The Republic of Armenia, Vol. I: 1918-1919, Richard Hovannisian (hardcover)

In 1918, the Armenian people emerged from centuries of domination to establish a small republic in the Russian Armenian provinces in the Caucasus. While the populace struggled for physical survival in a devastated land, Armenian representatives at the Paris Peace Conference appealed for supportive action and the means to extend the boundaries of the new state to encompass the adjacent, richer provinces of Turkish Armenia. During World War I, the Allies and associated powers had solemnly pledged that Armenians would be indemnified for their extreme sacrifices and that their historic nation would be guaranteed a permanent separate existence.

But the Republic of Armenia did not endure. The refusal of Turkey and ultimately of Soviet Russia to tolerate Armenian independence, the failure of the Allied Powers to enforce their decisions, and the inability of Armenians alone to defend their fledgling state, transformed the prospect of an independent Armenia into chaotic unreality at the end of 1920.

The first of Richard Hovannisian’s four-volume history of the first independent Republic of Armenia, a magnum opus of its own, describes the grave political and economic crises of the Republic in 1918-1919, the labors of its delegation in Paris, the relations of Armenia with neighboring Georgia and Azerbaijan, and the attitudes of all three republics toward the British imperial forces in the Caucasus, the White Armies and the Soviet government in Russia, the Turkish nationalist movement, and the Allied Powers.