Memoirs of an Armenian Revolutionary, Volume 1 — Chapter 2: The Party’s Machinery

Of the field-workers, the circuit-riders, and the ones who went to the Land, I have named only a few. They were the remnant of the multitudes that had gone before them, of whom many were no longer among the living. Their character will perhaps come clearer when I recall their work and their duties.

The work of the circuit-riders.— The first part of it we saw in part. To school oneself to the new way of living; to travel by railway third class, on horseback or on foot; to live among the people, with the life of its poorest class and of the hard-driven soldier, stripped of every pleasure.

Since the Central Committee was secret, it was the circuit-riders who were the link between the people, the ranks, and the Central Committee. They carried out its instructions and gave effect to its decisions. Whatever affairs or decisions succeeded, they credited to the Central Committee. In case of failure, the field-workers would declare that the fault was their own and open to review, since the Central Committee had not examined it.

The town and the villages of the province were divided into committees, Sub-Committees, and bands, which, with their bodies rising from the low toward the high, resembled a pyramid. The apex of that pyramid was the impalpable, secret Central Committee. These were the legislative, administrative, elective bodies.

On the other side — running the opposite way, beginning from the apex above and coming down to the base of the pyramid — there was spread another authority, one that was appointed, not elected, and that was visible to the government and to everyone. That authority hid the elective bodies beneath itself and gave the appearance that it alone was the whole force. Its duty was to see the decisions of the Sub-Committees, the committees, and the Central Committee carried out, and to pass on to the corresponding bodies all those questions that it was not in a position to resolve. Thus that network, which had sprung from the Central Committee, covered the whole of the Central Committee's domain.

That network was sparse. Its knots, who were intellectuals with an education above the secondary, had with them 2 to 5 soldiers as escort, who were in general men of some name and skilled in the use of a good pistol and a knife.

The field-workers, the circuit-riders, and the ones going to the Land, mentioned above, were those knots of the network; they hung from the Central Committee and from the bodies subordinate to it, and were removed whenever a complaint arose.

The judicial business was the most engrossing work of all, since the Central Committee had forbidden litigation before the government. The opposing parties would present their disputes and their witnesses to the Sub-Committee, if the parties were party members; whereas the non-party people presented theirs to the same Sub-Committee, adding to it their own non-kinsmen judges in equal number, whose verdict was binding.

Those disputes that this body judged it necessary not to resolve were passed on to the district committee, to the Central Committee, or to the circuit-rider of the district. In that case the verdicts they gave were final, whatever the matter might be.

With those disputes that were between Armenians and outsiders, these bodies did not concern themselves; the field-workers, the circuit-riders of the Central Committee did. These men, sometimes armed, would present themselves at the village of a Greek, a Turk, a Russian, or of some other nation, at the house of the one who had the dispute. If they were unknown there, they would declare their identity and propose to settle the dispute without the intervention of the government.

There was no one who would not agree, willing or unwilling. The trial was free, swift, in their own tongue, and so impartial that the foreign nations, too, wished to settle their own disputes among themselves by the Dashnaks' procedure. No man set foot in the state courts. Judge and prosecutor, with their officials, and the lawyers, were idle, and the prison and the police unemployed; they drew a salary without justifying their existence. What a saving to the people's purse, what swiftness in doing away with disputes…

The trial took place in some chance house, in the silent presence of the interested and the curious. Both sides and the witnesses swore that they would not speak falsely, and that if they did speak falsely, they would deserve to be punished. They answered the questions put to them, and the trial ended and the verdict was given that very day. The verdicts were given according to the voice of conscience and to custom.

The small matters were settled at the corner of the street, of the eating- house. They generally ended over sweets, the passions being quieted.

The punishments and the prisons.— The punishments were according to the offense, and there were many kinds.

The greatest punishment was the death penalty, which was given when the village or district courts demanded it. But that penalty could not be carried out unless the Central Committee examined it and by unanimous voice arrived at the same conclusion. He who carried out the penalty was reckoned a criminal, if he did not hold a certificate with the red seal. In the case where he held a certificate, it was counted desirable that the one carrying out the death penalty should be a near kinsman of the condemned, and never on the side of the one who had brought the suit, since that could give rise to clan feuds and blood vengeance.

The next punishment was final banishment. Except for acts of treachery, all the death sentences were commuted by the Central Committee to final banishment. A death sentence was in fact given for two offenses only — treachery and murder. For treachery the death sentence was unavoidable; for murder the death sentence could be softened, if a plea for pardon came from the condemned and his family, and if the condemned, in the presence of his parents and his wife, renounced his estate and his goods in favor of his heirs, gave his wife a divorce, renounced his family, all together signed the death sentence, and if the condemned removed himself finally within 12 hours from the bounds of the Caucasus, to Russia or wherever he wished. In the case of his return, not only he, but all the signatories as well, were condemned to death.

Simple banishment.— This punishment was not for criminal, nor yet for felonious, offenses. The Central Committee gave it rather in an administrative way, without trial and judgment. That punishment was generally given to party members whose presence was not desirable in the district. For example: when someone was an intriguer and created factions, when he was found in unseemly deeds, when he was disorderly, when he dealt roughly with the people and did not conform to local ways, and so on. The circuit-rider, presenting himself with the red seal, would order him in general to leave within an hour or two for Batum, or elsewhere. So it was in the case of Balakes^t1 Karapet, and of Ariudz Avag, who were banished by Sergei.

Prison.— This punishment was given to thieves, to usurers, to profiteers, and to those who did not perform their duties. In the days of the tsarist authority, beneath the fortresses of Kars, alongside the Russian prisons — while the tsar's gendarmes were hunting the Dashnaks to imprison them — the Dashnaktsutiun had a prison of its own. That prison was a tumbledown house in the Kroy quarter.^t2 No one lived in it, nor was there any guard. The door had no lock to be shut from outside; there was only a latch, to close it from within, two little holes for a window, and two or three plank-beds with grass strewn on them, and nothing else. The town's circuit-rider, who was Sergei, would give the condemned man his instructions: "You will go to prison until you carry out the decision."

This took place in broad daylight, while the tsar's policemen stood at the street corners. When entreaty and supplication had passed in vain, the man, under compulsion, would go to the place pointed out to him, alone or with a guide, and enter it. And since there was neither guard nor lock from outside, he would shut the door on himself from within and imprison himself. Before he did, he would arrange the question of his drink and his food. His kinsmen would bring it, since that was at his own charge.

How could he not obey — how could he not stay in that prison on his own two feet? To take refuge with the government was equal to treachery, whose punishment was terrible. To send word secretly, under the hand, to the authority that he was imprisoned, was senseless, since it was he himself who had shut the door from within. Not to carry out the order, to go out and flee — that was impossible, since he would be seized in his own house and, subjected to a fearful beating as well, would be compelled once more to go back to prison.

Laughable incidents happened too. When the policemen, catching the scent, would enter the prison:

"What are you doing here? Come out and go about your business," they would say.

"No, leave me in peace and alone. I have made a vow to do penance; I have committed an offense against my wife."

The government, bewildered, would set him down as a disciplined, fanatical revolutionary, and, having no evidence, would let it pass, or move its own prison elsewhere.

The other punishments were given as a beating, when there was resistance, or an evasion of a decision given.

Fines were forbidden.

For theft, for profiteering, twice the amount was collected from the guilty man, and the stolen or embezzled goods were returned to their owner, while the remaining amount was given in full to the school board of the district.

Let me give an example by way of sample.

Let us say that A. has stolen a sheep from M. and eaten it with his two companions. The court decrees that the price of two sheep, or two sheep, be collected from the thief A. On the spot one sheep is returned to M. Since the stolen sheep was eaten together with the thief's two companions, from them too a sheep apiece, or its price, is collected. Then the school board member, or the teacher, is summoned, and a signature is taken from him that he has received three sheep from A. and his two companions, and the matter is closed.

I brought this example from the villages of Takhm,^t3 where I myself carried out such a verdict.

The church and school affairs.— The Russian restrictions on the estates and the schools of the Armenian church had yielded a result contrary to the authority's wishes.

Before they resorted to those coercive measures, schools were to be found only in those places where there was an Armenian church, under whose shelter the schools were organized under the name of parish schools. From the joined income of the two the expenses of the church and the school were met. In the towns and at certain points, where the need for schooling was felt and where the churches had more income than their needs, other revenues too were added to the difference, and parish schools were opened. But in those places, chiefly the villages, where there was scarcely any thirst for schooling, and where only the priest's boys attended the monastery school, sending the rest of the children to school was reckoned as good as robbing them of their herding, and a dangerous business besides. Likewise, to give girls schooling meant to defile their morals. And with this understanding the village community had remained a hundred out of a hundred unschooled, illiterate. Eighty out of a hundred of the community of the province of Kars were illiterate.

To that backwardness the poorly endowed Armenian churchmen too contributed. The school, with its expenses, was a kind of rival to the livelihood and the well-being of the church's officials, since the income of the two came from the same source — the estates and the parish revenues. If schools were not opened, the whole revenue stayed with the church and its officials. If they were opened, their own income would be cut down. Therefore they either made no effort at all to open schools, or the schools were opened in a "symbolic" way — that is, to throw dust in the eyes of the school-lovers, and likewise to increase the income. In other words, they confined themselves to opening "Der Todikian schools."^t4

It was on this ground, then, that the broad and bright state schools sprouted like mushrooms in the district of Kars. These promised to give such an education that those who studied there could become not only priests but literate officials as well — which smiled on the common people.

Let me give the word to Vahinak Chilinkirian, who, though he was a teacher in state cap and uniform in a village that lay on the Kars–Sarighamish road, was nonetheless with us. He had splendid quarters attached to the state school, the like of which you could find only in the town; he drew 30 rubles and had other conveniences from the state. In a word, he had a condition that was enviable for the class of the petty townsfolk. Of the pupils he had once had, 25 remained. Only one was an Armenian, the son of a local official, who by the committee's leave attended that state school. The rest of the Armenians had drawn their children out on account of the "boycott." The remaining 24 of the state school, then, were boys of the foreign nations.

This friend of my childhood, whose uniform was an enemy to me, but whose inner man was more of a patriot than I, reasoned thus:—

"It is true that in these two years the greatest miracle took place. Our backward, religious communities awoke again and clasped the national idea. In all of them one will and one faith were created, and our people showed such adroitness, boldness, and resolve that they earned the leadership of the nation — happily. To all appearance the victory is on our side, and it is the Russian empire that is beaten before the Dashnaktsutiun. The proof is that in the school entrusted to me not one Armenian pupil has remained, and the boycott is everywhere complete. I am not one of those who ascribe these successes and those of the past to the Dashnaktsutiun alone, or to the strength of the reborn Armenians it has led. If one quarter of our successes is to be ascribed to the Dashnaktsutiun and to the Armenians, three quarters must be ascribed to the imbecile Golitsyn^t5 policy, of which the Dashnaktsutiun was able to make use. Do not be surprised if I say, 'Long live Golitsyn.' We owe our rebirth to him."

When, a little astonished, I looked at him, he went on:

"By the nature of my office I have many dealings with people of every sort. A year ago, when there was no boycott, my pupils' parents used to come and ask: 'When my boy finishes this shkol (the school) will he be able to become a chinovnik (an official), and how many manet hakh (how many rubles' stipend) will he draw?' I would answer them something, but I would grieve. When the boycott came and the parents drew their children out of the school, those same men would approach me as though I were cholera. One of them even — surely one of ours — called me a dog Judas and threw dung at me. In my heart I rejoiced, I smiled in spite of myself, and for that I heard a fresh curse:

"— He has neither honor nor shame; you spit in his face, and he takes it for rain.

"I said nothing. Let me give you one more example, so that you understand the state of mind. I have a friend, a der-der, who, it is true, has no pectoral cross, but whose gold watch has so long a gold chain that you would think he had a pectoral cross. Now and then he would bring me a roasted hen, cream, butter too, and would keep singing the praises of my school.

"— Der Hair," I said to him one day, "your village is rich; the church, the school, has much 'Ovkh'^t6 land. If I were in your place, I would open a better school than this one entrusted to me. Do that, and take me too for a schoolmaster.

"— No, my son," he answered, "your thought is good, but it is not an experienced man's counsel. The Gospel says, 'No man can serve two masters.' And truly, can two watermelons be held in one hand? If we keep up the church, the school cannot be kept up. If we keep up the school, the church cannot be kept up. Do not speak that counsel elsewhere; it is bad for you too. What — do you wish us to raise a flag against the Russian tsar? Let us give thanks to God that the tsar has come forward and with his own money has opened such a school, and set an Armenian schoolmaster over it, and wishes to make men of the foreign boys. Are we to go and claw at his face?"

I was cornered, and I did not argue back; I only said:

"— It was to try you alone that I made known these thoughts, Der Hair. Of course, what you say is right."

But I understood that our der-der was something of a snake. Afterward I understood that he was a very enterprising man; both the church land and the land in the school's name he had taken on lease at no price at all, and thinks only of the adornment of the church. But as to what the income is, and what the outgo, that he alone knows. We shy away from one another now, and when we meet, we change our road."

"Very well, Vahinak — what is the link of all this with your 'Long live Golitsyn'?"

"What is your hurry?" he answered, and poured out another tea from the samovar. "Today, and tomorrow, and the day after, you are with me; little by little I will open my heart. There is no harm to you, there is profit to me. My heart is full; I cannot empty it. Let me tell one more story, so that it may be understood why I said 'Long live Golitsyn.'

"There is a very clever friend of mine, a Greek teacher. We are intimate, and he comes often as my guest. He knows Armenian too. He knows our history better than we do. To pass the time I asked him:

"— You boast that you are a Greek and cleverer than the Russians and the Armenians. Well then, let me set two questions before you; solve them. My questions are: (a) What must the Russians do to reach their aim with regard to the Armenians? and (b) What must the Armenians do so that the Russians do not reach their aim?

My friend accepted my proposal, on condition that he answer the first question and I the second. Whichever man's arguments were unanswerable, he had won, and the loser must stand a good feast. I agreed, and he began.

1.— Let us grant that Russia wishes to swallow the Armenians and dissolve them in her own stomach. Do you agree?

I answered: Yes.

2.— Do you agree that the precondition of swallowing is that bones and thorns in the mouth must be broken up, mixed with saliva, and then swallowed?

I said, "Yes."

3.— Is not the Pobedonostsev,^t7 or rather the Golitsyn, policy of swallowing the Armenians to be reckoned a failure, when the whole of the Armenians has become united and rebellious, while Golitsyn himself, having taken the blows of a dagger, has withdrawn?

"— Yes," I said, "for the present it has failed."

"— If that is so, then that great empire is a fool, since it cannot eat this apple, these Armenians, the easiest mouthful there is."

4.— There was a Russian minister by the name of Delyanov,^t8 who first put forward the plan for Russifying the Armenian schools. I believe he was an Armenian by origin — is that not so?

"— So they say," I answered.

"— That is a secondary question, but the essential thing is this: are there to be found Armenians of the like — men who know the Armenian tongue too, yet who by their conduct are cleverer than Golitsyn and Delyanov and share their views?"

"— Why not; they may be found," I answered.

5.— We have agreed that Golitsyn has failed and will soon die. Russia loses nothing, since he is going to die anyway. But Russia will gain, if he (Golitsyn) is condemned and put to death. Do you not agree? What impression do the Armenians in particular take, if the Russian prosecutor demands the degradation or the death penalty for that headstrong governor who by his ill-considered steps aggrieved the loyal Armenian people? Do you not think that in that case the Armenians' hatred toward the Russian will scatter, and the anchors of this revolution will fall, and there will remain a few individuals of the clever ones? But what worth has cleverness?

"— Yes," I answered, "much would change."

6.— Then we are agreed that much would change by that one corpse. If that is so, I reckon the time has come for a capable Armenian to be set at the head of the Caucasian Viceroyalty — more knowing and more capable than Delyanov; for example, a Loris-Melikov, a Lazarev. If that Armenian is to stir the envy of the Tatar, the Georgian, and everyone, the Armenians will believe that they are the preferred ones for Russia. He will come, and pay his first visit to the Catholicos; and, receiving the return visit, he will take from him a formulated petition, in which there will be asked, in the first rank, the return of the exiles, the freeing of the prisoners, the return of the church estates and likewise of the properties and their free disposal by the spiritual authority, the freedom of the Armenian spiritual and secular schools, and so forth. I believe the whole of the Armenians will await its result.

"— To be sure," I answered.

7.— The Viceroy, to be sure, at the prompting of Petersburg, contrary to the discontent of many, will endorse the Catholicos's petition thus: "In accordance with the appeal of the Armenian Patriarch, I order:

"(a) To set free at once all members of the Armenian political parties who are in the prisons and in exile.

"(b) To return the Armenian church estates, goods, and properties, and to pay compensation for the damages. Their owner and administrator shall be exclusively the spiritual authority, under the higher supervision of the Armenian Patriarch. Those schools which are for the preparation of the clergy must be maintained from the church revenues and must be subject exclusively to the spiritual authority, under the higher supervision of the Patriarch.

"(c) To determine the number of the ecclesiastical schools and to separate the secular schools from them, be they primary or secondary. To subject the ecclesiastical schools exclusively to the spiritual administrations, and the secular schools to boards elected from the people and from the secular class. After the ecclesiastical schools and the church needs have been secured, to pass on the remaining estate and other determined revenues to the boards, to be allotted to the secular schools subject to them. Such an arrangement — what do you think, what effect and impression would it leave on the whole of the Armenians?"

"— A rejoicing equal to a firework display, and astonishment, gladness, and gratitude," I answered.

"— If that is so, show me your purse a moment; I have need of money," said the Greek teacher, and out of the 40 rubles I had he put 20 into his own pocket, and invited me to a feast at his place.

He, going on with his talk, said, laughing:

"— Did I not tell you that the Armenian's wits are in his heart and not in his head? We agreed that in order to swallow, one must first divide into parts, crumble small, mix, and then gulp down. Now, Golitsyn did not do so, but greedily wished to gulp down the Armenians at one go, and paid with his head. The Armenians, ossified in the Russian throat, would not go in; they had to be given back up. And what I said above was only to get that bone out, so that the empire^t9 might be saved and the pursuit continue, which stays the same — that is, to swallow the Armenians into the Russian stomach. And that has already been brought off, when you say that the Armenians will be 'grateful,' when the tsar carries out the concessions I named above through a Russian viceroy of Armenian origin. That enchantment, that gratitude, will become your death. The opening of the prison doors, the pardon of all the condemned, will break the fanaticism of the Armenian revolutionary element, and its momentum, which is your strength. The settling of the church and school questions, which was the one cause of your national unity, will vanish, and you will no longer have a single question able to gather all the classes around the revolutionaries. The condition that gives all the properties to the disposal of an incompetent and pretentious ecclesiastical authority, while on the other side it invites the secular men too into the work for the secular schools, is bound to become the cause of your discord. The spiritual authority, leaning on the state order, will prove that the revenues are barely enough for the needs of the churches and the ecclesiastical schools, and will allot nothing to the secular schools. With that the secular class will remain discontented. One will say: 'The nation is the church, and its prelates are the leaders'; the other will say: 'The nation is the representation of the people.' And both sides will be encouraged by the state. The gulf will deepen, and the Armenians will be in two pieces. The secular men, who have the present-day parties, will not give way; they will make an effort to have their schools independent of the clergy. And, as at present, they will open their schools in the haylofts, paying the teachers free or a paltry wage. In a short time a new question will arise — namely, that either the state must help with money, from which will follow the state's supervision over the secular schools, or the pupils must be sent to the state schools, and that is bound to become the cause of the boycott's ending and of the Russian schools filling up. This was Golitsyn's aim all along. Let one thing be plain: your present strength, your unity, is the result of the Russian's wrong course rather than of the awakening of your consciousness. That error the Russian will correct — not by giving up his plan, but by striving toward it along new roads. His retreat is no defeat; your victory settles nothing.^t10

"Now the turn is yours, to prove the second thesis and take the 20 rubles from me for a second feast."

Vahinak, finishing, asked:

"How am I to prepare my thesis, so as not to lose another 20 rubles?"

In those days I had no answer, and found what the Greek said unanswerable.

Yet what is unanswerable in quantity and in reckoning is answerable by faith in one's own strength, when the instinct of self-preservation drives a people to disregard everything and to be as daring as stinging bees are daring, though their sting may become the cause of death to the very one that stings.

When I told my comrades of the thoughts of Vahinak and his Greek friend, and of my own doubts, they grew angry. Evidently they too had no answer.

"Janım," said Sergei, "one work opens another. If everything is to go by reckoning, we must fold our arms and bow our heads. And where, in that case, is the revolution to be? Today we will do what is possible; and as for the future, let the coming generation think about that. You busy yourself with putting the schools of the villages of Takhsh^t11 in order."

By 1904, before I left Kars, in all the inhabited places where there were Armenians there had been organized school boards, which without permission of the authorities levied a "ghubara"^t12 from the villages' inhabitants; and where there were no school buildings, they would dig the foundations of buildings and raise up the walls, gather a tax in kind, or with the "ghubara" sow fields, and secure the expenses of the schools to come. The undisciplined they subjected to a fine, and the fine too they added to the school revenue. They sought out teachers, and when they did not find a suitable one, they set to work those there were. And there it was — the school stood ready, and the pupils came. The quality was low, and in many places they could have vied with the Der Todikian schools; but they were all of them proud that they would not be Russians, and that they had an Armenian school, and did not send their children to the "shkol."

I have gone on at length about the school movement of Kars, because the forms it applied served on a broad scale as a model for the educational work of the Land. The Prince,^t13 after 1904, applied on a large scale in Lernapar^t14 what he had seen in Kars; and I too, who crossed into Taron, imposed the same form in the world of Taron.

The party revenues.— One of the field-workers' basic duties was the collection of the party dues and the increase of the revenues. To this they gave, besides its material sense, a moral sense as well.

Whoever counted himself a Dashnak was subject to the party dues (tuyt). The dues were the basic revenue and the measure of one's grasp of duty. A man who by his gifts made a material sacrifice a hundred times greater, but did not pay his dues month by month, was outside the ranks. The dues were not proportional, but according to means. The one who fixed the amount was not the payer himself, nor the higher bodies, but the comrades who belonged to his own band or Sub-Committee. If someone, prompted by ardor, took upon himself more in dues, or, prompted by stinginess, took upon himself less, the ones who fixed the amount of his dues were his comrades. The dues never went beyond 1 to 3 percent of anyone's fixed income.

For the field-worker, when collections were being made, individual persons did not exist. He received the sum of the list and the fixed dues presented by the Sub-Committee or the band. The real collector from individuals was the Sub-Committee or the band. Non-payers were reckoned out of the ranks. The sums of those who paid more were presented under the name of gifts.

The number of the enrolled was scarcely 1 to 2 percent of the population. Their dues were paltry, compared with the general revenue of the party. In that numerical limitation was reckoned its quality, since it was the stable and unchanging part. What the Dashnaktsutiun collected was from beyond the ranks. But the ones who kept it stable and gave it life were the few enrolled. In 1904 the number of that collected body was about 80 percent of the population, which wavered with its own mood and rose and fell in its amount. That depended, on the one hand, on the labor of the enrolled and the zeal of the field-workers, and, on the other, on the outward situation. The amount of the revenue came 90 percent from that collected body, but not by monthly payment — rather from festivals, gifts, collections, fines, and so forth. The revenue too wavered like the mood of the collected body.

This form of revenue of the district of Kars was valuable for this reason, that the field-workers passing through it and entering the Land copied it and brought it into the Land.

The expenses and the purchase of arms.— These affairs too weighed on the field-workers of the district, whose pivot was Hagop (Chilinkarian)^t15 in 1904.

For the province and the town there were kept up continually 15 to 20 soldiers and, on the average, 5 field-workers. But Hagop, in the name of the Central Committee of course, had set himself to establish rules that this should be done without expense. His "laws" were:—

(a) The field-worker or the soldier who has vowed to devote his life to the nation must have no money, under the name of a salary or any other. If he takes money, that is equal to selling his blood.

(b) Every house of the nation is his house; and that house which shuts its doors and does not receive as a guest the one who is dying for it, is not Armenian.

(c) These sacrifices are for the wretched, above all; therefore the field-worker, the soldier, must prefer to be a guest in the houses of the poor and to "break their bread," rather than of those who have the means. Your host is hungry; you too must stay hungry with him.

By these principles all the expenses were done away with. There were deviations only in the town, where, on the condition of not spending more than 20 kopeks a day, the expenses were paid.

Eighty percent of the party revenue went to the purchase of arms and cartridges. With them the stores were filled — stores that were not for the district of Kars, but to be sent into the Land. Money was turned into arms by the following means:—

Those who were in the Russian army and counted themselves Dashnaks or sympathizers had to perform their material duty by bringing cartridges and arms — that is, by stealing from the state. At the same time they had to show the Russians and the men of the other nations the means of turning war-matériel into money.

This was brought about in the following way:— The Russian soldier loves brandy and women. But once in two months he received 37 kopeks of pay, which was not enough even for his poor sort of tobacco. Therefore he could have his beloved pleasures only by theft, through the bawdy-houses and through the go-between men of the "mkitans" (dram-shops).^t16 To these there were left open advances of a thousand rubles apiece, on the condition that they give war-supplies at fixed prices — a cartridge, for example, at half a kopek. So it was that all the places of debauchery and drunkenness became arms-markets. These establishments were night and day under the supervision of the police, but at the same time they were sheltered by the authority, to scatter the soldier's boredom. Before the eyes of the police the soldiers would come and enter by the main door. On their backs they had their long "shinels" (greatcoats),^t17 under which they hid all sorts of war-supplies.

"— Give a bottle of Smirnov brandy," the soldier would call out, and would slide his Nagant^t18 pistol behind the "till."

"— Give ghavghavat,"^t19 the next would call, and slide a bag of cartridges behind the "till."

And so, on the cry of "give, give," the splendid table was ready — without money — the cups were filled, and the songs began.

If the soldier were searched and the secret of the theft came to light, the one answerable was the soldier, before a military court…

But when the songs of merriment were sounding, the danger was removed from the soldiers and concentrated on the head of those establishments and of those who served them. There might be informers; the same soldiers, drunk, might demand more than the food they had received; the secret police might have noticed the arms-trade and seize them on the spot and bring these strange tradesmen before a military court.

What is the harm, we would think — let there be one profiteering rake the fewer, if he is unable to conceal what he has bartered. They generally did conceal it.

Besides the entrance door, the tavern had without fail a back door as well, or a window, or a hole made on purpose. The moment the shopkeeper took the war-supplies, he would draw secretly near that door, the window, or the hole, bring his goods out, and give them to an unknown man waiting there. His shop was now "clean"; if they wished, let them come and search.

The danger now was only on the head of that receiving man, who was the go-between's man. He was bound to throw what he received into a carriage waiting 50 paces off, and to return to his hiding-place^t20 and wait at the back door, to receive fresh "goods." The carriage would race off, loaded, and at the appointed place would find another carriage, to which it passed its goods without a word. Then it would return to its place.

The first carriage was likewise the go-between's, and the one answerable for the danger was the go-between. The second carriage was escorted by our comrades — usually Medzik, Andranik, Mato^t21 — who conducted it to the appointed place, where Hagop made the reckoning and gave it over to other persons, who lost the trail, carried it off, and stowed it in the stores. Those stores were outside the town, in the villages and the ravines.

The responsibility for these last operations fell on the party.

The third means of procuring war-supplies was the bribe. That was brought off by finding a common tongue with officers or store-keepers. In that case the "goods" were emptied from the state stores and carried over to our stores.

However easy this operation may seem in the telling, it was hair-raising and extremely dangerous. The man who went on it had first to make his will. For all that, the state stores were emptied many times, in many ways, each one of which might become a detective novel, with unimaginable adventures. But let us leave aside these real novels that actually happened. Later, by way of an example, I will perhaps tell of the deeds done in Alexandropol by Vagho of Padua^t22 and Harutyun of Sebastia, which by their scale cast into shadow the deeds of emptying the Kars stores.

From what I have said it must be plain that by all means, permitted and unpermitted, war-supplies were being gathered in Kars. Unpermitted means were applied, because there was no other means of procuring arms in an orderly way. Arms were a strictly forbidden article, but they had at all costs to be procured for the Land.

The proverb says truly: "When the thief is of the house, he carries the ox off by the roof." No authority, with its prohibitions, is able to prevent it, if a people has as its leader an organization like the Dashnaktsutiun of that date, for which no impossible thing existed.

The propaganda.— This work too weighed on the field-workers, the circuit-riders. Written propaganda did not exist, because at that date not one party newspaper was published in Russia, in Turkey, or in Persia, nor any other literature. Our newspapers published abroad did not reach the Caucasus, and even if they did reach it, they were already stale. Droshak was our only official organ, which was kissed like a Narek^t23 as a holy thing, but which, like it, was wrapped in handkerchiefs and set aside. It was read only by a small number of individuals.

I do not think that the press and literature played a great part, at least in our popular course of 1904. My own circle was guided by watching the beat of the popular current, and its theories had their source in work and in life. Reading was very slight.

I too, moved by that atmosphere, had set aside the following of both the Russian and the Armenian newspapers, and had even become their enemy. Like the others I would think, and would say to myself: "They turn a flea into a camel, but the elephant with its trunk they do not see. Life, work, goes on its way like a river, while they have risen up and are showing the river a new road. The river cannot climb the mountain; but they have risen up and reckon that if it climbed the mountain, it would be very well. Like a worm clinging to a leaf, if it goes by any current, willing or unwilling, they believe that it is they who go, and that they are showing the giant river its road."

We gave no force to the press, nor did we lend an ear to its good or its bad. And I would add that it was an evil, a factor that darkens the natural judgment, and black ink on the white.

Yet, for all that, we knew the Program and the By-laws by heart, and read attentively the circulars of the Bureau and the Central Committees and analyzed them for everyone.

The chief means of propaganda was oral preaching, which was accessible and intelligible to everyone. It was carried out on the one hand by the ashughs, and on the other by the intellectual preachers.

The worth of the ashughs has not been appreciated, though it was thanks to them that our popular mass awoke from its sleep and began to think. They had nothing to do with the present; the present was a pretext that moved them to recall the instincts of already forgotten ages, buried in the people's heart. They stirred up the hidden old fire and displayed it as the present. They made the Davids of Sasun of old living and present — which was what the people sought. Leaving aside the present, they made the future too the present, and showed the people's longings as an accomplished fact — which was what the people looked for.

The chief of those ashughs was Fahrat, the ashugh blind in both eyes, who would deliver a discourse and strike the tar and sing: "…Plpul-Kar, Antok, and Kepin, and brave Simon Zavarian when he drew the sword"… And if you were to remark, "Fahrat jan, but Simon was never in Sasun, he is no man to draw a sword," Fahrat would answer: "Mind your own business — he was not, but a man like that has to be from Sasun; and if he is no drawer of the sword, then he ought to draw it."

The matter was not only plain but desirable to everyone. You could remark that Fahrat was blowing up the pictures, and could remain wholly unpersuaded that "Sultan Hamid's throne was shaken," but all those puffings of his were pleasing, and it was desirable to hear them.

In a word, the ashughs were the awakeners of the longings of the past and the future. For that we ought to be very grateful to them.

After the ashughs' short tale, the song and the playing, the true lecturers, the preachers, came onto the field, who brought the hearers down onto the ground of the legends and spoke of the present, however bitter it might be.

Kars had seen many preachers, transient and abiding, whom it remembered. It had seen Rostom — stammering, but full of substance^t24 — of whom they used to say: "You lend an ear, you understand something, and you are filled." It had seen Khazhak, who, when he spoke, seemed to bring the wind of Alagyaz. It had seen N. Aghbalian, who, like a prophet, counted a man's teeth in his mouth. It had seen Vramian, who spoke so fast that what would take others a year to say, he said in an hour. It had seen many others too, who like those had come and passed and left something. But among them all one was abiding to the last minute of his life. That was Norhatian, who had become one of the household. And beside him two men were always and with sorrow remembered. One was Yegor (Arastamian), of whom they used to say that he sang like a "houri, a peri," and led men toward death as though he were leading them to a wedding. The other was Sergei, of whom they used to say that he was rough and coarse, but spoke to the point,^t25 to the jan said jan, to the sore spot said sore.

When I came up to Kars, the central figure of propaganda had, it turned out, remained Sergei, surrounded by the likes of me, who, though they saw and understood, yet when it came to making the man before them understand, their tongue turned to wood, grew heavy. So it was well that we kept silent and left the propaganda work to Sergei.

So we reasoned, Hagop and I, Levon and Rus-Kevork, and others as well. And Sergei had gatherings every night, under the pretexts of a wedding, a betrothal, a christening, or others, with 100 to 300 invited guests.

Our own propaganda was confined to the bands, where, in the presence of 10 to 20 men, we too became nightingales, answerers of question and probing.

Since all these affairs were carried out through the field-workers, the question naturally arises: what was the role of the Central Committee? At the same time the question is bound to be asked: was the Russian government asleep, imbecile, or bribed, that it tolerated within the authority another authority?

The Central Committee and the field-workers.— From the enumeration of the field-workers' chief labors it is intelligible that in general all the labors were carried out by the workers appointed by the Central Committee, while the Committee itself seemed not to exist, or to be a symbolic, impersonal administration, like an honorary chairman. So it was to all appearance, but so it was not in reality, since in its hand was the appointment and removal of the field-workers, since in its hand was the power to call to order and to punish the field-workers and all the soldiers and workers, since all had to work in its name, even though it were impalpable.

As I have said, the Central Committee was elected and cut off from the world. The conceiving of affairs, the establishing of order, and the having of a will did not belong wholly to the Central Committee, though it was the embodiment of all that. Those things were formed out of the longings and conceptions of the bands and the Sub-Committees rising from the low upward, which were distilled in the committees; while the Committee itself, leaning on the committees and having a direct link with them, was bound to give effect to their collective will, conception, and order. That was the reason why there could be no autocracy on the part of the Central Committee, though in form it acted as such a thing.

On the other side, all the field-workers, circuit-riders, and soldiers appointed by the Central Committee had but one duty — namely, to give effect to its will, to call the disorderly to order, to bring its conceptions to fulfillment, as the workers of the beehive do, or the soldiers of an army.

The strength, the vigor, was in the nameless collective. It did not hang on the brilliance of a single individual, whose eclipse often becomes the cause of the eclipse of the whole.

The Russian authority and the party.— It is wrong, of course, to think that the Russian authority was asleep, uninformed, imbecile, incompetent, or so lacking in will that it tolerated all this.

The Russian authority kept a keen watch. It had intelligence of everything. Already the operations directed against it had such a character that it could not fail to notice them. It had a giant force in that military zone. The number of its troops came double or equal to the population of the town. Perhaps it did not know for certain the names of the members of the Central Committee, but the field-workers were known to it — so well known that when Sergei passed through the streets, policemen and even the chief of police would salute him, without being acquainted with him. It was as though, beside the governor, he was the unofficial, the real governor. They saluted Hagop and the others likewise, whom, evidently, they set down as members of the Central Committee. And to Plo, who wished to be received as such a one and gave himself airs about it, they would say, laughing: "Evidently you too are the king of them all." He would hear it, but smile.

And yet the authority was bewildered and did not know what to do. First, because the Armenians were united, had formed one body around the Dashnaktsutiun, to touch one member of which might bring on again those calamities that a few months before had taken place at the time of the church demonstrations. And still more was awaited — up to armed insurrection. The Russian authority's one endeavor was to divide the Armenians from the Dashnaktsutiun, to which it ascribed all these things; while the drawing away of the Armenians from its skirts it counted a great loss to itself. But in bringing about that division it felt itself powerless.

By judicial, lawful means it could not carry out a pursuit, since for the things that had happened there was neither complaint nor public application, even on the part of the police. Matters had reached such a pitch that in broad daylight, in the street, the parents of one struck down, or the passers-by who knew by whom and how he had been struck, would give testimony that the deceased had in all likelihood taken his own life.

There remained the administrative means. But that too had its danger. Already the Golitsyn regime had so estranged the Armenians from the Russian dominion, had so weakened the Armenians' guileless servility and loyalty to Russian policy, that a man would throw off the Russian cap from his head and would use the papakha, even the fez.

The Dashnaktsutiun's watchwords — the self-determination of nations, the Caucasus for the Caucasians, Federation, and so forth — already spoke to the Armenians' heart and enjoyed sympathy among the other nationalities too. In Georgia as well there had been formed the party of the Federalists and the Georgian Social-Democrat party. This last, changing its international, anti-national course, showed a tendency to take its stand on the ground of national autonomy. Already in Guria (Georgia) there were movements of the like kind as in the Armenian districts, to which, if the Tatars too were to add their voice, the words "the Caucasus for the Caucasians" would become a real danger to Russia.

As a means of preventing that danger, the Russian authority did not count administrative squeezings a remedy. It counted the remedy to be the setting of the Caucasian peoples at odds with one another and, in the first rank, the breaking of the back^t26 of the Dashnaktsutiun and its extermination. That means it found, first, by setting the Socialists against the Dashnaktsutiun, who counted it a "chauvinist" organization; and then by stirring up the Armeno-Tatar clashes; and, finally, by coming to an agreement with Turkey, to destroy jointly the Armenian marauders who troubled the inner tranquility of Turkey and the Caucasus.

These, then, were the chief causes of its toleration. The government waited until the moment should ripen when "the dog could be strangled by the dog," as the Russian officials expressed it.

The Russian authority's aim had become, first and foremost, to isolate the Dashnaktsutiun.

The terror-acts.— When we consider the national unity of the Kars of the years 1903–4, its single-willed stance and struggle against the mighty Russian authority — when we consider the Armenians' self-sacrifice and discipline — we ask in spite of ourselves: Was that people really so conscious, was it really at that time so ripened, that among them there were no base men to disturb that single-willedness?…

To imagine that in those times men were born with none but virtues is baseless. Man is man at all times, with all his negative and positive qualities and, as the old wisdom says, "there is no village without its dog." But in order that the dogs should not be predominant, three conditions were necessary, of which we have counted two. One — the outward pressure, which endangered the vital interests both of the base and of the good. The second — the existence within the mass of an organization that united and led all toward the general liberation.

Yet those two were not enough to herd the wolf and the lamb into one flock. There was needed a third condition as well — to call the incorrigible egoists to order. That condition was the power to subject men to force and to responsibility. He who did not perceive that the danger of the whole was ruinous to his own interests, he who was unmoved by the moral atmosphere that the organization had created for the defense of the interest of the whole, had to be chained or exterminated. On that principle rested the party terror-acts of those years.

The terror-acts, according to their nature, were divided into two kinds — the outward, political, and the inner, national-disciplinary. The outward, political, could in its turn be divided into three kinds — the mass, the destruction of the anchors of the state, and the curbing of the state officialdom. The national-disciplinary could in its turn be divided into two kinds — that of a person or a small group, when they openly joined the enemies against their nation; and that of a person or a small group, when they had given themselves over to the craft of informing and treachery.

For offenses of the like kind the Central Committees gave their unanimous decision and gave it effect with the assent of the neighboring Central Committee or of a higher body.

For all the other offenses, however grave they might be, there was no death penalty by terror-act (ahabekum).^t27 For criminal offenses, for material embezzlements, for moral transgressions, for peculations, for breaches of discipline, men were subject only to punishments — yet on the condition that the person consented to bear those punishments and showed no resistance. In the contrary case, he was subjected to death by the administrative method. But to count that a terror-act is wrong. It is to be counted only a right — one that resembles the right of that commander who slays on the spot the soldier who resists or refuses to go to the front. In this class must be reckoned a number of killings — as, for example, the death of Vardo, which was carried out because he resisted the verdicts laid on him; or the terror-acts against the provocateurs^t28 when they disturbed order and peace. These administrative punishments were in general applied for inner party matters, with regard to those individuals who, making use of their position or of party authority, abused their strength. Whereas for the others, as I mentioned above, the terror-act decision was carried out in the accepted manner, for the five aims named.

It is not superfluous to recall briefly what those aims named above pursued.

Mass terror.— To this terror was subjected the Armenians, above all within the bounds of Turkey, which took on its official aspect in the years 1894–96, at the time of the Hamidian massacres. In the Caucasus Russia wished to replace that same form of mass slaughter or terror by the Tatar force. Mass terror in Turkey reached its summit of perfection in the years 1914–15, thanks to Dr. Nazim, Behaeddin Shakir, Talaat,^t29 and their comrades, who had set themselves the aim of radically solving the Armenian knot. But among the Armenians not one current, and above all the Dashnaktsutiun, ever so much as let it cross their mind^t30 to carry out such a mass terror in their own surroundings. The cause of not copying it must be sought not so much in the Armenian people's incapacity, nor in their being carried away by humane feelings alone, but chiefly in that principle — that the responsibility of vicious administrations rests not on the mass but on the authority; that by revolutionizing the mass and leading it, one can change the authority; that only by the establishment of a democratic authority will every nation, every class, win its freedom, and brotherhood, coexistence, and so forth be established.

This idealism was so deep-rooted in the Armenians and in the Dashnaktsutiun that to this day, with a peculiar emphasis and a peculiar pride, they sing: "Never is the vengeful Jan-Fidan^t31 to lay a hand on women." And from the founding of the Dashnaktsutiun down to today there is not one decision to carry out a mass terror with regard to a nation or a class.

The district of Kars, and with it all the other Central Committees, down to the years 1904 and after them down to the year 1917, held a firm and single-willed understanding with regard to mass terror. That is, that such a terror is not only an anti-human, anti-revolutionary barbarity, but is also aimless and ruinous — whereby to be against it is a sacred duty for every single revolutionary.

The terror of the destruction of the anchors of the state.— Kars counted the destruction of the anchors of the authority purposeful and revolutionary.

The Armenians, and together with them millions of other multitudes,^t32 reasoned Kars, suffer from two authorities — the Turkish and the Russian. Happily, both of them have the same state anchor, both are monarchical, both are absolute, and are headed by the sultan and the tsar. Ninety percent of the subjects would be glad of their removal. Now, to take these two out of the way, or to annihilate the anchors that support them, is a good for humankind.

Into the competence of the district of Kars there did not enter the application of such an undertaking; that the Bureau, or the bodies of Bolis and Petersburg, might do.

But the zeal to act in Kars was so great that it overflowed its banks.

"— We ask for the right," they would say. "Is a man needed to carry it out? We will give one. If the undertaking succeeds and the regime is not overthrown, no worse than what is will follow. There is a difference from tsar to tsar, from sultan to sultan. And if the regime is overthrown, that is already what we wish; there will be a revolution and a democracy^t33 will be established."

But in Kars, fallen into its corner, these musings were never carried out. Yet they served "as a maquette" to the ones who came and went. When the master is to build a mill and set it working, it is essential that he first copy the pattern drawn and measured beforehand. When Kars, with its peasant logic, would sing the praises of the Ottoman Bank, it drew the conclusion that this was the cause of the May reform program. When it glorified the attempt on the life of Golitsyn,^t34 which was the Hnchaks', it drew the conclusion that we owe it much. These became spurs to seek new and ever-new roads, to reach the aim and to drive men toward the attempt on Hamid, or the Ottoman revolution, or the Persian upheaval, at the hands of such men as had drunk the water of Kars. Among these last was also the modest Keri,^t35 who in Plo's workshop made bridles for horses and asses. But the flights of Kars drove him toward distant Persia, to forge there the tales he had heard in Kars.

In a word, Kars was a warm partisan of individual, state terror-acts.

The terror-acts to curb the state officialdom. This work, in the district of Kars, fell within the competence of the Central Committee. And on that matter it had a peculiar understanding. It is worth saying a few words about it, the more so as its conception differed from the conceptions of other districts.

Bznuni,^t36 who was a state official and at the same time a member of the Central Committee,(*) and Dr. Kazanjian, adorned in a different uniform, who was likewise a member of the Central Committee, and who won the fate of his comrades, being killed in Kars — these two, taking me in among them, would explain to me wherein I was mistaken.

(*) I think he too was killed, in that role, by the Turks.

"— That is the shortsighted and habituated understanding that perpetuates the tyrannical authority. It is not by looking at the feathers of a cock stuck on with spit that one ought to judge. The uniforms of the officialdom, of the army, are a compulsion — to turn us into machines, to deprive us even of the right to judge. Praise God, you too have worn it. Why do you not perceive it? One must root out that understanding — that the state officialdom and the army are enemies of the people and love the regime, the tyrannical authority. One must look at the officialdom and the army just as we look at the workers and servants hired at the factory-owner's, who, though they hate their exploiting factory-owners, yet do the work ordered them, which they do not love, for a bellyful of bread. The difference between the two is that one puts on a blue shirt, the other an ornamented uniform. But the blue shirt is preferable, since the meanest servant or worker draws 30 kopeks a day, while the soldier draws half a kopek, the policeman 10 kopeks. The worker, when he wishes, leaves his work and spits and walks off; the official cannot do that — he is wedded to his uniform. The worker makes, by order and against his will, the sword and the bayonet he does not love, but he has no moral responsibility for it; whereas that bayonet is given to the soldier or the policeman, and they are ordered to lodge it in the belly of the man before them, and he is answerable before his conscience. Neither of the two is a man, but a slave and, for a bellyful of bread, a machine, a tool turned against what he does not wish, an enemy of what he wishes. But of those two, the most pitiable are the servants of the regime, who, unhappily, by reason of shortsightedness, are hated by all and are not loved even so much as the worker — which is baseless and harmful. The revolutionary above all must think how to liberate that officialdom and army turned into a machine, and above all must love them, because their chains are the thickest of all; in them is the people's mind, its learning, its skill, and, in the end, they are compelled to be the prop of the hateful order. It is by loving them, by lightening their chains, by organizing them and punishing the incorrigible, that it will be possible to bring the revolution to success and to change the regime."

And Bznuni, beside himself, with his blue eyes and hooked nose, like a hawk, wished to peck at my eyes.

"— Listen. It is tens of years that I have been in the service; I understand better than you. When the soldier thrusts his bayonet into a man's belly, I do not pity the fallen one, but the striking soldier, and I strive to make him understand that the one who dies had no guilt, and neither had he, since he has carried out an order. When the policeman leads his friend chained to prison, I pity the policeman more than the prisoner. To console him I say: 'You could do no otherwise, it is an order.' And when I see tears in his eyes, I kiss him. When the tax-collector, turned to icy stone and scarcely holding himself in, stands before the door of the destitute, I draw near him and say: 'The sin is on the sinner; what sin have you?'

"But when I see that the official or the soldier feel pleasure and satisfaction in their evil deeds, I say, like you: 'These are lost past recall, and have sold their souls to the evil one.' The name I keep in my mind, and I count him an enemy. The number of such beasts is not great. Them one must pick out one by one and put to death — not in secret, but before the eyes of the officialdom, of the army. Many are struck dumb and feel themselves between two knives. Against an order we cannot rise, but we can avoid it — not see, not hear, confuse the right with the left. In a word, that class, whatever post and position it may have, whatever terrible deeds it may have done, must not be counted the people's enemy, but must be counted the people's own kin, and, as such, they must be won over step by step, man by man, knowing that one of them is worth a hundred of the other classes."

When I heard these words of Bznuni's, I could not believe that this silent and impalpable man was the death-angel of the officialdom and above all of the secret police. His door was shut before the Armenians, but open before all the Russian officialdom. He did not salute his comrades, but met the foreigners face to face with a smile. In his glittering clothes, seated in an open carriage, he paid visits to the tsarist officials. Once a week, seated in a closed carriage and having changed his uniform, he would go to the session of the Central Committee, where there was to be no outsider. And on that day blood smelled in the meeting, and a verdict was given to take or not to take the soul of this or that man.

It was a delicate matter to reach a terror-act decision with regard to members of the tsarist officialdom and the army. Not only had one to take into account the harm the condemned man had done to the community, but also whether his act fell within the condemned man's duties, and whether he had done it as an evildoer for his own pleasure, or had been compelled to do it. That was necessary so that the class to which the condemned belonged should not be stirred up, and so that the impression of the terror-act should at least in part be softened.

Thus, for example, if the condemned belonged to the military class, the reasoning was: "We send our sons to the army in the name of the people's security, to fight against the outer enemies; whereas Ivan, counting such-and-such a citizen an outer enemy, has tortured him and left such-and-such a family orphaned. In these conditions his death is a necessity for the people's interests."

If it was a policeman, the terror-act was reasoned thus: "We keep our sons, with our own money, as policemen, for our inner security. Such-and-such a man was neither a criminal nor a felon, and has been arbitrarily tortured and imprisoned on the strength of such-and-such a policeman's fabricated proofs. The real cause is the wringing of money, which does not serve the inner security," and so forth.

The arguments made in this direction, when they were real, proved, and beyond dispute, were written in a short form and fastened to the condemned man's corpse — which left a deep impression and drew from everyone, in spite of themselves, cries of "afarım" or "okh." When those cries of ratification were wrung from every heart, the terror-act carried out had reached its aim, the consequence was good, and the authority passed over it. In the contrary case, when there was an error in the condemnation and the terror-act was counted a crime, the consequence was negative, and the authority made of that error a bandage for its finger.

They used to tell me that from 1900 to 1904 there had been carried out in all eight terror-acts, of which seven were just, and one had been a "disgrace." The verdict had been just in that one too, but the ahabekich had been confused, had not recognized his victim, and had killed an innocent man and fastened the verdict to his breast. That error cost us dear, though, to expiate the error, material security was given to the family of the victim of the mistake.

The eight terror-acts against state officials and the army had been in the light of the sun, in the street, before all, "reasoned," and — what is the chief thing — not one ahabekich had been arrested. All of them had "vanished away."

They were well pleased with the consequence, though a few innocent passers-by had, it appears, been thrown into prison and were still kept by the authority, to give testimony as to the identity of the ones who carried out the terror-acts. But they persisted in their "I do not know."

They used to say, and I too would see, that the troops had orders not to interfere in criminal or political matters. Only the Cossacks would mingle and consort with the population, and often committed thefts.

The police performed its usual role, but was cautious in its arbitrariness, and when it sensed that the matter had a political lining, it would not see, or would forget what it knew. It would see men who were strangers in the district, but would not ask for a passport. It would see the guards going behind such a man, under whose belts there showed protruding bulges, which were surely pistols; but why should it see, when the man's name was not registered and this had not been laid on it either? Yet it well knew who those strangers were, and, when the place allowed, would salute them humbly as chiefs of the nation and fighters against the authority. But what need had it to bring them to light? Its duty was to carry out an order, and it had no order concerning such men. When there was an order, it would hasten its trusted men, to give word that within an hour they were coming to search, to arrest — let there be no unpleasantness. The police had become a kind of curtain to cover the revolutionaries' deeds.

There remained the hard thing — the secret police, the traitors, the informers.

The secret police, the traitor, and the informer.— The most difficult work of all was to determine exactly the secret police. They were the most dangerous, because they were not present in any deed, that you might see them; they had no name, that you might find them; they did not speak, that you might hear them. They were impersonal beings, who existed and were perhaps at your very side, and you did not recognize them. They saw you, and you did not see them. And what they saw was reported so secretly to the authority that only the exceptional could understand its essence.

Only approximately could you understand who the secret policeman was, when you were already in prison and subject to interrogation. Recalling the past, you could, by supposition, among a dozen names, search out and find the secret policeman, who might be someone you did not love or someone you loved much — your own kin, your comrade, your soldier, and, who knows, perhaps also your superior, the famous hero and field-worker, of whom you thought, but did not dare to think highly. Why not. When Azef,^t37 who was a member of the central body of the most daring of the Russian terrorist Socialists, could at the same time be a member of the secret police, why could not the like of him be also among us? Already this very thought was a crumbling and a weakening, which the Central Committee had to take into account, yet must keep, with cold blood, a keen watch.

There were two means of finding the secret police. First — to attend to the suspicions and the movements of the people round about, and above all to their material income and their expenses, which led to mere suppositions. And second — to have in the state establishment trusted or bought officials, who would beforehand make known the list of the secret police, and, if that was impossible, at least those operations that sprang from the secret police's reports.

These means could limit the evil, but the real source stayed conjectural. Therefore, with regard to that suspect element, a terror-act decision was not given in the accepted manner and publicly; rather, counsel was given to the suspects to leave their districts, and the very suspect ones would vanish away.

If in a nation there are no traitors and informers, the authority with all its means becomes powerless, and even its secret police becomes fruitless.

It was not hard to forestall those two plagues. That, at any rate, was easier than the secret police. In Kars they went about it in the following way:—

In the first place they worked to create such an atmosphere, above all among the little ones and the women, that these should feel disgust toward the traitor and the informer, and should shrink from these last more than from cholera. The means of bringing that about was strong preaching, with historical, religious, moral matter. And when on a Night of Darkness^t38 a guileless child would ask its parent: "Why did Jesus not do worse than death to that Judas?" the parent would shudder more at its own switch^t39 than at the gallows and the bullet. When such questions were asked within the families, the snakes died within the house.

In the second place it was necessary to know where they came from and how those snakes were created. It was understood that a large percentage of the traitors came out from among the chatterers, the vainglorious, the boasters. Among them were gathered the reputed traitors. In essence they were neither traitor nor informer, and even shuddered at being such. They hated the Judases, the Vasaks,^t40 though the consequences of their own tongues carried them to those men's estate. They had fallen, unwilling, through frivolity, onto that path, being unable to measure the consequences of their act. To count them traitors, to subject them to a terror-act, would become equal to the creation of real traitors within their very families. On the contrary, one had to make them one's own partisans, to let them live and see the consequences of their act, so that their conscience should torment them. But it was also necessary at all costs to punish them, so that they should remember their error forever. And that punishment had to be the beating with the switch,^t41 either alone or in the presence of the family. The blows of the switch became a salve to the voice of their conscience; and when they cried, "May your hand stay green," you could understand that you had become, in spite of yourself, a fellow worker against the voluntary traitors and informers.

The greatest part of the traitors and informers arose from personal or other enmities against one another. We are a passionate people; in a tight place we go to every extreme. The means of drying up those extremes was the inner peace of the people and the resolving of all disputes by our courts. But as for those who nonetheless went as far as treachery and informing, the remedy for such men was terror. It was necessary at all costs to subject them to a terror-act — on the condition that the treachery or the informing had been established, on the condition that the terror-act was not carried out by the opposing side, but by men close to the person, or by the party's soldiers, in broad daylight; the executing hand was to be made plain to all^t42 by its reasoning. The corpse of the one who bore the terror-act had to be buried, without mutilation, apart, at the edge of the road, so that the passers-by should each throw a stone on his grave and say, "A curse on the bearer," and beg God to forgive him.

Our organization of Kars had created this mystic psychology around the traitors and the informers, and it was so mighty, so out of keeping with its own traditions, that they were the exceptional who went to those extreme deeds out of the prompting of love, of money, of a bribe, or of ardor. The bread brought by a traitor or an informer, his own child, his mother, his wife, would not eat. That the one who stumbled^t43 knew, and he too, to cover his act, would cry: "Away — the traitor's bread is pus." But that repentance did not raise him up.^t44 By his own kinsmen he was pitied,^t45 and his blood was counted "halal," lawful.

A few words too on the operation of the terror-act.

It would be no exaggeration if I said that in the years 1903–4 there was not one Armenian who was a traitor, an informer, in the true sense of the word. And that cleansing we owed first and foremost to the atmosphere that had been created. Scarcely eight terror-acts in all^t46 had been carried out in the whole province in the course of five years. But the whole population, taking in the army too, lived in the nightmare of the terror-act. It did not perceive that that terror lay not in the terrorists and the severity of the punishment, but in its own psychology, in its own imagination.

This, then, is why the operation of the terror-act was counted easy and natural by all. The ahabekich was the Angel Gabriel, to resist whom was unnatural. He had no guilt; he was only the executor of a higher will. He had to be helped. He was invisible and invulnerable. His "hands" were even "green." In these conditions it was harder for a matnich^t47 to slaughter a sheep than for the ahabekich to kill a colonel before the eyes of his troops, or a traitor on the threshold of his own door, and to remain unknown, without arrest and without complaint.

We had not one terrorist arrested. They all stayed unknown, but about them all everyone knew, and dined with them in reverence, without speaking of what had been done.

At the time of the ahabekich's operation, everyone's doors had to be open, to save him from pursuit they had to show a road, to disguise him they had to give clothing. If it was a policeman who saw, he had to lead the other astray and foil the pursuit, and he had to hear about his identity. Those were counted answerable who had not helped; while the helpers of the authority might be killed on the spot, or had to kill themselves, so as not to fall into the ahabekich's hands.

A few words too on the choosing of the terrorists.

In the affairs of Turkish or Russian courts, or of other systems, it has often been heard that the ahabekiches were chosen by lot or by a "committee's" order. That means that they did not understand that "one does not strangle the wolf by beating the dog," and that the one who went to a terror-act by lot or by order might make that delicate work miscarry.

The one who went to a terror-act had, first, to have resolved that the work given had at all costs to be brought off. Second — he must not be arrested, neither wounded nor unharmed. Third — he had to be able to get free without leaving his trail. Fourth — if he could do none of these, he had at all costs to die.

From that it is plain that the ahabekich, besides courage, had to have something more as well. He had at all costs to have the certainty of succeeding, and the question of his escape or of certain death had to be secondary for him. That quality only the ahabekich himself could determine, and the order or counsel of a third person, or a compulsion by lot, could bring no profit but only harm.

The choosing was in general in the following way:—

Someone on the part of the Central Committee would call to him the person who was counted fit for the appointed terror-act, and would propose:

"— There is a grave, responsible work to be carried out, for the success of which one man is to be answerable. Are you able to take on such a work?"

The answer to that proposal had to be given only the next day. When the night had passed, after the anguish, and the answer was in the affirmative, then only would the Central Committee's representative lay open the essence of the work, give the needed information and conveniences, and, if he heard no objection, give a short time to carry out the commission, and set him on his road with the words "success, or your little head."

In general the ones who carried out the terror-acts performed the duty laid on them without flaw — and in Kars always, because the people helped the ahabekich. The chief cause of the terrorists' success was that the factors that impelled him were neither office, nor glory, nor above all material matters, but one single fixed thought — to annihilate an evil that endangered the community, and certain death or escape without a trace, so that the community should not be endangered.

The ahabekich who strikes his adversary at the very first sight of him — from him one may expect a miracle. He who dawdles and, after seeing him several times, cannot take the decisive step — of him one must beware; everything may be well by reckoning, but the fanaticism being wanting, the work^t48 turns out defective. One must not fall into two errors. One must not think that a miracle-working ahabekich, who has brought off a work counted hopeless and himself risen up without a trace, is able, as an experienced man, to carry out a second and a third miracle. That is wrong, because the foundation of the miracle done is a fanatical resolve, which may have altered. After tasting certain death and getting free, in general life grows sweet. The vitality^t49 of his surroundings and of his own self gives a spur to ambition; the rising up from death^t50 breeds the craving to live, the fanaticism wanes, and a wavering arises. And you see, by examples, that the one who swims the sea drowns in a brook.

The second error is that the initial self-satisfaction shown by the terrorists is turned into the measure of their idealism throughout the whole course of their life. He who has carried out one or two, or at most three, terror-acts, and has neither the passion nor the desire to carry out more — who does not even remember his deeds — may still be possessed of the ideal. But he who takes pleasure in the terror-act and seeks it out — that means that he has lost his ideal. From such a one one must expect evil.

Truly did Serpey^t51 and Norhatian say:

"— The man he is to kill,^t52 but who cannot slaughter a hen — love him and count him a comrade, but forbid him to kill a second time. And the man who has carried out many terror-acts and has taken pleasure in it — count him an enemy."

And indeed, in Baku, Tiflis, Erevan, and elsewhere, that element sank so low that it became necessary to destroy those heroes in a body or piecemeal, though they had been the bravest of the brave, the most self-sacrificing of the self-sacrificing, in their first steps. The man who kills more than once turns dasak^t53 — a hired blade.