Arnold Reisman: On an Armenian Manifesto Circa 1923

[Arnold Reisman is an engineer and a retired professor of operations research at Case Western Reserve University. Born in Lodz in 1934, he came to the United States after World War II and is the author of numerous books about Holocaust refugees in Turkey, including Turkey's Modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Ataturk's Vision (New Academia, 2006).]

Recently a friend showed me a booklet which I found intriguing.  It includes a most interesting and incisive account of what had been happening among, and to, the Armenian people up to 1923. The original, was written by a most knowledgeable Armenian activist of the time, Hovhannes Katchaznouni. He was a powerful leader in the Dashnagtzoutiun (English: Armenian Revolutionary Federation) and was the first prime minister of the Armenian state in 1918 proclaimed by the Armenian National Council in Tiflis (Tbilisi), as the ruling Armenian body was known at that time.  He “was in power as the head of government … for thirteen months.  He was among the founders of the Dashnagtzoutiun Party and one of its top leaders.  He was the prime authority of Armenia and the Dashnagtzoutiun Party and served on the Armenian committee conducting the peace talks with the Turks in Trabzon, and Batoumi.”  “He knew every Party secret before, during, and after the founding of the ill-fated Republic.”  “Few were in a position to know more, nor to express themselves with greater clarity, logic, and foresight than Hovhannes Katchaznouni.”

The booklet is a translation of a report Katchaznouni delivered to an Armenian Congress in Bucharest in 1923. Referred to as his Manifesto with a translated title: Dashnagtzoutiun Has Nothing to do Anymore, it was self-published in the same year. Translated from the original Armenian into Russian, the report was first published as a book in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, in 1927 and only 2000 copies were printed.

When I searched for a copy of any edition of the Manifesto for myself, I learned that only a few libraries in the United States carry any of the books in any language and as of this writing, Amazon.com shows none for purchase. The Armenian version cannot be found on the shelves of any library anywhere in the world even though some still list it in their catalogs. Allegedly the copies were removed from the libraries in Europe by the Dashnagzoutiun members for political reasons.

A copy of the Russian edition was located in Moscow’s Lenin library by Mehmet Perinçek, a young Turkish scholar who translated the Russian version  into Turkish. So I borrowed my friend’s copy and read it thoroughly. What I read blew me away. However it was published in Turkey as an English translation of a Turkish translation from Russian published in Tbilisi (Soviet Georgia) while the original was in Armenian. Because of all the iterations I naturally I wanted to check its validity.

Still searching, I found a version of the Manifesto on line. It is a truncated edition but most significantly it was translated from the original by Matthew A. Callender and edited by John Roy Carlson, published by the Armenian Information Service in English in 1955, and is offered by the University of  Louisville. The report/book has a total of 24 pages, some dedicated to commentary obviously postdating the original Manifesto.

The Turko-English edition contains a response Katchaznouni wrote to a “detailed” letter he received from “NN a personal friend and … party comrade concerning the report  … submitted to the Party Convention.”  He writes:

Dear NN,

I received your letter on June 22.

You say: ‘Though it was not possible to destroy your report before it was read, I wish it would soon be forgotten. And I find it useless and harmful to open this subject to a discussion.

This suggests that Dashnag party loyalists would not want others to see the report and such a letter might have been the catalyst for the removal of editions from library shelves and possibly the destruction of existing copies.

Two of the editions were reviewed by this author on a per-paragraph basis.  While the 1955 and the 2006 English editions of the Manifesto are found to be consistent in spirit on matters pertaining to the Armenian-Turkish issues there are some points on which text could be found in one but not the other.  No conflictual information has been located. The Turkish- English edition states that the Manifesto “evaluates the tragic incidents as incidents of war and open heartedly declares that they [the Armenians] have been tools in the hands of foreign powers.” Scholars, opinion makers, policy and decision makers, as well as concerned people at large should find the report of great value regardless of the edition since it comes from a most knowledgeable and a credible source.

The full review can be downloaded from  SSRN as http://ssrn.com/abstract=1712564