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.
BookPaywalled
Berberian, Houri, 2001
Westview Press (2001); Routledge edition; 244 pp.; ISBN 9780813338170
The fullest treatment of Armenian politicization and participation in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, in which the ARF was the decisive Armenian actor. Berberian first traces the nineteenth-century situation of Armenians, with emphasis on the Ottoman provinces and on the Russian Caucasus as the source of the nationalist-socialist revolutionary movement. She then examines the ideological, political and pragmatic motives that drew Armenians into the Iranian revolution, and the collaboration between Armenian and Iranian constitutionalists, including the military contributions Armenians made. The study also opens up, for the first time, the roles and activism of Iranian Armenian women.
BookPaywalled
Ter Minassian, Anahide, 1984
Zoryan Institute, Cambridge, MA (Zoryan Institute Thematic Series, no. 1); 69 pp.; ISBN 0916431045; translated from the French by A.M. Berrett
A compact study of how nationalism and socialism interacted inside the Armenian revolutionary parties between the founding of the Hunchakian party and the eve of the First World War. Ter Minassian examines the ideological formation of the Dashnaktsutyun and the Hunchaks against the background of Russian populism, Marxism and the Balkan movements, and traces debates over federalism, class struggle and the 'Specifists.' The volume gives sustained treatment to Kristapor Mikayelian, Droshak, the party congresses, the fedayi, and the ARF's relation to the Social Democrats. It remains a pioneering scholarly treatment of socialist currents in the Ottoman and Russian Armenian context.
