Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia In Modern History

304 Pages·1993·5.06 MB·English

by  Ronald Grigor Suny

LOOKING
TOWARD
ARARAT
Republic of Armenia
LOOKING
TOWARD
ARARAT
A R M E N IA IN
M O D E R N H IS T O R Y
Ronald Grigor Suny
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
© 1993 by Ronald Grigor Suny
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American
University Presses* Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only
exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicadon Data
Suny, Ronald Grigor.
Looking toward Ararat : Armenia in modern history / Ronald Grigor
Suny.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-253-35583-4 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-253-20773-8
(paper : alk. paper)
1. Armenia (Republic)—History. 2. Armenia (Republic)—History—
Autonomy and independence movements. I. Title.
DK687.S86 1993
956.6*2—dc20 92-19420
2 3 4 5 6 03 02 01 00 99
To my wife, Armena Marderosian,
and my daughters,
Sevan Siranoush Suni and
Anoush Tamar Suni

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction: From National Character to National
Tradition 1
PART ONE
IMAGINING ARMENIA
1 Armenia and Its Rulers 15
2 Images of the Armenians in the Russian Empire 31
3 The Emergence of the Armenian Patriotic
Intelligentsia in Russia 52
4 Populism, Nationalism, and Marxism among
Russia’s Armenians 63
5 Labor and Socialism among Armenians in
Transcaucasia 79
6 Rethinking the Unthinkable: Toward an
Understanding of the Armenian Genocide 94
PART TWO
STATE, NATION, DIASPORA
7 Armenia and the Russian Revolution 119
8 Building a Socialist Nation 133
9 Stalin and the Armenians 149
viii Contents
10 Return to Ararat: Armenia in the Cold War 162
11 The New Nationalism in Armenia 178
12 Nationalism and Democracy: The Case of
Karabagh 192
13 Looking toward Ararat: The Diaspora and the
“Homeland” 213
14 Armenia on the Road to Independence, Again 231
Notes 247
Bibliography of Books and Articles in Western
Languages on Modern Armenian History 274
Index 282
Preface
As a new independent Republic of Armenia is established among the ruins of
the Soviet Union, Armenians are rethinking their history—the processes by
which they arrived at statehood in a small part of their historic “homeland”
and the definitions they might give to the boundaries of their “nation.” Both
a victim and a beneficiary of rival empires, Armenia experienced a complex
evolution as a divided or an erased polity with a widespread diaspora.
Rather than promoting a notion of Armenians as a nation from primeval
to present times, the essays gathered here, written during the last several
decades, are preliminary explorations of the construction of modern Armenian
identity and nationhood. They discuss the cultural and social transformations
and interventions that created a new sense of nationality in the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The making of a nation is seen here as involving both
outside impositions and acts of self-realization by the Armenians themselves.
In Part I images of Armenians by others are examined alongside internal
Armenian representations of self. The social, cultural, and intellectual influ­
ences on the formation of a secular intelligentsia are considered in the context
of imperial impositions, revolutionary opportunities, and externally dictated
programs for “modernization.”
Ideas of antiquity and shared origin and perceptions of uniqueness and
value combined with the experiences of dispersion, genocide, and regeneration
to forge an Armenian nation in Transcaucasia. As Caucasian Armenians plan
their political independence from the moribund Soviet Union, they, like other
Soviet peoples, reject any positive evaluation of the transformations imposed
on them by the Communist regime. Yet, as the essays in Part II attempt to
demonstrate, Armenians in Armenia can be seen to be the recipients of an
indelible inheritance from that hard passage. Finally, it is shown that while
X Preface
the limits of the Armenian nation at times excluded the diaspora, in this
moment of state renewal they have been expanded to take in that half of the
nation that lives beyond the borders of the republic.
The openness of the present and the inability of historians and other
analysts to predict the possible futures has encouraged me to rethink some of
my conclusions in earlier published versions, and here and there I have
changed some language, clarified some points, and adjusted some of my
thoughts. The basic thrust of the individual pieces and the overall project,
however, remains essentially the same. They are offered, not as answers to
the question of identity, but, hopefully, as part of the debate; not as an effort
to recover some lost essence of Armenianness, but as an attempt to participate
in the construction of a new sense of ethnicity. This new kind of ethnicity, to
follow the path taken by the sociologist Stuart Hall,
is constructed in history, it is constructed politically in part. It is part of
narrative. We tell ourselves the stories of the parts of our roots in order to
come into contact, creatively, with it. So this new kind of ethnicity—the
emergent ethnicities—has a relationship to the past, but it is a relationship
that is partly through memory, partly through narrative, one that has to be
recovered. It is an act of cultural recovery.1
Acknowledgments
The introduction and chapters 6, 13, and 14 are published here for the
first time. The others have been previously published as follows:
Chapter 1: in Richard G. Hovannisian, ed., The Armenian Image in His-
tory and Literature (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1981), pp. 105—37.
Chapter 3: Armenian Review XXXVI, 3/143 (Autumn 1983), pp. 18-34.
Chapter 4: Armenian Review XXXII, 2/126 (June 1979), pp. 134-51.
Chapter 5: Armenian Review XXXIII, 1/129 (March 1980), pp. 30-47.
Chapters 2, 7, 8, 9, and 11: in Armenia in the Twentieth Century (Chico,
CA: Scholars Press, 1983), the published versions of the John and Haigouhie
Takajian lectures delivered at Columbia University in 1981.
Chapter 10: Armenian Review XLII, 3/167 (Autumn 1989), pp. 1-19.
Chapter 12: Michigan Quarterly Review XXVIII, 4 (Fall 1989), pp.
481-506.
Several friends, relatives, students, and colleagues have read and com­
mented on the original essays, and I would like to thank Geoff Eley, Richard
Hovannisian, Dikran Kouymjian, Vincent Lima, Maude Mandel, Linda Suny
Myrsiades, Norman Naimark, and Khachig Tololyan for their suggestions and
criticisms. A particular expression of gratitude goes to Ara Sarafian and Ste­
phen Rapp, my research assistants, who were diligent in finding new material
and keeping me alive to new questions. As always, this work has benefited
from the joy that my family has provided me, and in gratitude for the time