The Confiscation of the Properties of the Armenian Church
The anti-Armenian policy and the compulsory russification of non-Russian people in the Tsarist Empire under the auspices of a police state, soon assumed a more daunting shape. In 1894, Tsar Alexander III was succeeded by Tsar Nicholas II. This ill-omened regent, whose personal features are recorded in the famous book of Dillon, gave his men free reign to battle against the two nations which were among the most developed in the empire and who had stronger emotional bonds to their customs and national traditions. 30
Although Poibiedonostsev was undoubtedly the source of power for this ominous policy, the implementer was Plehve 31, the famous interior minister of Nicholas II and the creator of the pogroms, the killings of Jews in Kichinaev, who was finally assassinated by Russian revolutionary socialists in 1904. Plehve sent narrow-minded commanders such as Bobikov, Golitsyn and Prince Nakashidze to Finland and Transcaucasia, who enacted an utterly violent and merciless stratagem towards the Finns and the Armenians, aimed at crushing the historical identity of these two peoples. Bobikov was eventually assassinated by Finnish nationalists and Nakashidze by Armenian nationalists..
Plehve and Golitsyn began in 1897 by closing 300 Armenian schools in Eastern Armenia and a hundred other schools in the rest of Transcaucasia. 36 Other Armenian institutions such as libraries were closed, Armenian news papers were confiscated and aid organisations were harassed. At the same time, a complex spy organisation was established around the Armenian Church and its priests. 37 By order of the Russian government, the Russian papers began to incite the public against Armenians, Finns, Jews and Polacks 38/458 and in the schools of Caucasus they started to expel Armenian students. 39
All these measures sparked protests among the Armenians. According to an eyewitness of these events, the case was that: "the Armenians want to rely on the Russian government, but they want only to secure their national existence and not to be dissolved in the stomach of the Russians. Their church is one with their nationality and they desire both of them to remain untouched and well preserved." 40
In June, 1903, when Nicholas II was ill, Plehve used the opportunity and issued on his own an order in the name of the tsar, according to which all the properties of the Armenian Church were to be confiscated and handed over to the Russian state treasury. According to Victor Berard this was "an obvious robbery and, if possible, a international robbery and, if such a term is possible, an international robbery since these properties belonged to the Armenian Church in all the world and not only to the Church of Eastern Armenia. These properties were collected as gifts over centuries, and in particular during the 19th century, not only from Eastern Armenians, but from all Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Persia, Europe and USA and was intended solely for the preservation and the education of Armenian customs and traditions, but the Orthodox faith and its policy of russification annexed this budget to the Russian Church and its schools." 41
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