Straddling Two Empires: Cross-Revolutionary Fertilization and the Armenian Revolutionary Federation’s Military Academy in 1906–07

The emergence of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in 1890 marked the opening of a new front of guerilla warfare initiated by various revolutionary movements in the Ottoman Empire throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. A scrutiny of ARF activities from the late 1890s until the early 1900s indicates a gradual improvement of military strategies and operational tactics. This article argues that the establishment of the ARF Military Academy in Bulgaria in 1906 was a crucial element in the institutionalization of the ARF military platform, dictated by the political and military developments of the region. This article attempts to understand the history of the academy by putting it in the context of Armenian-Bulgarian/ Macedonian cooperation in the Balkans, on the one hand, and the expansion of the ARF operational terrain in the Caucasus, on the other. This article draws on ARF and Ottoman archives in order to gauge the political and military implications of this academy and its significance in generating cross-fertilization among revolutionary organizations in the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. The analysis of the Caucasian context is what sets this work apart from previous studies, insofar as it demonstrates how the ARF straddled the Russian and Ottoman Empires by adapting to the challenges in which it found itself in both settings.