather than reform, repression became the government's preferred strategy for maintaining the decaying imperial arrangement.

          In 1894 clashes between Kurds and Armenians in Sassun led to the intervention of state troops and the killing of hundreds of Armenians. This violence would later be read by Armenians as the first stage of a series of massacres that would culminate in the genocide of 1915. But the massacres in eastern Anatolia in 1894-1896 can be seen as part of an effort by Abdul Hamid II to restore the old equilibrium in interethnic relations, in which the subject peoples accepted with little overt questioning the dominance of the Ottoman Muslim eleite. Yet the sultan's own policies of centralization and bureaucratization, as well as his strategic alliance with Muslim Kurds against Christian Armenians, did as much (if not more) to undermine the customary system of imperial rule as did the emerging revisioning of nationality borrowed from the West.

          The Sultan defended his actions to the British as necessary for maintaining order:

          His Imperial Majesty treated the Armenians with justice and moderation, and, as long as they behaved properly, all toleration would be shown to them, but he had given orders that when they took to revolt or to brigandage the authorities were to deal with them as they dealt with the authorities.*****

          The Sultan's language would be repeated by other officials and would echo in the justifications of the Young Turks and the apologist historians who would later attempt to reconceive of state-initiated massacres as "necessary," figments of Armenian imagination, or a Muslim-Christian civil war. Yet the continuity between events should not obscure the difference between Abdul Hamid's essentially conservative and restorationist policy toward unruly subjects and the Young Turks' far more revolutionary attempt to remove surgically a major irritant. Though images of Armenians as subversive and alien, and habits of violence as a means to keep order, deeply affected Ottoman mentalities and practices, the subsequent Young Turk policy of systematic deportation and the attendant murder of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915 were not simply a continuation of earlier policies but a fundamentally more radical program of restructuring the empire in line with the hybrid ideological formulations then in play.

          The revolutionary nationalism of the Armenian committees and parties was exaggerated by both the revolutionaries themselves and by their opponents. While they struggled to convince villagers of the "Armenian cause," and threatened businessmen who refused to contribute to their movement, the Armenian nationalists were forced to rely on a handful of activists, many from Persia and Russia. Over time they succeeded in reshaping the understanding of the Armenian position in the empire. Their reading of the Armenians' fate was more broadly accepted. Repression of revolutionary demonstrations in Istanbul or of peasants in the mid-1890s seemed to confirm the analysis of the nationalists. In the period after 1908 the Armenians elected nationalists to the Ottoman Parliament, where they collaborated with (and competed with) the Young Turks. Resented by the more conservative clerical and merchant leaders in Constantinople, the revolutionary nationalists became the de facto leaders of a nation that they had helped to create through their teaching, writing, and sacrifice.

From Ottomanism to Nationalism

          Notions of nation are intimately intertwined with notions of the modern, and in the modernization paradigm the "rise" of nationalism and a necessary, if not inevitable, development of the nation is involved in the progressive transition from "traditional" society to modern. Western-language writing on the late Ottoman period has been heavily influenced by the theories and language of modernization that have constructed a teleological narrative leading to national revolution. Indeed, Kemalist Turkey has been an exemplar in the literature of a relatively-successful process of modernization, with a Western-style political system, a secularized culture, and capitalist economic development. Part of the modernization process in the Turkish case was the redefinition of the political community from a multinational one in which Islam gave authority to the rulers to one based on an ethnically homogeneous nation that would frequently be defined in terms of "race." "The Turkish revolution," writes S. N. Eisenstadt, "completely rejected the religious basis of legitimation and attempted instead to develop a secular national one as the major ideological parameter of the new collectivity."†††††

          The Turkish revolutionary elite, including those that emerged from the Young Turk committees to lead the Kemalist movement, grew out of an intellectual milieu in the last decades of the nineteenth century that exalted science, rejected religion, and borrowed freely from Western sociology in an effort to overthrow the autocracy of Abdul Hamid II and to preserve the Ottoman state. Neither liberals nor constitutionalists, the Young Turks were etatists who saw themselves as continuing the work of the Tanzimat reformers -- Mustafa Reshid Rasha, Mustafa Fazil Pasha, Midhat Pasha -- and the work of the Young Ottomans. According to Sukru Hanioglu, the historian of the early phase of the movement, "The Young Turk movement was unquestionably a link in the chain of the Ottoman modernization movement as well as representing the modernist wing of the Ottoman bureaucracy."‡‡‡‡‡ Influenced by the ideas of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Ludwig Buchner, even the phrenology of Gustave Le Bon (who "proved" that intellectuals have larger craniums by doing research in Parisian millinery shops), "the Young Turk ideology was originally 'scientific,' materialist, social Darwinist, elitist, and vehemently antireligious; it did not favor representative government."§§§§§

          Most analysts argue that there was a shift in the Young Turk movement from an Ottomanist orientation, in which emphasis was on equality among the millets within a multinational society that continued to recognize difference, to a more nationalist position in which the superiority of the ethnic Turks (which was implicit in Ottomanism itself) and their privileged position within the state was more explicitly underlined. Earlier, Ottoman westernizers had hoped to secure western technology without succumbing to western culture, somehow to preserve Islam but make the empire technologically and militarily competitive with the West. Reform had always come from above, from westernizing statemen and bureaucrats, a response to a sense that the empire had to change or collapse. Within Ottoman society the Muslims were the least prepared to adopt western ways. Rather, there was uneven development of the millets, and, as Hanioglu proposes, "superwesternization in the Ottoman capital was led by non-Muslim inhabitants and followed by Muslims."****** I have argued elsewhere that the visibility of better-off Armenians in the capital and towns appeared as an intolerable reversal of the traditional Muslim-dhimmi hierarchy that, in turn, increased resentments toward Christians.

          The social hostility generated by the Muslims' inferior status in the industrial and commercial world targeted Armenians in particular as those who were Ottoman but suspiciously sympathetic to Europeans....

          Whatever resentments the poor peasant population of eastern Anatolia may have felt toward the people in towns -- the places where they received low prices for their produce, where they felt their social inferiority most acutely, where they were alien to and unwanted by the better-dressed people -- were easily transferred to the Armenians.††††††

          If one thinks of nationalism as the primary identification with the nation, rather than with supranational communities, like religion or empire, or subnational communities, like tribes, clans, or regions, it can be argued that nationalism was quite weak among Turks in the late Ottoman Empire. The word "Turk," which referred to the lower classes of rural Anatolia, was in the nineteenth century contrasted to "Ottoman," a term usually reserved for the ruling elite. But at the turn of the century Young Turk nationalists, like Ahmed Riza began to substitute Turk for Ottoman.‡‡‡‡‡‡ Ottomanist views were dominant among the first generation of Young Turks, and attempts were made by both Young Turks and Armenian revolutionaries to join in a common struggle. After Damad Mahmud Pasha, brother-in-law of Abdul Hamid, fled to Europe with his two sons, he made an agreement with the Dashnaks and published an open letter urging joint action. The Dashnak newspaper, Droshak, wrote: "Dashnaktsutiun would not accept the re-establishment of the Constitution of Midhat as a solution of the Turkish problem, but look to a democratic federative policy as the way out." The Armenian party "would fortify the Young Turks if first it received a guarantee that the situation of the peoples would be bettered."§§§§§§ The more liberal Young Turks believed that an alliance with the Armenians would reap a favorable response in Western Europe. But the dual issue of an alliance with the Armenians and inviting European intervention to secure the end of autocracy in the empire led to a major split among the Young Turks. This incident illuminates the ultimately unresolved tension among Young Turk activists between their ecumenical Ottomanist impulses and the growing influence of an exclusivist Turkish nationalism.

          On February 4, 1902, the First Congress of the Ottoman Opposition opened in Paris. The nationalist minority at the Congress, led by Ahmed Riza categorically rejected foreign intervention and special arrangements for the Armenians in the six eastern Anatolian vilayets, while the majority led by Sabahaddin Bey favored such concessions as a basis for an Armenian-Turkish alliance. When the majority came out in favor of mediation by the Great Powers to implement the treaties that the absolutist regime refused to execute, the minority essentially broke with the rest of the movement. Efforts by the majority to appease the minority failed. The Armenian delegates submitted a declaration that the Armenian committees were ready to collaborate with the Ottoman liberals to transform the present regime; that outside of common action, the committees would continue their own efforts with the understanding that their actions are directed against the present regime and not against "the unity and the organic existence of Turkey;" and that their particular actions will be directed toward implementation of Article 61 of the Treaty of Berlin and the Memorandum of May 11, 1895 and its annex.*******

          Tensions and suspicions were high between the Armenians and the Turkish opposition, and the Armenians could conceive of collaboration only with the guarantee of special reforms in the east guaranteed by Europe. For many Turks this was an outrageous demand. As Ismail Kemal, a member of the majority, put it: "I recognize you not as an independent element but as Ottomans. You have rights as Ottomans. [However,] you do not have the right to bargain with us and make offers as if you were [representatives of a] state."††††††† After this statement, the Armenians walked out of the congress. Only later, after the Armenians sent a letter to Sabahaddin Bey stating that they "were ready to participate in all efforts to overthrow the present regime" and that "they did not oppose the establishment of a constitutional central administration that would execute" special reforms for the six provinces, was a compromise reached between the majority and the Armenians.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ The Young Turks even agreed that an Armenian was to sit on their central committee. Ominously for the Armenians, however, the minority at the Congress actually represented a powerful, even dominant tendency, within the Young Turk movement that controlled most of the committees and the newspapers.

          In the years after the Paris Congress a Turkish nationalism based on linguistic ties among Turkic peoples and notions of a common race grew among Turkic intellectuals, like Yusuf Akcura, outside of the Ottoman Empire and influenced those within. After the 1908 coup that brought the Young Turks to power, a number of small nationalist organizations were formed that put out occasional newspapers or journals -- Turk Dernegi, Genc Kalemler, Turk Yurdu, and Turk Ocagi. But ideas of a Turkish nation were not limited to Ottoman Turks or Anatolian Turks. They were intimately connected to a Pan-Turkic ideal that celebrated the ties between all the Turkic peoples, stretching from Anatolia through the Caucasus and Central Asia. This was expressed most vividly in Ziya Gokalp's famous poem "Turan:"

          The fatherland for Turks is not Turkey, nor yet Turkestan, The fatherland is a vast and eternal land: Turan!

          Many of the Turanists argued for a purified Ottoman Turkish language, freed of Arabic and Persian words, that would serve as the language of this Turkic nation and also serve as the official language for the non-Turkic peoples of the empire, those that made up the Ottoman millet. The Young Turk government passed resolutions making Turkish the official language of the empire, requiring all state correspondence to be carried on in Turkish, and establishing Turkish as the language for teaching in elementary and higher education, with local languages to be taught in secondary schools.

          Turkish nationalism, Pan-Turanism, Pan-Islam, and Ottomanism were all part of a complex, confusing discussion among Turkish intellectuals about the future of the Ottoman state and the "nation." The supranational ideal of Ottomanism that posited a multinational empire-state in which different peoples were treated equally never sat comfortably with the growing emphasis on Turkish language and Turkism. The nationalists criticized the thrust of the Tanzimat reforms and the position of the Ottomanists. Gokalp tried to clarify the differences:

          If the aim of Ottomanism (Osmanlilik) was a state, all the subjects would actually be members of this state. But if the aim was to construct a new nation whose language was the Ottoman language (Osmanlica), the new nation would be a Turkish nation, since the Ottoman language was no other than Turkish.§§§§§§§

          The Young Turk government moved steadily away from Ottomanism toward Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turanism. After the coup of 1913 and in the first years of the World War, a more virulent form of expansionist nationalism inspired the triumvirate that now governed the empire. As Feroz Ahmad writes: Pan-Turanism, like Pan-Islam, was an expansionist ideoogy which suited the mood of the Young Turks, then in full retreat at the opposite front [in Europe].... Turkish nationalism, centered around the Turks in Anatolia, was in the process of development in 1914. It was to emerge out of the defeats of in World War I, only after Pan-Turanism and Pan-Islam had proved to be mere dreams.********

          The shift toward nationalism and Pan-Turanian expansionism presented the Armenian political leadership with an extraordinarily difficult choice -- remaining in alliance with the Young Turks or breaking decisively with the government. The Dashnaktsutiun decided to continue working with the Young Turks, while other groups, notably the Hnchaks, rejected collaboration. When war broke out in 1914, the Ottoman Dashnaks pledged to fight for the empire and Ottoman Armenians joined the Ottoman army, while across the border Russian Armenians volunteered for the tsarist army. The Young Turk leaders' suspicions about Armenians as subversives intensified with the initial defeats of the Ottomans in the Sarikamish campaign of the winter of 1914. In the context of imminent collapse of the empire in 1915, with the Russians threatening in the east and the Australians and British landing at Gallipoli, the Ottoman government decided to embark on a radical solution of the the Armenian problem. Beginning in the first months of 1915 they demobilized Armenian soldiers from the Ottoman Army, at first organizing them into work brigades and then forcing them to dig their own graves before being shot. As rumors spread of Turkish violence against Armenian villagers, Armenians in Van organized to protect themselves in April. Their activity was painted as a revolutionary uprising, and fighting broke out in the streets. The advancing Russians took the city, but those Armenians who lived behind Turkish lines now became the targets of a massive campaign to remove them from the region. The argument often employed by Turkish leaders to the Western and German diplomats who inquired and protested against the treatment of the Armenians was that the precarious condition of the empire and the requirements of self-defense of the state justified the repression of "rebellion." One of the Young Turk triumvirs, Talaat Pasha, revealed in a telling interview with the American ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, the complex of reasons that influenced the decision to eliminate Anatolian Armenians.

          "I have asked you to come to-day," began Talaat, "so that I can explain our position on the whole Armenian subject. We base our objections to the Armenians on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies."††††††††

          Though some Armenian historians have argued that the Genocide was the final stage in a long history of Turkish oppression and massacre of Armenians, with the implication that mass murder was part of a widespread and popular exterminationist mentality, my own sense is that the intensifying hostility toward Armenians need not have reached the proportions of a genocide, save for the initiation and encouragement of the state in the context of war. Rather than a long-planned and carefully orchestrated program of extermination, the Armenian Genocide was more a vengeful and panicky act of suppression that turned into a opportunistic policy to rid Anatolia of Armenians once and for all, eliminate the wedge that they provided for foreign intervention in the region, and open the way for the fantastic dreams of a Turanian empire. When the archives are opened, and if they have not been cleansed of incriminating documents, I would not be surprised to find not a single decision to deport the Armenians but a series of decisions, one more radical than the other, that fed on each other until demobilization and sporadic executions and repressions turned inexorably into a massive program of physical extermination.

          Nationalism at the end of the Ottoman period reinforced and essentialized differences between the peoples of the empire. Religious distinctions were transmuted into national and racial differences, far more indelible and immutable than religion, by both the Armenians and the Turks. At the same time economic competition in a hard economic environment and struggles among Turks, Kurds, and Armenians over the limited resource of land intensified interethnic tensions. Stereotypes on both sides had long existed, but changes in relative status, particularly the perceived reversal of the Muslim-dhimmi hierarchy, created the kinds of fear and anxiety about the future than political entrepreneurs could exploit. Ultimately the launching of genocidal violence in 1915 came, not from the accumulating tensions, but from the initiative of the state. When the Young Turk government decided to demobilize Armenian soldiers, attack the villages around Van and then the city itself, arrest Armenian intellectuals and parliamentarians in Istanbul (April 24, 1915), and order the deportations of their Armenian subjects, the state removed all legal restraints on violence toward Armenians, indeed, encouraged theft and murder, punished those who protected the Armenians, and created a cycle of violence that grew from the local to the whole of eastern and central Anatolia. Again, here too, Talaat is as effective a witness as the victims of his crimes. In posthumously published memoirs he states:

          The Porte, acting under the same obligation, and wishing to secure the safety of its army and its citizens, took energetic measures to check these uprisings. The deportation of the Armenians was one of these preventive measures.

          I admit also that the deportation was not carried out lawfully everywhere. In some places unlawful acts were committed. The already existing hatred among the Armenians and Mohammedans, intensified by the barbarous activities of the former, had created many tragic consequences. some of the officials abused their authority, and in many places people took preventive measures into their own hands and innocent people were molested. I confess it. I confess, also, that the duty of the Government was to prevent these abuses and atrocities, or at least to hunt down and punish their perpetrators severely. In many places, where the property and goods of the deported peole were looted, and the Armenians molested, we did arrest those who were responsible and punished them accordining to the law. I confess, however, that we ought to have acted more sternly, opened up a general investigation for the purpose of finding out all the promoters and looters and punished them severely....

          The Turkish elements here referred to were shortsighted, fanatical, and yet sincere in their belief. The public encouraged them, and they had the general approval behind them. They were numerous and strong....

          Their open and immediate punishment would have aroused great discontent among the people, who favored their acts. An endeavor to arrest and to punish all those promoters would have created anarchy in Anatolia at a time when we greatly needed unity. It would have been dangerous to divide the nation into two camps, when we needed strength to fight outside enemies.‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

          There is much we yet need to learn about the ordering and organization by the center of the Genocide, but the witnesses -- diplomats, soldiers, and missionaries -- and the victims have left a documentary record of the genocidal effects of the state's policies that only the most callous and deceitful of people can deny.

          By the end of the war ninety percent of Ottoman Armenians were gone, killed, deported to the deserts of Syria, or refugees in the Caucasus or Middle East. The number of dead is staggering -- somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 killed in the more conservative estimates -- and the event shocked European and American opinion. Armenians were now seen as historic victims, the "starving Armenians," pitiful refugees to be fed and protected by the West. In the 1930s writers spoke of the Armenian "holocaust," and in the early 1940s when he invented the word "genocide," Raphael Lemkin applied it to two twentieth-century events -- the Turkish deportation and massacres of the Armenians in 1915 and the German annihilation of Europe's Jews.

          Sadly for Armenians, the Genocide has been eliminated from the story of the end of the Ottoman Empire. The events of 1915 have fallen into a "memory hole" between the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and the Kemalist Revolution of 1919-1922. Nationalist readings and those by modernization theorists have, without confronting it, transformed an act of mass murder into a foundational moment of nation-building. Genocide has been covered over by the ground floor of the Kemalist republic. But even as the heirs of Kemal try to repress new claimants to eastern Anatolia, the Kurdish national movement, they are foced to listen to the voices of those who refuse to remain quiet, the descendents of those Armenians who could not leave Anatolia. History is the spectre that haunts the world today. Memory preserves the revenge of the past. And, as the experience of many former empires and their national successor states has shown, not understanding and coming to terms with the past infects the present and cripples the future.

          * At two recent conferences -- an SSRC workshop, "The End of Empire: Causes and Consequences," at the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, November 20-21, 1994, with a projected volume to be published by Westview Press; and a conference on "The Disintegration and Reconstitution of Empires: The USSR and Russia in Comparative Perspective," at the University of California, San Diego, January 10-12, 1996, with a projected volume to be published by M. E. Sharpe -- papers by distinguished scholars Serif Mardin and Dankwart Rustow dealing with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire failed to mention the deportation and massacres of the Armenians.

          † Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961; 2nd edition, 1968), p. 356.

          ‡ For discussion of the nation as "imagined community," see Benedict Anderson, Imaginated Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

          § Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86-106.

          ** See, for example, Etienne Balibar, "The Nation Form: History and Ideology," from Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 86-106; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

          †† Aron Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance in the Ottoman Empire: Interview by Nancy Reynolds," Stanford Humanities Review, V, 1 (1995), p. 82.

          ‡‡ Ibid.

          §§ Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Otoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society, Volume I: The Central Lands (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982).

          *** Rodrigue, "Difference and Tolerance," p. 85.

          ††† Mair ts'utsak' hayeren dzeragrats' matendaranin Mekhitariants' i Venetik, vol. I (Venice, 1914), p. 321; cited in Gerard Libaridian, The Ideology of Armenian Liberation. The Development of Armenian Political Movement Before the Revolutionary Movement (1639-1885) (Ph D dissertation in history, University of California, Los Angeles, 1987), p. 31.

          ‡‡‡ "Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an Understanding of the Armenian Genocide," in Ronald Grigor Suny, Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 101.

          §§§ Libaridian, The Ideology of Armenian Liberation, p. 191.

          **** Ibid, pp. 145-146.

          †††† This is the sense of much of the argumentation in Libaridian. For Armenian writers divisions among Armenians are treated in two ways: either ignored altogether, so that the nation becomes a homogeneous whole, or as an unfortunate deviance toward disunity that damaged the national cause. Libaridian, on the other hand, emphasizes class divisions among Armenians and proposes two forms of oppression on the people -- by alien and incompetent Ottoman rulers and by the exploitative and self-interested Armenian upper classes, the clergy, rich merchants and bankers. He inverts the usual treatment of the Church as the unifier and major force for preservation of Armenian culture and argues that the Church oppressed Armenians, not only through taxation and as political agents of the Porte, but through their hold on culture and education.

          ‡‡‡‡ "Logical conclusion" comes from Libaridian.

          §§§§ See Ronald Grigor Suny, "Populism, Nationalism, and Marxism among Russia's Armenians," in Looking Toward Ararat, pp. 63-78.

          ***** Letter of Sir P. Currie to the Earl of Kimberley, Great Britain, Foreign Office, Turkey, no. 1 (1895), (Part I) Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey, Part I. Events at Sassoon, and Commission of Inquiry at Moush (London, 1895), pp. 20-21.

          ††††† S. N. Eisenstadt, "The Kemalist Regime and Modernization: Some Comparative and Analytical Remarks," in Jacob M. Landau, Ataturk and the Modernization of Turkey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), p. 9.

          ‡‡‡‡‡ M. Sukru Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 17.

          §§§§§ Ibid., p. 32.

          ****** Ibid., p. 10.

          †††††† Suny, Looking Toward Ararat, pp. 107, 108.

          ‡‡‡‡‡‡ Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition, p. 216. This occurred around 1902 at the time of the Congress of Ottoman Oppositionists in Paris.

          §§§§§§ Ibid., p. 150.

          ******* Ibid., p. 193. "This text," writes Hanioglu, "reveals how antithetical the vantage point of the members of the Armenian committees was to the rest of the movement and how they had divorced themselves from the notion of 'liberaux Ottomans' by emphasizing their willingness to work with them." (193) In my own reading, this Armenian declaration makes a clarification, which Sabahaddin Bey then declared had been accepted by the majority -- that the clauses of the treaties signed by the Sublime Porte must be implemented.

          ††††††† Ibid., p. 195.

          ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Ibid., p. 197.

          §§§§§§§ Cited in Masami Arai, Turkish Nationalism in the Young Turk Era (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), p. 61.

          ******** Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 154-155.

          †††††††† Henry Morgenthau, Ambassador Morgenthau's Story (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Page, 1918), pp. 336-337.

          ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Talaat Pasha, "Posthumous Memoirs of Talaat Pahsa," Current History, XV, 1 (October 1921), p. 295.

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