Journal ArticleOpen Access
Hovhannisyan, Gegham, 2025
Բանբեր հայագիտության / Banber Hayagitutyan (International Review of Armenian Studies), 2025, No. 2(38), pp. 32–47; DOI 10.54503/1829-4073-2025.2.32-47
The First World War threw the Hunchak Party into crisis and left its Paris central administration non-functional, prompting a new leadership to form in Tiflis, where Tashir (Simon Hovvian) was elected. Already known as a publicist, party theorist and teacher at the Gevorgyan Seminary, he edited the newspaper Gaghapar in 1916–1917. Tashir was sceptical of the Armenian volunteer movement and tied the resolution of the Armenian Question to international social democracy and national self-determination. Between 1917 and 1920, as many Transcaucasian Hunchaks drifted toward the Bolsheviks, he argued for the Hunchak Party's independent existence, holding that Armenian liberation depended on Soviet Russia and on internal Armenian conditions rather than on the European powers.
Journal ArticleOpen Access
Hovhannisyan, Gegham, 2024
Fundamental Armenology, No. 2 (20) (2024), pp. 31–41 (National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia, Yerevan)
This article examines the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party's approach to the restoration and preservation of Armenian statehood in the critical years 1918-1921. Hovhannisyan traces the party's positions primarily through its organ Young Armenia and the writings of ideologue Stepan Sapah-Gyulyan. The study analyzes how international political events, the Paris Peace Assembly, the mandate discussions, and the resurgence of Russian power, shaped Hunchakian assessments of the Republic of Armenia's prospects. It follows the party's evolving stance from the First Republic through the establishment of Soviet Armenia, showing how regional threats forced pragmatic recalculations of the statehood question. Hovhannisyan draws explicit historical parallels between the dilemmas of 1918-1921 and contemporary challenges facing Armenian statehood. The article was translated from Armenian by Gevorg Harutyunyan and is freely available.
ThesisOpen Access
Moumdjian, Garabet K., 2012
PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles (chair: Richard G. Hovannisian); eScholarship
Scholars have written extensively on Armenian revolutionary movements, but relations between Armenian political organizations and the Young Turks have received only tangential treatment, largely because the sources were inaccessible. Moumdjian sets out to document the actual relationships between Armenian leaders, parties and revolutionary movements and their Ottoman counterparts, and to explain why those collaborations occurred and why they failed. He opens with the long-promised post-1878 reforms for Armenian inhabitants of the empire and Abdulhamid II's manipulations to dilute them, including the palace's use of the Kurdish Hamidiye Regiments to sabotage reform. He engages critically with Turkish-perspective studies of the Young Turks, arguing they skirt the Armenian contributions that helped bring the Young Turks to power.
