The ARF’s First 120 Years

A Historian’s Perspective ¹

Below are the comments delivered by Ara Sanjian (Professor of History, University of Michigan-Dearborn) at the public forum titled “The ARF at 120: A Critical Appreciation,” held at the New York Hilton Hotel on Nov. 21, 2010. Click here for the comments delivered by the other panelists and the response of ARF Central Committee chair Antranig Kasbarian.

One constant feature defining the first 120 years of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) has been its incessant activity within the realm of Armenian politics and often in other related domains as well, beyond politics narrowly defined. Historians of almost any post-1890 episode concerning the Armenians inevitably also deal with the ARF, usually directly, or, at the very least, indirectly.

Over these years, the ARF has established a stable following, especially in the post-Genocide Armenian Diaspora. For decades, its influence as a single faction across this—what we may describe as the traditional—Diaspora has far outweighed those of its two, traditional rivals, the Hunchakians and Ramkavars. Moreover, after 1920, the ARF never got reconciled with the narrow Diasporan straightjacket that was imposed upon it by the exigencies of international politics. It tried tirelessly to re-establish its transnational character at every opportunity. Finally, in 1990, it formally returned to the Armenian nation-state, and, since then, it has been trying to re-establish viable roots not only in the Republic of Armenia, but also in the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh (Artsakh), Javakhk, and among Armenians in Russia. It has done so with varying levels of success, although the overall level of its achievements in this regard has arguably been more modest than what the party anticipated some twenty years ago.

In parallel with this decades-long active history, the ARF also became the foremost publisher in Armenian life of various genres of political literature—theory-related, policy-outline, propaganda, and history. The existing literature by and on the ARF far exceeds that related to the Hunchakians and Ramkavars. (Because of the very different circumstances in which it was published, literature by and on the Communist Party in Armenia is not included in this comparison.) Therefore, there is more accumulated positive historical knowledge on the ARF both at the scholarly and popular levels than about its traditional Diasporan rivals.

Most of the published primary and secondary historical literature on the ARF is in Armenian. Very little of what has been published in other languages (English included) has made original contributions to our academic understanding of the party’s history. Houri Berberian’s Armenians and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 (2001) and Dikran M. Kaligian’s Armenian Organization and Ideology under Ottoman Rule, 1908-1914 (2009) are rare, but welcome exception to this pattern, and I wish to see their contents become available to Armenian-reading audiences in some form in the near future.

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However, this relatively vast historical literature on the ARF is extremely imbalanced as regards the different epochs of the party’s history which it covers. The overwhelming majority of collections of documents and secondary literature published by the party, its leaders and intellectuals—what we will call the “authorized” corpus of ARF literature—deals with the first 35 years of its history: from its founding in 1890 to the convening of the party’s 10^th General Meeting in 1924-25, the first after the collapse of the ARF-led independent Republic of Armenia (1918-1920).

This was indeed an eventful period in modern Armenian history, and many professional or self-styled historians outside the ARF’s immediate circle of influence have also written extensively on the party’s involvement in these events.

Compared with the post-1924 period, which I will discuss next, today we have what I will describe as a satisfactory level of knowledge about what happened during this era and how the ARF both reacted to and partly shaped its important events. Polemics persist and sometimes they still get sharp, but these are more common among publicists and laypeople, who like to resort to selective historical facts or interpretations to make a point or to show their pre-existing sympathies for or against the ARF. There is, on the other hand, converging consensus among most professional historians when presenting conclusions on the most pivotal events of this period and the ARF’s involvement in the latter.

The increasing freedom enjoyed by historians in Armenia since the collapse of the Soviet system and the wider access which they now have to archival materials housed in various institutions in Yerevan have helped us find out more about certain aspects of the Armenian national-liberation struggle in the Ottoman Empire and even more about the period of Armenian independence (1918-1920). There have been few radical departures, however, from established interpretations, and many of the past arguments and counter-arguments within this context are being mostly reiterated, simply re-enforced through the use of some previously untapped primary sources.

The eventual unfettered opening of the ARF’s Central Archives, now housed in Watertown, Mass., may shed additional light on this period. However, it is highly unlikely that access to these papers, at present closed to most historians, will radically alter the way we now look back on this period.

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This situation changes radically when we move to the post-1924 period of the history of the ARF, i.e. the party’s last 85 years.

For this period, not only do historians not have access to the party’s own archives (this is already an obstacle to those who are studying the ARF’s first 35 years), but, in this case, they are also told that the archives for this particular era are not only out of bounds because of an administrative decision, but that they are still poorly organized, if at all.

Moreover, unlike the previous period, the party itself has not undertaken any real effort to publish collections of primary documents pertaining to developments after 1924.

I find more curious the fact that ARF leaders have themselves been reluctant to pen their memoirs of this period. Famous ARF figures, who were active both before and long after 1924, rarely touched on post-1924 developments in their voluminous writings of autobiographical nature. Ruben Ter Minasian, Simon Vratzian, Vahan Papazian and Garo Sasuni are prominent examples of this group. Among members of roughly the same generation, it seems that Vahan Navasardian, Dro, and Kapriel Lazian never wrote memoirs. The next two generations of ARF leaders, Gobernig Tandurdjian Adour Kabakian, Papken Papazian, and Hratch Dasnabedian, also have no published autobiographies. The only member of the ARF Bureau in the post-1924 period, who, to my knowledge, has published his memoirs, is Antranig Ourfalian. One may also add publications by A. Amurian, Misak Torlakian, S. Saruni, Armen Sevan (Hovhannes Devedjian), Baghdik Minasian, Melkon Eblighatian, and Suren Antoyan, but this is, I think, as far as one can go.

Some information on inner dealings within the ARF during this period can be gleaned from the autobiographical insights in the mostly polemical works penned by ARF figures, who left the party or were expelled at various times and under different circumstances. Within this group, we can mention Shahan Natalie, Krikor Merdjanoff, Khosrov Tutundjian, and Antranig Dzarougian.

Under these circumstances, the ARF press remains the major source to write about certain aspects of the party’s post-1924 history, especially the evolution of its ideology, priorities, and tactics.

However, the very limited access to archival sources and the dearth of published autobiographies are probably not the only reasons which have hindered conducting in-depth studies in the post-1924 history of the ARF. It also appears that there has also never been a sustained interest among the party’s leaders to sponsor such studies, as well as related public debates and discussions. The prevailing cautious attitude among contemporary Armenian Diasporan elites of all political persuasions toward openly tackling the nation’s recent history has also not helped.

It is very difficult to mention any published, high-quality, professional study which deals with any aspect of the party’s history in the post-1924 period. The book version of Gaïdz Minassian’s Guerres et terrorisme arméniens 1972-1998 (2002) unfortunately lacked the necessary scholarly citations so as to impose a public discussion among scholars at least around the various interesting issues that it raised. There have been very few PhD dissertations – e.g. those by Ara Caprielian (1975), Hratch Bedoyan (1978), and Nikola B. Schahgaldian (1979) – but they remain for the most part unpublished and are now probably also to some extent dated. Indeed, Schahgaldian and Bedoyan have been among the lucky few who have had the opportunity to consult archival material in the party’s possession. Shogher (Shoghik) Ashekian has also enjoyed that rare privilege when conducting research for her dissertation at Yerevan State University on the ARF and activities related to what is now widely described as the Armenian Cause in Lebanon in the 1960s and 1970s. However, recent biographers of famous ARF figures like Dro, Garo Sasuni, Avetik Sahakian and Ruben Ter Minasian continue to concentrate for the most part on their pre-1924 activities. They only devote a few pages to their activities in the ensuing decades. Indeed, Sasuni’s biographer, who did not have access to archival material in the party’s possession, openly admits that he could not find out the exact date when Sasuni re-joined the ARF Bureau!

This lack of adequate interest in post-1924 developments is probably behind another feature – the fact that Soviet Armenian and foreign (i.e. US, British, French, and other) archives, which can provide some glimpses on the post-1924 history of the ARF, also remain largely untapped by historians.

Historians in post-Soviet Armenia have also shown no particular interest in the post-1924 history of the ARF, which mostly occurred, after all, in the Diaspora. A collection of documents compiled by Vladimir Ghazakhetsyan, H.H. Dashnaktsutyune ev khorhrdayin ishkhanutyune, published by the ARF Bureau in Yerevan in 1999, covers mostly the 1920s period and only to some extent the 1930s; it is certainly a commendable exception. Eduard Abrahamyan, a young scholar, has recently written about ARF groups which clandestinely breached the Soviet border in the 1920s and 1930s. Nevertheless, it is obvious that, in both cases, the purely Diasporan component of the ARF’s post-1924 history is largely missing.

The absence of high-quality secondary literature makes it very difficult to provide informed opinion on many important issues which remain indispensible to evaluate the ARF’s post-1924 history as a whole: the party’s role in community-building in the post-Genocide Diasporan communities; its individual or group responsibility for the persistence of intra-party rivalries in the Armenian Diaspora; the related issue of the ARF’s involvement in Armenian Church politics; the ARF’s relations with Georgian and Azerbaijani exiles in the inter-war period; the participation of the ARF in electoral politics primarily in Lebanon, but also in Iran, Cyprus, and Syria; the gradual détente between the ARF and the Communist authorities in Soviet Armenia from the 1960s onward; and the party’s clandestine attempts to disseminate nationalist literature among intellectuals and the youth in Soviet Armenia, particularly from the 1970s. I will end this partial list of examples with a topic, which has intrigued me in the past few years: the gradual evolution from the 1960s of the ARF’s ideology from that of a “Cold Warrior” party, allied to right-wingers, to something more akin to a Third Worldist party at present, as well as the various manifestations of this gradual, but steady shift in the various host-countries where Diasporan Armenians live in significant numbers.

In the absence of good scholarship, polemics among those who hold pro- or anti-ARF views remain more acute when we encounter particular, usually violent, episodes of which the ARF was or is believed to be part. Examples include the assassination of Archbishop Ghevond (Leon) Tourian in New York in 1933; the cooperation of some prominent ARF figures with the Nazis during the Second World War; Dro’s post-World War II political and quasi-military activism in the Arab world; the discovery of armed caches and the subsequent arrest and trial of many ARF members in Syria in 1961-1962; and, finally, the occasionally bloody encounters between the ARF and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA) in Lebanon in the early 1980s. While each of these episodes can be treated as a thriller in its own right, a more in-depth and dispassionate study for each of them is necessary not only to cool down passions inherited from those who were participants in or contemporaries to these events but also as a means to better understand the party’s political and ideological evolution in the Diaspora, in parallel with the broader issues listed above.

The ARF’s involvement in political events leading to and since the outbreak of the Karabagh Movement in Armenia in February 1988 are perhaps too fresh to be analyzed in depth by professional historians today, but will undoubtedly concern them in the future. However, just as the current generation of historians complains about the above-listed and other difficulties when tackling the ARF’s post-1924 history, later generations of historians will probably also complain in similar vein about lack of encouragement to discuss and inaccessibility of primary sources pertaining to the post-1988 era, unless there is a radical change among the Armenian elites’ readiness to face contemporary history head on and an attendant change within the ARF ranks toward providing access to its archival material for professional historians without distinction of nationality or political convictions.

On the occasion of the 120^th anniversary, I thank the ARF Central Committee of the Eastern United States for providing me with this opportunity to share my concerns during this public forum. I express the wish that the ARF leadership go back to its coffers, look for, and release unpublished memoirs that touch upon the party’s post-1924 history; make its archives accessible to professional historians as quickly and as widely as possible; take a parallel initiative and publish significant of the more interesting and important documents in its possession; initiate an oral history project targeting party veterans with acknowledged intellectual depth; and, finally, encourage public debate on post-Genocide Diasporan and recent ARF history.

I believe that such endeavors will contribute to having an educated Armenian public which can make informed decisions on important matters in an elegant climate. Honestly, while I won’t rush to bet that such changes will occur in the foreseeable future, I promise to be among the first to cheer loud and clear whenever I see some progress in the direction that I have suggested today.

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