Imperial Russia’s Newspapers and the Relief Campaign for Armenian Refugees

The Great War caused unprecedented calamities throughout 1914-1918 and affected the lives of millions of people – combatants and civilians – both on battlefields and on home fronts, challenging humanity. The war that ensued on the Caucasus front in November 1914 triggered enormous population movements, accompanied by massacres, violent persecutions, rape, famine, and epidemics. These population movements were the result of war and the genocide organized and systematically implemented by the Ottoman Turkish government against its Armenian subjects.

By late summer 1915, hundreds of thousands of refugees – the majority of whom were Armenians – had crossed the Ottoman-Russian border and created an immense humanitarian crisis in Transcaucasia. Russian imperial government (both military and civil authorities), state-funded and public agencies such as the Tatiana Committee and the All-Russian Unions, as well as local Armenian committees such as the Armenian Benevolent Society and the Committee of Brotherly Aid, organized and coordinated the relief efforts on behalf of over 200,000 refugees crowded in Alexandropol (Gyumri), Etchmiadzin, Erivan (Yerevan), and Tiflis (Tbilisi), among others. To reach out to various communities in all parts of the vast empire and make the voices of refugees seeking shelter, food and warm clothes heard, the state and local relief organizations deployed the power of the printed press. A number of newspapers and periodicals in the Russian Empire placed appeals in their issues regularly to raise funds and help the refugees confront this emergency.