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Index

Armenia

The Urartu Civilisation

Victory for Independence

Artashisian Dynasty on the Armenian Throne

Armenia caught between Rome and the Arsacids

The Acceptance of Christianity

Defending Christianity

Armenia Under the Bagratouni Dynasty

Cilicia - the New Armenia

Armenia Under Turanian Rule

The Renaissance or the Resurrection of Armenia

The Eastern Question

Russia in the Caucasus

The Armenian Question

Battle on Two Fronts

Tsarist Russia Against the Armenians

The Revolution of the Young Turks and the Armenian People on the Eve of World War I

The First World War

The Resurrection of Armenia

Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918

- Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918

Eastern Armenia

Western Armenia

"The Fateful Years" (1914-1917)

"Hopes and Emotions" (March-October, 1917)

The Bolshevik Revolution and Armenia

Transcaucasia Adrift (November, 1917

Dilemmas (March-April, 1918)

War and Independence (April-May, 1918)

The Republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia

The Suppliants (June-October, 1918)

In conclusion

Soviet Armenia

The Second Independent Republic of Armenia

Epilogue

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Though the proceedings at Berlin humiliated Russia, they did not nullify all provinces of the Treaty of San Stefano. Alexander annexed Kars, Ardahan, and Batum, forming the Kars oblast from the first two districts and establishing Batum as separate oblast. 31 In 1878 three-fourths of the inhabitants of the Kars oblast were Moslems, but in the following two years approximately seventy-five thousand of them sought refuge within the Ottoman Empire. Their abandoned lands were repopulated by Russian religious dissenters and Western Armenians who continued to filter across the border. An Armenian plurality was gradually established in the two southern okrugs ("counties") of the oblast. By 1916, 37 percent of the residents in the Kars Okrug and 42 percent in the Kaghizman Okrug were Armenian. 32 The national composition of the oblast's four okrugs by that date was as follows: 33


Okrug Total population Armenian Turco-Tatar Kurd Other (primarily Greek and Russian)
Kars 192,000 81,000 54,000 11,000 46,000
Ardahan 89,000 5,000 50,000 25,000 9,000
Kaghizman 83,000 35,000 6,000 27,000 15,000
Olti 40,000 5,000 27,000 (incl. Kurds) - 8,000

Armenians, Georgians, and Moslems of Transcaucasia

The addition of the Kars and Batum oblasts to the Empire increased the area of Transcaucasia to over 208,000 square kilometres. The estimated population of the entire region in 1886 was 4,700,000, of whom 940,000 (20 percent) were Armenian, 1,200,000 (25 percent) Georgian, and 2,200,000 (45 percent) Moslem. Of the latter group, 1,140,000 were Tatars. Paradoxically, barely one-third of Transcaucasia's Armenians lived in the Yerevan guberniia, where the Christians constituted a majority in only three of the seven uezds. 34 Yerevan uezd, the administrative centre of the province, had only 44,000 Armenians as compared to 68,000 Moslems. By the time of the Russian Census of 1897, however, the Armenians had established a scant majority, 53 percent, in the guberniia; it had risen by the 1916 to 60 percent, or 670,000 of the 1,120,000 inhabitants. This impressive change in the province's ethnic character notwithstanding, there was, on the eve of the creation of the Armenian Republic, a solid block of 370,000 Tatars who continued to dominate the southern districts, from the outskirts of Yerevan to the border of Persia. 35

If national compactness may be taken as an indication of strength, the Georgians, concentrated in the Kutais and Tiflis guberniias, commanded the most favourable position, while the Armenians, scattered throughout every province of Transcaucasia, had the least favourable. According to Russian population statistics of 1917, 1,783,000 Armenians, 22 percent of Transcaucasia's 7,500,000 inhabitants, were distributed as follows:



Province Armenians 36 Percentage of total population 37
Yerevan 669,000 60
Kars 119,000 30
Tiflis 415,000 28
Elisavetpol 419,000 33
Baku 120,000 9
Batum, Kutais, Daghestan 41,000 -

The growth of Armenian political awareness led to increased dissatisfaction with the administrative subdivision of Transcaucasia. Bordering on the Yerevan guberniia but included in other provinces were several districts populated preponderantly by Armenians. Opportunity to express discontent and to propose rectifications was afforded the Armenians in 1905 by the Viceroy, Count I. I. Vorontsov-Dashkov, who summoned a conference of indigenous leaders to consider the possibility of introducing zemstvos, agrarian districts with assemblies that were permitted limited economic, cultural, and educational initiative. 38 Previously few non-Russian areas of the Empire had been granted the zemstvo system, and even this 1905 conference and a later one in 1909 failed to extend that institution to Transcaucasia. Nonetheless, participation in these deliberations motivated the Armenian politicians to crystallize their proposals for altering the provincial boundaries. They insisted that the area of jurisdiction of each zemstvo should correspond with that of a given province, which should be as ethnically homogenous as possible. The Armenians would have three zemstvo-provinces, together encompassing the entire Yerevan guberniia, the two southern okrugs of the Kars oblast, the Akhalkalak uezd and Lori uchastok of the Tiflis guberniia, and the mountainous regions of the Elisavetpol guberniia. 39 That the Georgians and Moslems rejected the Armenian pan is significant, for the disputes concerning Kars, Akhalkalak, Lori, and Mountainous Karabakh were carried over into the period when Transcaucasia was divided into three separate states. 40