Latest / The Story of Armenia: Survival Through Empires and Genocide — Fexingo History / The 1905 Armenian-Tatar War: Roots of Ethnic Conflict
Transcript
- Lucas: When we talk about the Armenian Genocide of 1915, there's a tendency to see it as coming out of nowhere—the Young Turks suddenly deciding to wipe out the Armenians. But there's a prelude that often gets overlooked, a bloody dress rehearsal that happened ten years earlier, right here in the Caucasus. Luna: You mean the Armenian-Tatar War of 1905? Lucas: Exactly. It's a name that sounds almost quaint—'Armenian-Tatar War'—but it was a brutal ethnic conflict that tore through six provinces of the Russian Empire. Thousands died, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and it set a pattern of mutual distrust that never really healed. And at the center of it was the city of Baku. Lucas: Baku at the turn of the century was a boomtown. Oil had been discovered in the 1870s, and by 1900 it was producing half the world's oil. Armenian entrepreneurs like the Mantashevs and the Gulbenkians owned many of the wells, while Tatar—what we'd now call Azerbaijani—workers made up much of the labor force. There was already economic tension, and then the 1905 Russian Revolution shook things loose. Luna: So the ethnic violence was stoked by the Russian authorities? Lucas: Partly. The Tsarist government, especially the viceroy in the Caucasus, Count Illarion Vorontsov-Dashkov, saw the revolution as a threat. They knew that Armenians and Tatars both had revolutionary movements—the Dashnaks and the Musavat. So they used a classic divide and rule tactic: set one against the other, exhaust them, and then step in as peacekeepers. Lucas: In February 1905, Baku exploded. A rumour spread that Armenians had killed a Tatar—or maybe it was the other way around, no one's sure—and within hours, the city was in flames. Armed mobs roamed the streets, attacking anyone who looked like the enemy. The oil fields were set on fire, and the sky turned black for days. Luna: I've read that the Armenian quarter was completely destroyed. Lucas: Yes, the Armenian neighborhood in Baku was sacked, and hundreds were killed. But the violence wasn't one-sided. In the countryside, Tatar villages were burned by Armenian bands, and vice versa. The Russian army mostly stayed in their barracks, only intervening when the violence threatened to spread to Russian settlements. There are accounts of Cossack units actually joining in the looting. Lucas: The worst single event happened in the city of Ganja—then called Elisabethpol—in November 1905. A Tatar mob, aided by local police, massacred over a hundred Armenians in a single day. Many were killed in the city's Armenian cathedral, which was then set on fire. Luna: And this was all while the Russian authorities were supposed to be keeping order. Lucas: Correct. But the viceroy's strategy backfired. Instead of exhausting the revolutionaries, the ethnic war radicalized them. The Dashnaks, who had been a socialist revolutionary party, started to focus more on Armenian self-defense. They created armed units, trained fighters, and began stockpiling weapons. That would prove crucial a decade later during the genocide. Lucas: The war petered out by 1907, partly because the Russian government finally cracked down on both sides, partly because people were exhausted. But the psychological damage was done. For the first time, Armenians and Tatars saw each other not as neighbors but as mortal enemies. The concept of 'Nagorno-Karabakh' as a disputed territory began to take shape—though that word wouldn't be used until much later. Luna: So in a way, the 1905 war created the template for the later genocide—the idea that Armenian existence itself was a threat. Lucas: I think that's right. The Young Turks learned from Baku. They saw that if you provoke ethnic violence, you can discredit your political opponents and create a 'national emergency' that justifies extreme measures. The difference was that in the Ottoman Empire, there was no Russian army to eventually stop it. Lucas: There's one more angle I want to mention. The 1905 war also had a huge impact on the Armenian diaspora. Wealthy Armenian families in Baku lost everything and fled to Tiflis or Moscow. Some of them became patrons of Armenian culture, funding schools and newspapers. But others became bitter, and that bitterness fed a new kind of nationalism that was less about socialism and more about survival. Luna: It's amazing how much of modern Armenian history can be traced back to a few years of violence in the early 1900s. Lucas: And that's what we're trying to do with this show—trace those threads. Honestly, if today's episode was worth a coffee to you, you can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's the smallest thing that keeps these conversations ad-free and independent. Luna: Yeah, listener support really does make a difference. It lets us dig into these deeper stories that don't get told elsewhere. Lucas: And speaking of digging deeper, let's talk about one forgotten figure from that war: a man named Hambardzumyan. He was an Armenian oil magnate in Baku who tried to broker peace between the communities. He met with Tatar leaders, organized joint relief efforts, and even got the Dashnaks and Musavat to agree to a temporary ceasefire in the summer of 1905. But the extremists on both sides murdered him a few months later, and the war continued. Luna: So the moderates lost, and the hardliners won. Lucas: That's the tragedy. And it's a pattern we'll see again in 1915, and again in the 1990s during the Karabakh war. But that's a story for another episode.