Tuesday 21st May Dr Thomas Welsford (All Souls)

An Armenian Liberal in Revolutionary Samarkand

In 1917, as Armenian socialists and Dashnaks in Samarkand joined other political activists in celebrating the collapse of tsarist authority, the political commentator A.H. Muradian struck a discordant note, observing that this revolutionary dawn posed a direct threat to the long-term welfare of an Armenian community that had been living and flourishing in Central Asia for the last 35 years. Not for the first time in his career, Muradian’s dissident opinion was vindicated by subsequent events. In this paper I draw upon Russian-language archival documents and Armenian-language newspaper reports to trace the course of Muradian’s career from nationalist agitator to liberal sceptic, and consider how attention to this little-known figure usefully complicates conventional narratives about the Armenians in Central Asia, and more generally about the nature of Russia’s multi-ethnic empire.