The following is an excerpt from “Resolutions of the Meeting of Caucasian Organizations of the RSDLP”, where Shahumyan presided over and recorded the resolutions of party representatives from all parts of the Transcaucasus region. Shahumyan discusses the chauvinistic policies of the Caucasian nations’ bourgeoisies, and mentions the Armenian Genocide. – Translator
During the war, relations between nationalities in the Caucasus were greatly worsened due to that frenzied competition in lackeyism in relation to the government, which was dominated by the ruling classes of different nationalities: the Armenian bourgeoisie, the Georgian nobility and Muslim beks.
The Armenian bourgeoisie, as a token of gratitude for the special attention shown to it by the former governor Vorontsov-Dashkov*, and for expressing loyal feelings to the Tsarist government, under whose shield it freely enriched itself, performed during the war the wildest bacchanalia of hurrah-patriotism.
Having seized the popular slogan among the Armenian people of the liberation of the Turkish Armenians and using the political shortsightedness of the “Dashnaktsutyun” party, which has great influence among the Armenian peasant and petty bourgeois masses, the Armenian bourgeoisie, together with the aforementioned party, did everything in its power to portray the Turkish Armenians as loyal to the Russian government and traitors to the state in which they lived. To do this, it created with its own money Armenian volunteer squads, in which Turkish Armenians (deserters from the Turkish army and even a deputy of the Turkish parliament) were involved.
Reinforcing and loudly publicizing their own, insignificant in essence, military services to the government, the Armenian bourgeoisie did everything possible to contrast itself with the supposedly not so loyal Georgian people and supposedly disloyal and almost treacherous Muslim population**.
On the other hand, the Georgian and Muslim nobility, made accustomed to the role of the first lackeys by the Russian authorities in the Caucasus, could not reconcile themselves to the predominant influence of the Armenian bourgeoisie on the governor and, having concluded their fight with each other, tried to discredit the Armenians and in particular their squads, in the eyes of the government, the army and Russian public opinion.
At the same time, the Muslim nobility supported by the capitalists and the Georgian nobility, supported by petty-bourgeois nationalist parties, tried, like the Armenian bourgeoisie, to involve the masses in their class politics and class rivalry and to stir up anger and hatred of the entire Armenian people in the Muslim and Georgian peoples.
The sad but natural result of the self-serving class policy of the Armenian bourgeoisie and its servant, the “Dashnaktsutyun” Party, – the result that we, the Social Democrats, foresaw and warned from the very beginning, was the almost total brutal extermination of the ill-fated Turkish Armenians as open traitors to their own state.
Again, thanks to this very policy of the Armenian bourgeoisie on the one hand, and its rivalry with the Black-Hundred Muslim and Georgian nobility on the other, the relations between individual nationalities in the Caucasus deteriorated significantly.
In stating all the above, the Conference proposes that comrades conduct intensified agitation among the workers and at various levels of all nationalities in order to expose the criminal and treacherous policies of the ruling classes. It is necessary to urge the workers and the broad masses of the population of the Caucasus not to succumb to provocation by the commanding classes of nationalist parties and remember that only in the fraternal unity of democracy of all nationalities is the pledge of their victory and liberation, and that, on the contrary, further strengthening of national enmity can turn the Caucasus into an arena of bloody national clashes.
– The Caucasian bureau of the RSDLP
Shaumyan S. G.
of the year. Ed.
** We are talking about Azerbaijanis
Aragast 