Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary, Volume 1 — In Place of a Preface

From one end of the emigration to the other, freedom-loving Armenians mourned deeply the loss of Levon Shant¹ and Rouben Der Minassian.

Levon Shant, being a great man of letters and above all a playwright, was already fairly well known to the broad strata of Armenian society through the works he had published over some sixty years, and above all through his plays and novels. Not so Rouben Der Minassian, who was comparatively little known to the public.

It could not have been otherwise, for Rouben had never been a literary man by trade; until the last period of his life he had had very little to do with the pen, but had been supremely a man of arms, had lived for the most part an underground life, and, by the nature of his revolutionary work, had kept out of the general public's sight.

Only during the short-lived period of the Republic of Armenia did Rouben's name gain a certain popularity. But had it not been for the memoirs he published in the Hairenik monthly across the thirty years following the Republic's fall, a great many, in the days of his death, would have forgotten who he was. It was only after his death that freedom-loving Armenians began to render their tribute of appreciation to the important work he had done, and began fully to grasp what a great loss they had suffered in the death of that matchless Armenian, patriot, and revolutionary.

One may say boldly that, after Aram, no one played so decisive a part in the Republic of Armenia's becoming a living reality as Rouben did. And if today, under the Soviet name at least, we have an Armenia with a solidly Armenian population, we owe that in the greatest measure to Rouben's political foresight, his unbending will, and his resolve that broke through every obstacle.

⁂

Rouben was born in 1882. I knew him from his childhood days, from 1890, when he was barely eight years old. I first met him in Akhalkalak, where my parents had taken me to my grandfather's, to learn Armenian before I entered a Russian school.

He was a pupil at the parish school. I would see him not only in school but out of it as well. He became not only my classmate but my playmate.

From those days I well remember our "flight" toward "Armenia," Rouben and a group of schoolfellows together.

In those days not only the Armenian youth of the Caucasus but the boys, the children of ten and twelve, dreamed of going to "Armenia." Though they lived on the soil of Caucasian Armenia, they all held the belief that the real Armenia lay on the far side of the Russian frontier — that is, Turkish Armenia. And so they yearned toward it, to help their brothers and sisters suffering under the bloody Turkish yoke.

Years afterward Rouben often recalled our flight toward "Armenia," half in jest and half in earnest, and would remind me of it. That failed childish venture had left so deep an impression, so lasting a mark, in his soul — a venture destined to be the first sign of his later adventurous revolutionary life.

After that our roads parted. I left for Tiflis, then for Yekaterinodar, to get my schooling in Russian schools, while Rouben went not long after to Echmiadzin, to enter the Gevorgian Seminary.²

I met Rouben again in Moscow, when I was a student at the university there and he had come to enroll as a free auditor at the Lazarian Academy. At that time we had a circle of Armenian students that busied itself with "self-improvement." Rouben joined the circle too, and showed a particular interest in philosophical questions.

I remember one "paper" of his, full of original and rather knotty turns of phrase, which revolved around the following thought: "What begins does not end, and what ends does not begin"…

It was the time of the Russo-Japanese War. Rouben, as a reserve officer, was waiting to be sent to Manchuria should the call-up be declared in the Moscow military district. Being already opposed to the tsarist regime and unwilling to serve it, he had resolved to evade the call-up. He therefore asked me, if I could learn beforehand of the coming call-up, to let him know at once, so as to ease his flight.

He knew that through Russian women students I had a link with military families and could do him this service. And in fact I managed to learn of the call-up's announcement two days ahead, and told Rouben at once. That very day he left Moscow, without telling me where he was bound. Probably he did not yet clearly know it himself.

Only years later did I learn that he had gone to the Caucasus, and from there had crossed into Turkish Armenia.

The account he gives in "In the Furnace of Kars" makes plain that, after leaving Moscow, he had gone to Tiflis, had presented himself to the A.R.F. Bureau,³ had received a letter of introduction from it, and with that letter had set out for Kars — to make himself ready, in the "furnace" there, for the revolutionary life he had chosen in the Land, of which he would give such unforgettable memories in time to come.

⁂

In February or March of 1909 I received a letter from Rouben in Moscow, written from Constantinople. It came just at the time when I was preparing to sit my final university examinations that spring.

The letter was a complete surprise to me. Rouben wrote of the opportunities opened by the Turkish Constitution,⁴ and invited me to come to Constantinople, where, in his view, a broad field had opened for young men like myself.

I read it with astonishment and a little wry amusement, for in those days it could not have entered my head that in the autumn of that very year it would fall to me to fulfill Rouben's wish, and to seek refuge in Constantinople to escape the tsarist persecutions.

Unhappily, by the time I reached Constantinople, Rouben had already left for Geneva, to continue his interrupted studies.

The bustle of Constantinople swallowed me up so completely that I had neither the time nor the disposition even to keep up a correspondence with Rouben. It was only in 1912, in the days of the Balkan War, that I received from him a long, a very long letter. In it he set out in detail a plan for an armed insurrection in Turkish Armenia, and asked me to lay it before the A.R.F. Supreme Body and, if I agreed with it, to defend it there as well.

Looking at that plan in the light of later events, I must confess that it was a very sound, farsighted, practical plan, one that offered guarantees of success; and had it been carried out at the time, it might perhaps have saved the Turkish Armenians from the great catastrophe that came after. But in the atmosphere of Turco-Armenian collaboration in the days of the Turkish Constitution, our minds were not yet ready to accept and carry through such an insurrectionary plan. And it was natural that our Supreme Body would not so much as consider it.

Though his plan was not accepted, Rouben could not stay on in Geneva, but resolved to leave at once for Turkish Armenia — to be able to follow on the spot the course of the fateful events he foresaw, and to be with his people in the Land itself.

His part is known thereafter in the A.R.F. General Assembly at Karin,⁵ where — though against the majority — he defended a view more promising than the others for the physical preservation of the Turkish Armenians. Looking at the events of the past through the lens of the present, we may say that this view, or plan, of Rouben's was likewise sounder, more farsighted, and politically more correct than the road followed by almost all the Armenian people under the A.R.F.'s lead.

It was natural that Rouben would not consent to cross into the Caucasus, still less to join the volunteer movement that was to begin there on Russia's behalf. He stayed in Taron and fought, with the armed part of the people, against the Turks, who had set about the extermination of the whole Armenian people. There is no doubt that he would have succeeded in saving the Armenians of Taron, had the Russian troops and the Armenian volunteer units come to his aid in time, as they came to the aid of Van.

Unhappily, the people of Taron — though they resisted the Turks longer than the Armenians of Van — could not be saved from extermination, because the Russian troops and the Armenian volunteer units failed to reach them in time either. It was for this reason that Rouben, with only a handful of fighters, was able to cut through the enemy's ring and find refuge in the Caucasus.

Need one speak of the inner tragedy he lived through when he came down into the Caucasus with only his few brave men, after the tragic death of his beloved people of Taron?

Happily, the heavy trial of spirit did not last very long. Rouben found himself again and set to work anew, but this time in an altogether changed situation, one created by the great Russian revolution. Elected a member of the Armenian National Council, he did not stay long in Tiflis but soon moved to Erevan, where — first as a member of that Council, then of Parliament and of the military committee, and at last of the Bureau-Government — he played a fateful part in the two and a half years of the Republic of Armenia's historic life.

It was chiefly thanks to the undertakings he directed that an important part of Armenia was cleared of elements irreconcilably hostile to an independent Armenian state. It was under his leadership that the May Uprising⁶ engineered by the Bolsheviks against our infant Republic was put down. And if Rouben could not come out victorious from the Armeno-Turkish war as well, the cause was no weakness in his military leadership, but the crushing superiority of the combined Turkish and Russian forces advancing at once from the south and from the north.

The last thirty years Rouben lived in exile, far from his mother country and his people, but he never lived an idle, fruitless life. Abroad too he gave all his strength to his party, and through it to freedom-loving Armenians and the Armenian Cause. He did his best to strengthen the organizational force of the A.R.F., the Dashnaktsutiun. Through the publication of his matchless memoirs he brought back to life the heroic period of our recent past — its spirit, its heroic figures and deeds — so that in this way the fire of our struggle for liberation might be kept burning in the surviving Armenians, and an ever-flowing spring of inspiration and devotion created for our new generation.

⁂

Very few Armenian revolutionaries repaid the Turks eye for eye in their lives as much as Rouben did. Yet very few, too, were as convinced advocates of Armeno-Turkish collaboration as Rouben.

Rouben wished to see Armenia cleared of that well-known element irreconcilably hostile to the Armenians, but at the same time he sincerely wished to establish a lasting friendship with it — for he knew that without its friendship the Armenian people could never be safe and free in their mother homeland.

He was an enemy of communism, yet not on doctrinal grounds but on political ones.

In the winter of 1919, when I managed to get free of the Soviet world and reach Erevan, I lived two months with Rouben, and told him then, at very great length, of the order the communists had established and of their violence. But he, after listening to me for weeks together, still showed a reserve toward what he heard. He fixed his position only when the communist armies conquered Azerbaijan and threatened the independence of Armenia.

Once he had grasped the essence of Soviet power, Rouben, naturally, could not but oppose, during the last war, the plan to enlarge the borders of Soviet Armenia, as well as the repatriation — for both that plan and the repatriation, in his deep conviction, could in no way serve the Armenian Cause, but could serve only Soviet world-dominion.

Rouben was never a doctrinaire, but neither was he an opportunist; he was never disposed to give up any of our fundamental principles or political aims in order to gain some temporary advantage.

Rouben loved the peasantry as a class, because he counted it the backbone of our people, and its soundest, purest, most decent, most virtuous, and strongest element. But Rouben did not love our intelligentsia as a class, because — though he was an intellectual himself — he was above all a man of action, whereas in the intelligentsia he saw the hollow mouthpiece of mere talk, and often of empty talk.

It is characteristic that Rouben felt no particular love for the working class either, because he counted it a child of the modern great city, with all that city's baser sides.

The village was Rouben's chosen element, and never the city.

Having been a pupil of the Gevorgian Seminary, he was deeply bound to Echmiadzin and to the Armenian national church.

I remember his fierce indignation over an editorial of mine years back, in which I had expressed the thought that the Armenian churches of the emigration ought for a time to cut their ties with the Catholicos of Echmiadzin — become a captive of Soviet power — and join themselves to the Catholicosate of Cilicia, so as to free the Armenians of the emigration from highly dangerous Soviet influences and interferences in the present stormy state of the world.

It seemed that Rouben loved Echmiadzin not only from national and political considerations, but from mystical, religious motives as well.

Though the child of a well-to-do family, he was austere in his wants by his natural bent and understanding. Yet Rouben's austerity was not like S. Zavarian's. Rouben tried to force his austerity on no one, and wished to influence others only by his own personal example.

Apart from Nikol Aghbalian, I have met no one in the Armenian intelligentsia as original as Rouben in his thought, his way of living, and his way of working. He was a penetrating observer and a philosopher born; he accepted nothing without his own minute and many-sided examination. His mind was a scientist's mind. Beyond doubt he would have been a great scientist and philosopher, had he not become an Armenian revolutionary.

In Rouben's temperament there was also a strong streak of the adventurer, without which he could hardly have been capable of becoming Rouben Pasha in Moush. In this and a number of other respects he seems to have resembled the famous Englishman Lawrence,⁷ who did so much for the liberation of the Arabs from the Turkish yoke.

Rouben seemed to believe in the life to come as well, though he was ashamed to speak of it seriously; when he did speak of it, he spoke in jest.

In a letter he wrote me on January 20, 1937, he said: —

"This life, too, came to nothing; let us see the next one, if that one exists at all… Just now I flew back to the days of childhood and remembered you, when you were getting ready to leave Akhalkalak for Tiflis, to enter the gymnasium… I wish we were in Akhalkalak, drinking from the Kulikam spring, eating alabalık (red trout) and boiling them at the water's edge. You know, Artash, this life abroad distresses me greatly; the earth is pulling at me; the farther I go, the more I hurry. I don't know whether it is a sign that death is near, or whether I will really go…"

In answer to my endless entreaties that he come to America, he wrote in his letter dated February 28, 1937:

"It seems we won't see each other again. What business have I in America, and what would I do there? — I cannot get my mind round it, and I have no wish at all to end up in those parts. I would like to go to our own parts, but that too is not permitted. There remains, then, the grave, beyond which perhaps we will meet"…

But, contrary to his ill foreboding, we did meet — in the autumn of 1947 in Cairo, during the A.R.F.'s 14th General Assembly, and last year, at the beginning of October, in Paris, when I was traveling once more to Cairo to attend our 15th General Assembly. When I was urging him to come with me to the General Assembly, Rouben said:

"My work with the living is finished. That work you and others will carry on. My work now is with the dead. Let me at least tell the story of the dead, and finish it before I die. I have only barely managed to gather myself into that world and to fix my mind wholly on it. Do not cut the thread of my mind; do not part me from that world. Otherwise it will be impossible for me to restore the connection of my memories…"

Unhappily, he could neither come to the General Assembly to see his fellow workers a last time, nor find time enough to finish his memoirs. Death lay in ambush and came far sooner than he, or any of us, expected.

After the fall of the Republic of Armenia, when at the end of March 1922 I came to America by way of Persia, Iraq, Egypt, Izmir, Constantinople, the Balkans, and Germany, and settled in Boston as editor of the Hairenik daily, I began from the very first day to work at bringing off the plan I had cherished for years — the publication of a great monthly. I was sure that America, thanks to its material means and its free conditions, was the fittest place in those days, as it is today, for the realization of such a plan.

When I laid my cherished plan before our Central Committee, and then before the Delegates' Assembly, our comrades received it with enthusiasm. One of the chief reasons for that enthusiasm was that the magazine would give a chance to put to the best use the free hours of our deserving intellectuals and fighters, newly exiled from Armenia, by having them write their memoirs — and by that means giving them, at the same time, a little material help.

Together with the decision to publish the Hairenik magazine, the Central Committee took into account the straitened material condition of our exiled comrades, and, according to the plan I had proposed, decided to send some of them modest monthly stipends at regular intervals, so that they might give all their time to literature and to memoir-writing, and furnish the magazine with valuable matter. Among these were Levon Shant, Nikol Aghbalian, Hovh. Kachaznuni, and one or two others. To others we decided to send single lump sums for the same purpose. Among these last was Rouben.

At the same time we wrote letters to a great many comrades, asking them to contribute to our new magazine their memoirs and other writings, and promising them a certain material reward for their work.

Rouben was one of the few comrades of ours who only with great difficulty met our proposal that they send their memoirs, and above all that they take a certain payment in return for their work. It is true that in the summer of 1921, in Tabriz, he had already begun to write, and to have written out, his own recollections and those of his close comrades. After Tabriz too, when he had moved to Geneva, he had gone on with that work. But he had done it, and was doing it, not for immediate publication, but to occupy his free hours with the recollections he loved, and to supply materials to the A.R.F. archive. Above all he could not easily reconcile himself to the thought of taking any payment for what he wrote.

When, by decision of our Central Committee, we sent him 150 dollars, so that he might with an easy heart give a little more time to setting down his memoirs and sending them to the magazine, Rouben wrote modestly in his letter dated August 15, 1922:

"This weighed on me greatly, since it is the first time I have been shown attention personally by my comrades, and it is hard to be shown such attention. But at the same time I was glad, for my material condition is very unenviable; I live from day to day and do not know what I will live on a month or two from now…"

When, on our stubborn insistence, Rouben at last began to send his memoirs to be printed in the magazine, he had to be urged each time with letters of encouragement to hasten the continuation. It was not that he was too lazy to write; he was afraid that what he wrote was not interesting, that it was tiresome, and that it would be better to stop publishing his memoirs. He kept voicing doubts about their worth, and always wanted to verify what impression they made on the readers. In his letter dated October 20, 1923, for example, he wrote: —

"One of these days I will send the continuation of the memoirs, though I had written that I would send no more. But Simon, and people in several places, advise me to go on and finish. I don't know whether anything real is coming of it or not. Write and tell me what impressions there are of what I've written. Isn't it tiresome, after all? I would like you to write a serious critique and send it to me. But don't print it in the paper, as Vahan did in Husaper,⁸ because extravagances of that sort (praise) affect me worse than a serious critique, from which I myself want to learn."

In another letter, written in the course of the same year (1923), Rouben, fairly heartened by the appreciative letters he had received, wrote — with the self-forgetting modesty of a man who credits his merits to others: —

"It seems you fix up the pieces I send rather well. I get a fair number of letters from Persia, Siberia, Egypt, and the Balkans. They seem very pleased with the Hairenik magazine and with what I've written. They send me their thanks — not knowing that the one who fixes it up is you. Whatever comes of it, if bringing up this old capital can furnish a moral foundation for our ranks, then I am satisfied — though I am not at all persuaded that I am a writer."

It is true that his writings needed careful correction. His hand was untidy and hard to read. He paid no respect to the rules of punctuation. His grammar was defective. Even the misspellings were not few. His language was mixed — in one place Western Armenian, in another Eastern, sometimes both in the same sentence.

Yet Rouben's style was firm, all his own, and telling. In his writings there was no verbiage, not so much as a superfluous sentence or word. However strange his thoughts might be, he always expressed them clearly, and often in a very beautiful and forceful way. What he wrote was original, interesting, alive, and never tedious. His rare gift of observation, his uncommon power to penetrate the souls of men, his rare capacity to judge everything always by his own wits and not another's, his marvelous memory, his talent verging on the artistic in portraying figures and events, his philosophical approach to the life of the individual and of nations — of the Armenians in particular — and, finally, his almost unprecedented, many-sided acquaintance with the Armenian world: all these gave an extraordinary worth and weight to his word.

For that very reason it was necessary that his so precious recollections be published without needless flaws of language or grammar. Naturally this duty fell to the editorial staff of Hairenik, and it was one that, in the first months of Rouben's collaboration, Astur (Khorian) and I carried out with great pleasure. Later, when Astur had grown well accustomed to Rouben's handwriting and to the way of correcting it, he lovingly did it alone for years together. And beginning in 1948, when after a pause of some years Rouben began again to send his memoirs to the magazine, I performed that highly pleasant duty myself, down to the February number of this year's (1952) magazine, in which, posthumously, the last section of his manuscript remaining with me was published.

"The compliments you pass on about my writing console me," wrote Rouben in a letter dated February 7, 1925, "though I never have so good an opinion of my writing myself. The secret of writing, to my mind, is this: if the subject matters first of all, the manner of the telling, the beauty of it, is just as essential. And it is precisely these last that I am unable to satisfy. It is my misfortune to have neither language nor pen. And though I understand this failing, I cannot learn Armenian, or any other tongue, well. If only I knew even Kurdish well! But that too is beyond me. What is the trick of learning it? Show me the way."

It is a curious thing that some of our known men of letters, seeing in the magazine the writings of Rouben, of Sepuh, of Sasuni, of Malkhas, and a few other non-literary men, complained in personal letters to me that I was filling the numbers of Hairenik with the writings of "Kurds." Happily, the written and spoken expressions of appreciation and admiration that came from every side, and from far humbler readers, were living proof that those "Kurds" spoke to the heart of our people, and that their writings too had a lasting worth — not only historical but at times even artistic.

Coming to Rouben's recollections in particular, one may say boldly that not one of our memoirists could present, as truly, as vividly, and as completely as he, the revolutionary generation of our last sixty years — its psychology, its character, its struggles, its ideals, its self-devotion, its fanaticism, its hard self-denial, its heroic bursts of daring, its whole array of striking figures and events. One may even say that Rouben's memoirs present the priceless raw stuff of the epic of freedom-loving Armenians in modern times. And indeed, how much matter there is in them for the epic creations of our present and future poets. "The Bride of Tadrağom,"⁹ whose subject Kostan Zarian took from Rouben's memoirs, is only one small episode. Hundreds of like subjects lie scattered through those pages, and any one of them, under the breath of a gifted artist, might become a literary masterpiece like "The Bride of Tadrağom."

From Rouben's recollections, more than from any other writing, the reader can grasp exactly and clearly the life-giving spring from which the strength of the A.R.F., the Dashnaktsutiun, was born, and by which it lives even today; for not one of our intellectuals was able, as Rouben was, to penetrate deeply into the soul of the heroic generation of our last sixty years, and to present it as truly as he to the public.

\ \ \*

The interest aroused by the fragments of Rouben's memoirs printed in the magazine was so great that as early as 1925, heartened by the letters received by our editorial staff, I wrote to him of the need to publish them as separate books. In his letter dated August 12, 1925, he answered: —

"I would not be against publishing my memoirs in separate volumes, if they were finished. Besides that, if they are to be printed as books, additions will again be needed, and it should be done with pictures, of which I have gathered a good many. In that case the cost would be considerable. Though I think the outlay would be recovered later, still — so as not to burden the Party, and to give no occasion for bitter talk about you and me — I advise you to let the idea go."

Some years later, in a letter dated May 20, 1931, Rouben wrote: —

"From every side they advise me to publish my memoirs in separate books. But no one stops to think how. They must take me for a rich man."

For this purpose I applied to the Central Board of the Taron-Turuberan Compatriotic Union. But for reasons of one kind or another, which I have now forgotten, they refused to meet my proposal.

It was only during the last war that, at the urging and prompting of Drtad Kazanjian, the late Comrade Levon Hakobian one day wrote me a letter from Fresno, promising to pay the cost of publishing Rouben's memoirs in separate books, and proposing that I set about the work at once. I answered at once that Rouben's memoirs could not be published in separate books immediately, because they had first to be corrected, enlarged, and adorned with pictures by the author, whereas the author, on account of the war, was in fact cut off from us. It would be best for Comrade Levon to carry out his fine wish after the war, when it would be possible to enter into regular relations with Rouben. And meanwhile it was greatly to be desired that Comrade Levon publish one splendid work that remained in manuscript for want of a publisher. That work was Kostan Zarian's novel "The Ship on the Mountain," which Comrade Levon Hakobian gladly agreed to publish at once.

Some years after the last war, when Rouben resumed the publication of his memoirs in the Hairenik magazine and moved from Lebanon to Paris, our two worthy comrades of California, Hagop Karian and Alek Pilibos, at the initiative and with the wholehearted collaboration of Drtad Kazanjian, conceived an idea without precedent in our history: to found, with their own means, a special press for the publication of Rouben's complete memoirs in separate volumes.

I have no doubt that, had Rouben lived, all ten of the volumes he had planned would have seen the light in a short time. At this moment, as I write these lines, I do not know to what extent our dear late comrade's untimely death will affect the publication of his complete work, or how many volumes it will prove possible to bring out. I know, however, that besides his memoirs he has left other manuscripts on various matters of interest. Among those manuscripts is, as far as I can learn, a study of Cilicia already ready for the press. It is to be wished that these materials too be published.

Of all our revolutionary leaders, the most fortunate was Rouben. Not only because he had two exemplary children who adored him and were devoted to his ideals, but above all because, without any effort on his part, there were found comrades who loved him to the point of adoration, and who of their own accord, with great enthusiasm and with great material and moral effort, undertook the publication of his complete memoirs. An honor and a good fortune that, apart from him, no Armenian revolutionary has been granted to this day.

I have no doubt that these volumes, published by the exceptional sacrifices of Hagop Karian, Alek Pilibos, and Drtad Kazanjian, will be lasting springs of patriotic inspiration and devotion, not only for past but for coming generations. I am sure they will be a fine, a very fine example to others. When these magnificent volumes, so well printed, are brought out, I believe the Armenian reading public will consume them in a short time, and the need for a second printing will soon be felt.

In publishing these volumes, the great-hearted comrades named above had meant to devote all their proceeds to Rouben, so that he might live and work more at ease to the end of his life. But, unhappily, his untimely death prevented Rouben from benefiting in any way from those proceeds.

Whatever the publishers' original purpose may have been, it is hard to imagine a better means of honoring and immortalizing Rouben's memory than the publication of these fine volumes, now placed at the disposal of the Armenian public. They will furnish inexhaustible materials not only to the future historian of freedom-loving Armenians, but to our future artists and writers as well. And for this we ought to be forever grateful not only to Rouben, who supplied that priceless matter, but also to the three comrades named above, who by their personal sacrifices brought this splendid work to completion.

R. DARBINIAN

Boston, March 20, 1952