Armenian Revolutionaries’ Anti-Tsarist Mobilization in Northern Iran and the South Caucasus, 1912-1914

• In Event: Religious, Class, and National Solidarity and Conflict in the Eastern European-Ottoman Borderlands, 1848-1939

Abstract

Before the outbreak of the First World War and Armenian Genocide, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, Dashnaktsutyun) formed alliances with likeminded national liberation movements in Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire. This paper focuses on the twilight of cooperation between the Ottoman Young Turks and the ARF in the South Caucasus and northern Iran, where both groups sought to challenge the tsarist Russian military occupation imposed in December of 1911. In so doing, it asks how the Young Turks continued to court the support of the ARF in the South Caucasus and northern Iran even as it made overtures to regional pan-Turkic organizations, and how this dual outreach signaled the possibility and eventual actuality of the Armenian-Ottoman break.

Author

• Kayhan Aryan Nejad, U of Oklahoma