Authors

Asya Darbinyan¹;  ¹ Clark University, United States

Discussion

When Ottoman and Russian troops fought at the Caucasus battlefront of the First World War, over 200,000 Armenians were displaced or fled their homes in the eastern Ottoman provinces to Transcaucasia. Covering these developments, the front page of the 30 June 1916 issue of the Parisian newspaper Excelsior carried an illustration of a Russian soldier on horseback with a refugee child in his arms, captioned, “The Symbol of Protection of the Armenians by Russians.” Yet, when the Russian troops retreated from those temporarily occupied Ottoman provinces, the Armenian residents of the region felt they had been “deceived.” At the Caucasus front of the First World War the geopolitical interests of regional powers clashed with the humanitarian concerns and sentiments for the people experiencing the crisis. A little over a century later, whether Russia is Armenia's savior or oppressor (as opposed to a state acting in its own interests) continues to be a divisive issue. Based on research in the depositories of Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tbilisi, and Yerevan, this paper investigates the experiences of the displaced at the Caucasus front and examines Russia’s responses to the humanitarian emergency. It uncovers a previously neglected aspect of the history of population displacement and refugee crisis during the First World War by addressing key questions: What did the refugees think? Did they see the Russian tsar and his army as the protectors of Armenians during the war?