Introduction

This chapter explores Russia's political encounter with Armenians from its expansion into the South Caucasus in 1801 to its fateful entrance into the First World War in 1914. It argues that Russia tried to harness the stateless and dispersed Armenian diaspora to build its empire in the Caucasus and beyond. The chapter also talks about how the tsars relied on the stature of the two most influential institutions of the Armenian diaspora, the merchantry and the clergy, to accomplish several goals. It provides a background of Russia's project of diplomatic power from Constantinople to the Caspian Sea, economic benefits of Russia, Persia, and the Ottoman Empire from the Armenian merchant's transimperial trade networks, and political advantage taken from the Armenian Church's extensive authority within far-flung Armenian communities. The period discussed in this book follows the evolution of “Russian” perceptions of “Armenians” alongside the dual processes of tsarist empire-building and Armenian nation-building.

The Shining of the Sabers

This chapter highlights the rise of a diverse Armenian nationalist sentiment in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It describes the manifestations that Russian officials lumped under the label “Armenian nationalism,” which took on multiple forms and were not always distinct to Romanov imperial agents that struggled to discern and disarm the various Armenian political agendas. It also demonstrates, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Russo-Armenian symbiosis that faltered in the tempest of Russian reactionism and Armenian nationalism. The chapter analyzes the tsarist responses to Armenian nationalism under the rule of Tsar Alexander III. In order to grasp the bases of St. Petersburg's unprecedented measures toward Armenians in the 1880s and 1890s, the chapter provides an overview of the new tsar's political ideology.

The Embrace of an Empire, 1801–1813

This chapter clarifies the forging of the Russo-Armenian political partnership in the fires of the First Russo-Persian War, during which the shah's Armenians systematically assisted the tsar's military and political agents. It examines Russo-Georgian and Armeno-Georgian tensions and Russia's rivalries with its Western and Eastern counterparts. The chapter also explores how, and why, Armenians emerged as imperial Russia's primary partners in the early nineteenth century. Although the political symbiosis between Russia and Armenia blossomed in that era, they were already familiar to each other well before the onset of tsarist imperialism in the Caucasus. It investigates the Russo-Armenian encounter that happened centuries before the Romanov incorporation of Eastern Armenia in 1828.