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Catholicos Khrimian Hayrik applied to receive an audience at the court of Tsar Nicholas II, but Plehve discarded his application with scorn. 42

These measures aroused the general wrath and hostility of the Armenian nation and, in the majority of Armenian villages, the Armenian peasants started an armed resistance against the intruders in defence of their sacred institution. 43 The Russian police and military intervened and in several areas people were killed. In Etchmiadzin, the Russian soldiers surrounded the millennium old residence of the Armenian Catholicos and demanded the key to the cathedral and its treasures and when Khrimian Hayrik refused, they smashed the gate and entered by force. 44

These harsh measures led to the creation of a national movement among the Armenian bourgeois, who had reached the higher echelons of athletics and academia and were slowly but surely being russianised, with their language slowly shifting from Armenian to Russian. If the establishment had continued at the same gentle pace, they would have attained assimilation. However, the extreme measures and oppressive policy of the Russian bureaucratic government reinvigorated this Armenian class and awakened them from Russian enchantment, stemming a return to national thought and spirit and even their mother tongue. 45

Before long, the Armenians realised that the future held either the fall of the tsarist regime or the transformation of the empire into a great union or confederation of different peoples, where each people would be self-governing and determine the development of its own characteristics. 46 In 1892, the first party convention of Dashnaktsoutyoun demanded: "Political and economic freedom to Western Armenia". At the fourth convention, in 1907, in reaction to the intervening events, the party's aim was extended to the self-governance of Western Armenia within the framework of the Ottoman Empire and the self-governance of Eastern Armenia within the framework of a federal Russia. Subsequently, during the ninth convention of the party in Yerevan, in 1909, these two goals merged into one challenge: "One united and independent Armenia".

The principal actors in the Armenian revolutionary movement, led by the Dashnak party, stood by the church during these events and formed armed resistance against the assaults of the Russian tsarist government. 47 Despite their disapproval of religion, the revolutionaries sacrificed their lives in front of the churches, defending these sacred grounds against government officials.

Whilst carrying out the attack on the Armenian Church, the tsarist regime also began harassment of the Catholics who constituted the majority of the Poles, Lithuanians and also a part of the Armenian congregations in Transcaucasia. 48

Müller Simonis therefore comments that in the eyes of the tsarist Russian Empire, Armenia had become a second, southern Poland. 49