He also made links with the nascent Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), helping to set up publication of its newspaper Droshak in Geneva.

He wrote extensively about the oppression of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and European countries and elaborated his vision for a social revolution in Armenia.

He has since been held as a key example of an anarchist from outside the Western tradition, and his work on anti-authoritarianism, co-operative economics and tenants rights has been studied in Russia and Ukraine.

[4] During his undergraduate education, Atabekian worked as a typesetter for Avetis Nazarbekian's newspaper Hunchak – the official organ of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party (SDHP) – which publicised reports about rising anti-Armenian sentiment in the Russian and Ottoman Empires.

[5] Before long, Atabekian had met numerous prominent members of the anarchist movement, becoming close friends with Kropotkin, Reclus and Jean Grave.

[6] He also met Max Nettlau, Paraskev Stoyanov,[7] Luigi Galleani and Jacques Gross; with whom he printed a poster in memory of the Haymarket martyrs, which they plastered throughout Geneva.

[13] He had planned to start by publishing a Russian language edition of Words of a Rebel, but Kropotkin was overwhelmed by work and unable to translate more than a few chapters, leaving the rest to Varlam Cherkezishvili.

[5] After publishing the first batch of pamphlets, he considered selling his printing equipment to the Free Russian Press, but was dissuaded by Kropotkin, due to their ideological differences.

[17] During this period, he also formed links with the nascent Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and helped to publish its newspaper Droshak, together with Stepan Zorian.

During his time there, he witnessed the assassination of Sadi Carnot by Sante Caserio, as well as the subsequent anti-Italian reprisals, which turned him against the anarchist strategy of "motiveless terrorism".

[7] Atabekian thought that Armenia was ripe for revolution, due to the conditions created by the Ottoman Empire's despotism and the exploitation of Armenian labour in Europe and America.

[24] Atabekian also published articles by the ARF,[5] but supplemented them with his own criticisms of the authoritarianism and centralisation he'd experienced within the structures of Armenian political parties.

[25] While it focused largely on Armenia, the journal also gave attention to the revolutionary anarchist movements in France, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain.

Hamaink quickly gained popularity among the Armenian diaspora throughout Europe, with Stoyanov helping to distribute it in the Balkans, Caucasus and Turkey.

[5] As Armenian resistance to the anti-Armenian massacres in the Ottoman Empire manifested, he established connections with anarchist and libertarian socialist activists within the ARF.

[27] The anarchists of the ARF blended socialist anarchism with a form of Armenian nationalism,[28] influenced in part by the Russian nihilist movement.

Prohibited from returning to the Russian Empire due to a sentence of exile for his anarchist activities, he moved first to Bulgaria,[31] where he provided medical assistance to Armenians that had fled the Hamidian massacres.

[5] After the outbreak of World War I, Atabekian was granted permission to return to the Russian Empire, which was experiencing such a shortage of combat medics that it began ignoring their backgrounds.

Atabekian was quickly appointed to head a field hospital in Baku, but he fell severely ill with typhoid fever and went on sick leave.

[38] He also published an open letter to Kropotkin, in which he sharply criticised the Imperial Russian Army's attacks against the local Armenian and Kurdish populations, comparing them to the German occupation of Belgium.

[42] Atabekian placed his hopes in Moscow's "house committees",[43] which had been established in order to protect the common interests of tenants and regulate landlords to ensure regular repairs and central heating.

[45] By the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, Atabekian began advocating for the creation of an independent anarchist army, established along decentralised and anti-authoritarian lines, which could defend people against the rising White movement.

Atabekian considered cooperation to be a "law of life", stemming from the evolution of eusociality and human society, and saw it as essential to establishing socialist anarchism.

From an analysis of history, he concluded that the co-operative movement distinguished itself from capitalism and other economic forms like state socialism, not only because it was unmotivated by profit and sought to abolish wage labour, but also because it upheld a morality based on "freedom, equality and justice".

[58] Kropotkin expressed regret over making his visit,[59] but when he asked Atabekian if he disapproved, his friend responded that he would "approve of pleading even to the Tsar to save those who were condemned to death.

[79] By this time, the Kropotkin Museum Committee had collapsed into factional infighting,[80] which was beginning to affect the entire Russian anarchist movement.

He reported that in 1940, while working in a lagpunkt in Temnikov, he had treated an old anarchist called Alexei or Alexander Atabekian, who died of a heart attack towards the end of that year.

[93] Atabekian's advocacy of house committees has also been taken up by the Ukrainian urbanists Olena Zaika and Oleh Masiuk, who cited his work as foundational to research on the reorganisation of urban space.