Anarchism in Armenia
[3] The establishment of the Armenian Apostolic Church as the institutional arm of the new state religion and the construction of the feudal Nakharar system began to concentrate vast amounts of territory in the hands of the clergy and the nobility.
As Armenian peasants were subjected to increasingly restricted conditions, there were a number of anti-feudal uprisings by dissident Christian movements in the country, particularly the Borborites, Messalians, Paulicianists and Tondrakians.
Eastern Armenia remained an independent kingdom until 428, when the local nobility overthrew king Artaxias IV and the Sasanian Empire installed Veh Mihr Shapur in his place as governor.
This ignited a guerilla war against Sassanid rule, led by Vartan Mamikonian, resulting in the successful ratification of the treaty of Nvarsak, which granted greater autonomy to the nakharar.
[4] Shortly after the Muslim conquest of Armenia, Constantine-Silvanus was inspired by the gospel and Pauline epistles to found the Paulician movement,[5] an adoptionist Christian sect that rejected feudal land-ownership, social inequality and the superstitions of the church.
In the late 17th century, the Age of Enlightenment took hold in Eastern Armenia, with intellectuals spreading anti-feudal, democratic and revolutionary ideologies throughout the country.
The most notable of these figures was Shahamir Shahamirian, a philosopher who rejected the monarchical order, considering obedience to rulers to be an insult to human intelligence.
Mikaelian himself was a former supporter of Bakunin and defended the ideas of direct action and self-government, encouraging the ARF to put these principles into practice in their activities.
[31] In 1905, Christapor Mikaelian and other members of the ARF planned an assassination attempt against Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in an act of propaganda of the deed.
[40] This led the federation to entirely break ties with the Tsarist authorities, engaging in acts of terrorism against the state and establishing separate institutions in Russian Armenia.
The actions of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation had gone on to inspire the Young Turks, who ignited a revolution that overthrew the absolutist regime of Abdul Hamid II, re-establishing the empire as a constitutional monarchy.
[46] When a constitutionalist revolt broke out against the absolutist rule of the Qajar dynasty over Iran, the Iranian branch of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation elected to participate.
[47] After the bombardment of the Majlis, the ARF militias rallied together with the Persian revolutionaries, eventually managing to depose Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar and re-establish the constitution.
[48] In 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers, formally entering into World War I with a surprise attack on Russian positions in the Black Sea.
[51][52] After the disintegration of the Russian Empire during World War I and the subsequent rise to power of the Bolsheviks, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk permitted the reoccupation of Western Armenia by Ottoman forces, which began to encroach on Eastern Armenian territory.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation coordinated an armed resistance to the Ottomans,[53] which halted their advances at Sardarabad,[54] Abaran and Karakilisa, thus securing the independence of Armenia.
The Armenian Revolutionary Federation was banned by the new Bolshevik authorities, which transformed Armenia into a one-party state and brought the country under the Red Terror.
The rebel forces managed to liberate large swathes of the country, including the capital of Yerevan, and freed many Armenian revolutionaries from prison.
[57] Battles continued to take place with the Red Army forces, which vastly outnumbered the ARF, eventually ending on April 2 with the recapture of Yerevan.
[61] The last remnants of the ARF fled into exile, where they lost any trace of their anarchist and socialist ideology, moving towards an explicitly nationalist and anti-communist party line.
[63] This decision was ratified by the People's Commissariat for Nationalities under Joseph Stalin, later also transferring the Nakhichevan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic to Azerbaijan.
Throughout the 1920s, Armenia suffered through an anti-religious campaign during which church property was confiscated by the state and priests were harassed, briefly subsiding in order to ease relations with the Armenian diaspora.
On October 27, 1999, the Armenian parliament shooting took place, in which the prime minister Vazgen Sargsyan and the speaker Karen Demirchyan were both killed in a terrorist attack led by the former ARF member Nairi Hunanyan.
In the 2000s, the anarchist movement re-emerged in Armenia, rising up in reaction to the restoration of the rites of the nobility and the Apostolic Church, as well as the resurgence of authoritarian governance.
[82] The rise of anti-establishment sentiment culminated in the 2008 protest, in which people rose up against alleged electoral fraud after the election of Kocharyan's successor Serzh Sargsyan as president.
The demonstrations were violently dispersed and a state of emergency was invoked by the republican government, banning freedom of assembly and censoring the media, accelerating the violence which resulted in the deaths of 10 protesters.
[83] Political repression in the country became so intense that many of the newly established anarchist groups were forced to dissolve themselves, including the Armenian branch of Autonomous Action, which fled into exile in Europe.
[86] The anarchist movement subsequently re-organized itself, attending May Day protests as part of the "Left Alternative" organization,[87] as well as establishing autonomous social centers such as the DIY Club in Yerevan.
[88] Animal rights activists staged "shut 'em down" events in cities throughout the country, during which meat and fur shops were closed down with glue and locks.
They claimed that the only way to achieve peace was through the destruction of the patriarchal and militarist systems that perpetuate war, by means of non-violent methods of collective direct action.
