Józef Stanisław Łobodowski was a Polish poet and political thinker.
Łobodowski was born 19 March 1909 at the Purwiszki country estate, Sejny County in the Suwałki Land (Pol., Suwalszczyzna), Polish lands of the Russian Partition (now within the territory of Lithuania) and died 18 April 1988 in Madrid.
His poetic works are broadly divided into two distinct phases: the earlier one, until about 1934, in which he was sometimes identified as "the last of the Skamandrites",[6] and the second phase beginning about 1935, marked by the pessimistic and tragic colouring associated with the newly nascent current in Polish poetry known as katastrofizm (catastrophism).  The evolution of his political thought, from the radical left to radical anticommunism, broadly paralleled the trajectory of his poetic oeuvre.
To the contemporary reading public  Łobodowski was also known as the founder and editor of several avant-garde literary periodicals, of a newspaper, translator, novelist, prose writer in the Polish and Spanish languages, radio personality, and preeminently a prolific opinion writer with sharply defined political views active before, during and after the Second World War in the Polish press (since 1940 only in the émigré press). Łobodowski described himself as an Ukrainophile and devoted three of his books to Ukrainian themes, including two collections of poetry (Pieśń o Ukrainie and Złota hramota).[7] He spoke out in defence of ethnic minorities in Poland before and after the Second World War, condemning for example the forced resettlement of the Lemko community in the so-called Operation Vistula mounted by the communist régime in 1947,[8] or the destruction of churches built in the Eastern Orthodox architectural style out of favour in the Western-oriented Poland of the Interbellum.[9] He denounced in print the anti-Jewish sentiment prevalent in some Polish literary circles before the War, defending for example the Polish poet Franciszka Arnsztajnowa against antisemitic attacks.[10] An inveterate and caustic critic of totalitarianism in all its forms, he was blacklisted by the communist censorship of the post-War Poland and spent most of his life in exile in Spain.
Life and work
Early life
Łobodowski was born on 19 March 1909 in the lands of Partitioned Poland on the (relatively modest) Purwiszki farmstead of his father, Władysław Łobodowski, a colonel in the Imperial Russian Army, and his wife Stefanja Łobodowska, née Doborejko-Jarząbkiewicz.  Of the Łobodowskis' four children — three daughters and one son — two daughters died in childhood, leaving Józef and his surviving (elder) sister Władysława.[11] In 1910 the Łobodowskis were obliged to sell their country estate and moved to Lublin.  In 1914, owing to the outbreak of the First World War, Władysław Łobodowski was transferred together with his family to Moscow as a measure taken by the Imperial Russian Army to shield its officer corps from the hostilities of war.  It is to this period of his early schooling in Moscow that Łobodowski owed his excellent knowledge of the Russian language.  However, the upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 soon forced the family to flee for their lives to Yeysk in the Kuban region of the Ciscaucasia, where — drastically reduced in their means — they suffered severe privations for five years, including hunger.  In this place and in these conditions Łobodowski passed the formative years of his life between the ages of 8 and 13, at times forced by circumstances into wheeling and dealing in the town's streets to help the family survive.  The name "Kuban", as a reference to the broadly conceived world of the Kuban Cossacks, crops up in all discussions of Łobodowski's life and creative oeuvre as the single most significant toponym of his entire biography.  The Kuban period will be fictionalized in his 1955 novel Komysze ("The Bushmen"), a text which paints a faithful and seductively vivid picture of the last months of freedom and decadence in Russia in a secluded port in the Zakubanskie Marshes on the Sea of Azov.[12] It is also here, in the Kuban, that Łobodowski first came in contact with Ukrainian culture, owing to the presence in the region of the Zaporozhian Cossacks who had been resettled there after the banning of the Zaporizhian Sich by Catherine II in 1775.[13]
However, the Kuban, and Yeysk in particular did not prove a safe haven for the family, and here his father, Władysław Łobodowski, was at last arrested by the Bolsheviks: although eventually released through the intervention of a former comrade-in-arms from the Imperial Russian Army who had crossed over the new ideological divide, he died there of natural causes on 4 March 1922 and is buried in town.  Thereupon Łobodowski's mother, Stefanja Łobodowska, decided to take her three surviving children (one daughter had already died earlier) to the nascent Second Polish Republic, a long and perilous journey which claimed the life of another of her children, a second daughter, hurriedly buried along the way in an unmarked grave.[5] Thus reduced in numbers and deprived of means of support, the family settled once again in Lublin, in an establishment owned by Stefanja Łobodowska's stepsister, Łobodowski's aunt.
Youth and the early period as a poet
The city of Lublin (now in independent Poland) was thus to become the centre of his youth, and here Łobodowski spent his tumultuous high-school years which saw his first forays into poetry, encouraged by the poet Julian Tuwim, soon to become the dominant preoccupation of his life.  In the first years of his life as a poet his sympathies lay with the so-called Second Avant-garde (Druga Awangarda) movement centred round the poet Józef Czechowicz and his circle, whose style was characterized by visionary catastrophism mediated by Expressionism, although the personal idiom Łobodowski developed was distinctively and unmistakably his own.[14] One of the first compositions published by Łobodowski was the poem "Dlaczego" (Why?) which appeared in May 1928 in the bimonthly magazine WSłońce which he co-edited and which also carried in its first issue the article of a 19-year-old Łobodowski on the nature of poetry in general as the art of the unsayable, and some other of his poems.[15] His début in book form in 1929, at the age of20, was the collection of poems entitled Słońce przez szpary ("Sunshine through the Cracks").  This was followed by the volume entitled Gwiezdny psałterz ("Astral Psaltery") released in the autumn of 1931, whose programmatic poem "Poezja" (Poetry) is dedicated to Julian Tuwim in obvious acknowledgement of his indebtedness to the Skamander circle.[16] However, another poem in the collection, "Hymn brzucha" (The Hymn of the Belly), in which reverberate the echos of the terrible period of hunger experienced in Yeysk in 1917–1922, will mark the beginning, stylistically, of a post-Skamander stage in Łobodowski's creative journey.[17] These early volumes largely escaped the notice of the literary establishment at the time.
On the Red Colour of Blood and other colours
Łobodowski began to draw attention with his third collection of poetry on account of the controversy it caused.  The controversy stemmed principally from the fact that the newly independent Poland was not a fully democratic country with unfettered freedom of speech, but constituted instead an environment in which the ostensibly "leftist" ideology he espoused early in his life as a vehicle for his nonconformist ideas was treated with suspicion.  The entire print run of Oczerwonej krwi ("On the Red Colour of Blood"), his third collection of poems published in January 1932 expressing revolt against the prevailing standards of morality and challenging all authority, was seized by the authorities and criminal proceedings were instituted against Łobodowski as the author.[18] Although the protracted court case ended, on appeal, with mere confiscation of all the copies of the book and no fines or imprisonment were imposed, the affair had damaging consequences for Łobodowski since — as it coincided with the commencement of his studies in the Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Lublin in 1931 — he was promptly expelled from the university in February 1932, at the beginning of the second semester of the first year and, for good measure, blacklisted by all institutions of higher education in Poland "for the propagation of pornography and blasphemy through poetical works".[19]
Łobodowski responded defiantly by releasing another collection of poetry later the same year under the title Wprzeddzień ("On the Eve"), his fourth book which included the title poem "Wprzeddzień" (On the Eve) incorporating the following three lines addressed to the Polish dictator First Marshal Piłsudski (who had earlier called his coup d'état a "revolution", and who is referenced in the poem by name):
towarzyszu Piłsudski,

w przeddzień polskiej rewolucji

krwią wasze imię wypisujemy na tarczach...

_________________________________

Comrade Piłsudski,

on the eve of the Polish Revolution,

we inscribe your name in blood upon our armoury of battle...(emphasis in the original).[20]
This book, which appeared towards the end of June 1932 in a print run of 100 copies, was placed under an interdict by the local authorities in Lublin on 2 July 1932; the interdict was however lifted by the decision of the Lublin district court just eleven days later.[21] The authorities evidently considered it wise to ignore the challenge this time round to avoid giving Łobodowski the benefit of extra publicity, his star having risen markedly since he had been stamped with the hallmark of a "confiscated poet" the last time.  Indeed, thrust into the public spotlight with the Oczerwonej krwi affair of March 1932, with his books suddenly an object of attention, Łobodowski started billing his previously released (but unsold) volume Gwiezdny psałterz as now still forthcoming in newspaper notices intended to capitalize on the newly found wave of popularity with this title, too.[22]
On the other hand, the individual poem entitled "Słowo do prokuratora" (A Word to the Prosecutor), published separately in the Trybuna in March 1932, a literary journal of which he was for a time the editor-in-chief, will be the cause of another court case against him in 1933.[23] This time in addition to the usual charges of subversive publications will be added the charges of contacts with the Communist Party of Poland: Łobodowski will be acquitted only on appeal in a Warsaw court in October 1933.[24] For all the exertions of the Sanacja régime against him as a communist subversive, Łobodowski's leftist stance was to a significant extent superficial, adopted as an expedient by an angry young man to transmit his ideas of rebellion against reality, tout court (and was soon to be abandoned of his own accord for other forms of poetic discourse better suited to his evolving perception of human condition).  Some critics have used the adjective światoburczy to describe the nature of Łobodowski's political writings, a partly jocose word whose meaning is a blend of such concepts as iconoclasm, radicalism, and dissatisfaction with the status quo (welterschütternd in German).[25]
The evidence of how seriously Łobodowski was taken as a political commentator at this time can on the other hand be illustrated by the fact that, at the age of23, he could print opinion pieces on the first page of the premier daily newspaper of a major Polish city (the Kurjer Lubelski of Lublin) with such headlines as "What You Need is a Suicide" (a title he used in an article stressing the need for the Polish society to free itself from the old entrenched modes of thought).[26] There is evidence that Łobodowski, even at this particular period of his life, held in contempt those who — like Jerzy Putrament — admired him for his leftist leanings rather than his poetical craftsmanship.[27] Józef Czechowicz, the leading light of the Lublin avant-garde, went so far (in a private letter) as to express the opinion that Łobodowski deliberately fostered around himself an atmosphere of sensation and scandal in which to move his wings, and that not only in the political sphere but in the literary and social domains as well.[28] Despite the wide publicity his first four volumes of poetry had received, Łobodowski himself considered his output up to this point "unoriginal".[29]
Łobodowski was twice the editor-in-chief of the Kurjer Lubelski, one of the most important daily newspapers of the interbellum Poland, in 1932 and 1937.  Upon assuming the office of the editor in 1932 he promptly published the article "Why the Work of the Opposition is Harmful", arguing that the fight with the Sanacja system had been hijacked by other equally distasteful political groupings making the whole exercise of the political opposition moot and suspect.[30] In its so-called Fifth Phase in 1937, after his own ideological turnabout, he attempted to revive the broadsheet on Promethean lines, that is to say to make it unabashedly an organ "of the struggle to dismember the Russian–Soviet empire into its constituent parts".[31]
Turnabout in ideology and poetics
Suicide attempt
During the military service he was performing at a reserve officers' cadet school (szkoła podchorążych rezerwy) in the Polish town of Równe in the Volhynia in 1933–1934 Łobodowski made an unsuccessful attempt on his life by shooting himself. The act was witnessed by others. He was hospitalized, and in the aftermath of the incident arrested (10 March 1934) on charges of possessing "leftist propaganda" (that apparently meant his own poems in manuscript, which were found during a search of his belongings performed in his absence) and placed in military prison for three weeks.[32] The intervention of his literary friends who mobilized some of the greatest names in Polish literature on his behalf, including the well-connected writer Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna (1892–1983) but also Ewa Szelburg-Zarembina (1899–1986) and others, was instrumental in bringing about his release from jail and in making the whole affair die a sudden death without a court martial or other long-lasting adverse consequences for Łobodowski.[33] Łobodowski's explanation of the reasons for his suicide attempt given subsequently to Iłłakowiczówna and reported in her memoirs as attributable to disappointed love (presumably for Zuzanna Ginczanka) has been treated with scepticism by critical opinion since its publication in 1968.  While Łobodowski avoided the subject throughout the rest of his life, a set of more complex reasons concerning the ideological turmoil he was in at the time are nowadays credited as the real cause of the dramatic act he resorted to.[34]
Following the military affair at Równe, Łobodowski moved to Warsaw in May 1934.[35]
Polemics with Wasilewska
During this period Łobodowski changed some of his political views, a fact which is signalled most dramatically in his polemical exchanges with Wanda Wasilewska, a writer of a staunch communist, pro-Soviet, Stalinist stance that she will maintain unshaken even in the face of the Soviet Union's (later) alliance with Hitler and their joint attack on Poland at the beginning of the Second World War.  In an article published in 1935 in the most prestigious literary periodical in Poland at the time, the Wiadomości Literackie weekly — as part of his ongoing war of words with Wasilewska — Łobodowski made the following statement which posits self-criticism as the essential element of moral courage, and which thus holds special significance for this period of his ideological transition and the whole rest of his life:
A distinction must be made between on the one hand a heroism of life, which consists in a determined fight [for one's ideals] and the rejection of all compromise, and on the other hand a heroism of mind that has no fear of criticism and of a continuous reappraisal of its primary assumptions. It often so happens that people who bravely go to jail for many years for their beliefs lack the courage to admit before themselves that their sacrifice may be useless — or worse, misguided, being offered in the wrong cause.  In this sense many a hero or revolutionary is a retrograde intellectual coward.  Idoubt it whether Ms.Wasilewska — who in her novels has given us a striking example of the crudity to which facile ideologies can lead — whether she understands this distinction.—from "The Prophetess of Heroism", Wiadomości Literackie, 1 December 1935.[36]

New direction in poetry
Critical acclaim and wide recognition as an important voice in literature brought him the collections of poetry Rozmowa z ojczyzną ("A Conversation with the Fatherland"; 1935; 2nd ed., corr. & enl., 1936), much appreciated by Zuzanna Ginczanka, and Demonom nocy ("To the Demons of the Night"; 1936), which won him a coveted prize of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1937 but in private was sharply criticized by Ginczanka.[16][37] The general adulation showered on him by both the reading public and the critics was tempered by the dissenting voice of Ignacy Fik who wrote of Łobodowski ad personam as "a character most alien to the Polish psyche, a pagan Scythian, a Romantic shot through with anarchism and nihilism, an expansive Russian nature whose longings for his Marzanna are inspired by boredom.  And where Łobodowski ends, [Czesław] Miłosz takes over...".[38] Another carping critic, Ludwik Fryde, for his part, accused Łobodowski of "actorship, playacting".[39] However, by 1937 such barbs served as a confirmation of Łobodowski's presence in the public spotlight with his firmly established fame.  It has been observed that the latter works for the first time sound a note — from now on to be the characteristic theme of Łobodowski's oeuvre — of tragic pessimism which has been seen by scholars to have its source in the dramatic confrontation between the powers of élan vital and biology on the one hand, and those of culture and ideology on the other.[16] Tymon Terlecki (1905–2000), one of the most astute Polish critics, wrote in 1937 that inasmuch as Łobodowski was difficult of classification in general he did not fit easily within the cultural parameters of any known literary tradition.[40]
The collection Rozmowa z ojczyzną ("A Conversation with the Fatherland"), like the previous book Wprzeddzień ("On the Eve") of 1932, contains an engagé poem dealing with the Polish dictator First Marshal Piłsudski.  Indeed, in this case, the name of Piłsudski is not merely incorporated into the body of the text but constitutes the very title of the 6-stanza, 25-line poem "Piłsudski".[41]
Marriage with Jadwiga Kuryłło
On March 1, 1938, Józef Łobodowski married Jadwiga Kuryłło at St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Lublin. Depside what Jadwiga's surname might suggest, she was born to a rooted Polish Roman Catholic family. At the time of marriage, Józef was 29 and Jadwiga 26, but they had started their relationship when Jadwiga was still in high school. They became separated when WWII broke up in 1939. Due to the postwar communist reality in Poland, which Józef Łobodowski actively opposed from abroad, they had no contact after the war. Jadwiga divorced Józef on April 9, 1950, just before she remarried. When they were together, Jadwiga participated in Józef's work. After they became separated, Jadwiga tried to preserve Józef's work that she had managed to gather, but most of that was confiscated by Germans. She donated the remaining pieces to the Lublin Museum after the war.
Relationship with Zuzanna Ginczanka
Józef Łobodowski had a relationship with a Jewish woman Zuzanna Ginczanka. That was opposed by his mother and his sister. Łobodowski first met Zuzanna Ginczanka — in his words, "a precociously mature woman... with eyes scintillating like the vast expanse of the sea shimmering in the sun" — at the multicultural Polish locality of Równe in Volhynia (now within the borders of the Ukraine), where he had the uncommon good fortune to have been performing his military service in the autumn of 1933, when Ginczanka was 16 and he 24. When Józef married Jadwiga Kuryłło, Zuzanna ended the relationship. After the War, while living in Madrid, Łobodowski would receive a small parcel posted from Pamplona containing the gift of a golden diamond-studded tie pin, with a small note skewered on it, which read: "From the mother of Zuzanna".[42] What remains for posterity is the extraordinary volume of understated erotic lyrics modelled stylistically on the Song of Songs, with an introduction important for historical reasons, which Łobodowski will dedicate to Ginczanka posthumously late in his own life (at the age of 78): his collection Pamięci Sulamity ("In Remembrance of the Shulamite Woman"),[43] brimming as it is with love for Ginczanka undimmed by the passage of time.[44]
Second World War
During the last few years preceding the outbreak of the Second World War Łobodowski lived in Łuck, in what was then Poland, moving to Warsaw in April 1938 after his marriage.  He was called up in August 1939, a few days before the outbreak of the Second World War, and saw action during the September Campaign in Wiśnicz, Łańcut, and several other places, including a locality known as Dublany (then in Poland, now in the Ukraine), which he memorialized in the poem entitled "Dublany" (first published in France in 1941).[45] After the Soviet invasion of Poland on 17 September 1939, while waiting with the remnants of his brigade at Tatarów (now Tatariv in the Ukraine) to cross the border into Hungary, he wrote the memorable lines of the "Noc nad granicą" (A Night on the Frontier).  The next day, 19 September 1939, they crossed the Polish border through the Yablonitsky Pass: this was the moment Łobodowski would leave his homeland for ever.  The veterans of his unit were interned in various places throughout the territory of Hungary, Łobodowski ending up at first at a camp at Tapolca near Lake Balaton.  His subsequent wartime peregrinations are not well known; he intended like most men of his unit to join Sikorski's Army in France, and this intention guided his actions while in Hungarian detention.  After two unsuccessful attempts at escape, he finally managed to flee to Yugoslavia about a month after arriving in Hungary, eventually reaching Paris on 9 or 10 November 1939.  In Paris Łobodowski encountered the Polish poets Jan Lechoń and Kazimierz Wierzyński (who was eager to meet his younger colleague whose fame had preceded him to France), and he began to publish his poems in the émigré press there.
On the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the way of ending the War
Łobodowski's first text in prose published in Paris was the full-page political article entitled "On the Soviet–German Alliance" which appeared in March 1940 in the Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie, a weekly émigré newspaper newly founded by Mieczysław Grydzewski.[46] The principal thesis of the article was the contention that however unexpected and shocking the collusion between Hitler and Stalin in starting the Second World War might have been in the eyes of the world, their compact was in fact predictable.  (He had foretold it himself, he pointed out, in the article published in the Wiadomości Literackie of Warsaw on 2 April 1939, fully 4months and 3weeks before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which at the time resulted in the wholesale confiscation by the Polish authorities of the newspaper carrying the article on the grounds that the author was spreading unsubstantiated rumours detrimental to public peace.)[47] Such precautions against rumours were  predicated on a mistaken view of the Soviet Union as less noxious than that of Nazi Germany, a view that was based not on facts but on wishful thinking.   Łobodowski wrote that the only way of ending the War quickly in an Allied victory obtained without millions of dead was not by attacking Nazi Germany on the Western Front but by way of an Allied attack on the Soviet Union on the south-eastern front in the region of the Black Sea and the Caucasuses. Such an attack on the Soviet Union would be the most effective form of attack on Nazi Germany itself for the simple reason — Łobodowski wrote — that it would pre-empt Germany's own inevitable transfer of the theatre of war to the region and terminally undermine its capacity to pursue long-term goals (by severing access to natural resources concentrated in the area): but unlike in Europe, a successful outcome for Germany there — even if successful only partially — would have "incalculable consequences" (enabling Germany to strike at British India, etc.).[48] For great wars, concluded Łobodowski, are won only when the forces of history are allowed to do the fighting for you, with the military operations serving in an ancillary and corrective role to them.[46]
Arrest in Paris
On 20 February 1940 Łobodowski, then aged 30, was arrested by the French police in Paris in circumstances that to this day have not been properly established. The event involved the confiscation of some of his personal effects, including manuscripts, during the search of his hotel room.  Some of these materials have never been returned.  Those materials included anticommunist propaganda leaflets apparently secretly authored by Łobodowski for the Polish government-in-exile (then based in Paris), which were intended to be dropped from airplanes over the Soviet-occupied parts of Poland for the purpose of fomenting subversion among the Red Army — and as such they were the reason for his detention at the Cherche-Midi military prison over a period of some six months after the Polish government minister responsible for ordering the leaflets in question (Professor Stanisław Kot) denied involvement when interpellated by the French authorities.  Łobodowski will use the scurrilously offensive satirical verse "Na Profesora Kota" (On Professor Kot) to lampoon the minister in question in his 1954 collection Uczta zadżumionych ("The Banquet of the Plague-stricken"),[49] calling him again a "cynical swindler" in a parting shot fired one last time towards the end of his life.[8] According to Łobodowski's own testimony, he was not released from prison until September 1940, and that only after having been tried and acquitted by the Supreme Military Court (a circumstance which it will be impossible to verify before the year 2040, as it will be impossible to ascertain the precise nature of the charges he faced).[50] While the prison experience was a significant and perhaps traumatic event in his life, its silver lining — for the posterity — proved the preservation of his police dossier containing what appears to be a complete set of his confiscated manuscripts.  The dossier was initially expropriated by the Nazis after the invasion of France and taken to the Third Reich, where towards the end of the War it fell in its turn into the hands of the Soviets and was taken to Moscow, there to be repeatedly and assiduously studied during the following years at the Central Military Archives of the USSR (Центральный государственный Особый архив СССР; as evidenced by the handwritten annotations made in it), until it was finally returned by the Russian Federation to France in recent years.  (It was found to contain no propaganda leaflets: only Łobodowski's poetry manuscripts and fragments were present, a circumstance explainable by the probability that the leaflets in question may form part of the as yet unopened French military archives instead.)[51]
Post-War period
While Łobodowski was a frequent victim of censorship by the Sanacja régime before the War, his legal problems then were to be eclipsed by the very effective, blanket blacklisting of all his writings by the communist censorship of the post-War Poland, which accorded him "a place of honour on the blackest of blacklists" — in the words of the literary critic Michał Chmielowiec.[52] This resulted virtually in his being rendered, while still one of the best-known names in Polish literature, into an "unperson" in the Eastern Bloc.[53] The blackout continued into the 1980s.[54] Łobodowski believed that in every country in which a criminal political system holds dominion all those participating in any capacity in governance are responsible to some degree for the crimes committed in its name.[8] For this reason he regarded with empirical scepticism and moral contempt such events as the Khrushchev Thaw and the Perestroika, for example, arguing that their authors, Nikita Khrushchev and Mikhail Gorbachev respectively, had not satisfactorily explained their own complicity in the crimes of the previous Soviet régimes which they later purported to criticize as the wrongdoing of others rather than their own.[8] The great communist empire was for him a satanic domain chiefly on account of its subversion of truth as a method of survival and self-preservation (rather than because of its expansionist propensities, the chief point in Ronald Reagan's definition of the Evil empire).[8] Thus the most effective method of combating totalitarianism was the upholding of Truth and its widest possible dissemination, a view which he upheld not only in theory but in his active practice as opinion writer and translator of the dissident writers suppressed within the Soviet Union and elsewhere: Andrei Sinyavsky, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Yuli Daniel, Andrei Sakharov, and others (see Translations).
Postscript
Unlike many other poets, Łobodowski was very good at reading his own poems in public, and they gained at his recitation.[55]
He was influenced by Juliusz Słowacki,[56] Henryk Sienkiewicz (prose),[57] Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Józef Czechowicz,[58] Władysław Broniewski,[59] and Stefan Żeromski.[40]
Works
Poetry
Poetry monographs
Słońce przez szpary (1929)
Gwiezdny psałterz (1931)
O czerwonej krwi (1932)
W przeddzień (1932)
Rozmowa z ojczyzną (1935; 2nd ed., 1936)
U przyjaciół (1935)
Demonom nocy (1936)
Lubelska szopka polityczna (1937)
Z dymem pożarów (1941)
Modlitwa na wojnę (1947)
Rachunek sumienia (1954)
Uczta zadżumionych (1954)
Złota hramota (1954)
Pieśń o Ukrainie (1959; bilingual edition: text in Polish and Ukrainian)
Kasydy i gazele (1961)
Nożyce Dalili (1968)
Jarzmo kaudyńskie (1969)
Rzeka graniczna (1970)
W połowie wędrówki (1972)
Dwie książki (1984)
Mare Nostrum (1986)
Pamięci Sulamity (1987)
Rachunek sumienia: wybór wierszy 1940–1980 (1987)
Dytyramby patetyczne (1988)
Selected poetry in periodicals
"Modlitwa na satyrę" (A Prayer For Satire; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.1, No.38/39 (38/39), 29 December 1946, p.1)
"Serbrna śmierć" (Silver Death; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.2, No.51/52 (90/91), 28 December 1947, p.1)
"Erotyk" (Erotic Poem; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.2, No.51/52 (90/91), 28 December 1947, p.1)
"Dwie pochwały Heleny Fourment" (Two Eulogies in praise of Hélène Fourment; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.12, No.40 (601), 6 October 1957, p.1)
"Nowe wiersze" (New Poems; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.31, No.7 (1559), 15 February 1976, p.1)
"Kolęda dla Papieża" ("A Christmas Carol for the Pope"; Wiadomości: tygodnik (London), vol.34, No.51/52 (1760/1761), 23–30 December 1979, p.1)
Drama
Lubelska szopka polityczna (1937)
Prose
Por nuestra libertad y la vuestra: Polonia sigue luchando (1945)
Literaturas eslavas (1946)
Komysze (1955)
W stanicy (1958)
Droga powrotna (1960)
Czerwona wiosna (1965)
Terminatorzy rewolucji (1966)
Pro relihii︠u︡ bez pomazanni︠a︡: likvidatory Uniï (1972)
Selected opinion journalism
"Prawda i nieprawda: o literaturze proletariackiej" ("Truth and Untruth: About Proletarian Literature", Kurjer Lubelski, 3 April 1932; on the political polemics round the novel of Bruno Jasieński, Palę Paryż, "IBurn Paris", 1929)
"Kultura czy chamstwo" ("Culture or Caddishness?", Kurjer Lubelski, 17 October 1932; on the way the political polemics are being conducted in the Polish press)
"Dlaczego działalność opozycji jest szkodliwa" ("Why the Work of the Opposition is Harmful", Kurjer Lubelski, 22 October 1932; on the so-called political opposition in Poland not being a viable option for the electorate)
"Potrzebne jest samobójstwo" ("What You Need is a Suicide", Kurjer Lubelski, 25 October 1932; on the need for the Polish society to free itself from the old entrenched ways of thinking)
"Smutne porachunki" ("Settling the Sad Scores", Wiadomości Literackie, 27 October 1935; a response to Stefan Napierski's review of Rozmowa z ojczyzną; an apologia pro vita sua after the "turn" of 1934/1935)
"Adwokatka heroizmu" ("The Prophetess of Heroism", Wiadomości Literackie, 1 December 1935; a response to Wanda Wasilewska)
"Tropicielom polskości" ("To the Assayers of Polishness", Wiadomości Literackie, 13 June 1937; a response to Bolesław Miciński's review of Demonom nocy)
"O sojuszu sowiecko–niemieckim" ("On the Soviet–German Alliance", Wiadomości Polskie, Polityczne i Literackie, 17 March 1940; on the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the ways of winning the Second World War)
Selected posthumous editions of Łobodowski's works
List do kraju (1989)
Kassandra jest niepopularna: wybór tekstów z Orła Białego z lat 1956–1980 (1990)
Worek Judaszów (1995)
Naród jest nieśmiertelny: Józef Łobodowski o Ukraińcach i Polakach (1996; bilingual edition: text in Polish and Ukrainian)
Selected translations by Łobodowski
Józef Łobodowski, comp. & tr., U przyjaciół, Lublin, [n.p.], 1935.
Sergei Yesenin, "Tęsknota w ojczyźnie" (1932; translation from Russian into Polish, published in Kurjer Lubelski of 14 October 1932, of the poem "Устал я жить в родном краю...": "I'm Tired of Living in My Land...")
Aleksandr Blok, Wiersze włoskie (1935; translation from Russian into Polish, jointly with Kazimierz Andrzej Jaworski, of Итальянские стихи: "Italian Poems")
[Zdzisław Stahl], El crimen de Katyn a la luz de los documentos (1952; translation from Polish into Spanish of Zbrodnia katyńska w świetle dokumentów: "The Katyn Crime Against Humanity in the light of the Documents")
Boris Pasternak, Doktor Żywago (1959; translation from Russian into Polish of Доктор Живаго: "Doctor Zhivago", poetry sections only)
Abram Tertz (sc. Andrei Sinyavsky), Sąd idzie (1959; translation from Russian into Polish of Суд идет: "On Trial: The Soviet State versus 'Abram Tertz' and 'Nikolai Arzhak'")
Aleksey Remizov, Czy istnieje życie na Marsie (1961; translation from Russian into Polish of Есть ли жизнь на Марсе?: "Is There Life on Mars?")
Abram Tertz (sc. Andrei Sinyavsky), Lubimow (1961; translation from Russian into Polish of Любимов)
Abram Tertz (sc. Andrei Sinyavsky), Opowiesci fantastyczne (1961; translation from Russian into Polish of Фантастические повести: "Fantastic Stories")
Yuli Daniel, Mówi Moskwa (1962; translation from Russian into Polish of Говорит Москва: "This is Moscow Speaking")
We własnych oczach (1963; translations from Russian into Polish in the anthology of contemporary Russian poetry, "In Their Own Eyes"; co-translator)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Zagroda Matriony (1963; translation from Russian into Polish of Матрёнин двор: "Matryona's Place")
Andrei Sinyavsky, Myśli niespodziewane (1965; translation from Russian into Polish of Мысли врасплох: "Unguarded Thoughts")
Galina Serebryakova (Галина Серебрякова), Huragan (1967; translation from Russian into Polish of Смерч: "Tornado")[60]
Andrei Sakharov, Rozmyślania o postępie, pokojowym współistnieniu i wolności intelektualnej (1968; translation from Russian into Polish of Размышления о прогрессе, мирном сосуществовании и интеллектуальной свободе: "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom")
Ivan Koshelivets', comp.; Józef Łobodowski, tr., Ukraina 1956–1968, Paris, Instytut Literacki, 1969. (An anthology of Łobodowski's translations from Ukrainian poetry into Polish.)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oddział chorych na raka (1973; translation from Russian into Polish of Раковый корпус: "Cancer Ward")
Bibliography
Tymon Terlecki, "Poezje Cezarego Baryki: Rzecz o Łobodowskim" (The Verses of Cezary Baryka: A Disquisition on Łobodowski), Tygodnik Illustrowany (Warsaw), vol.78, No.16 (4,038), 18 April 1937, pages 311–312.  (Acritique of Łobodowski's oeuvre in juxtaposition of his person with that of the fictional character Cezary Baryka, the protagonist of the novel cycle The Spring to Come by Stefan Żeromski for whom the character served as one of his heteronyms à la Pessoa's.)
Janusz Kryszak, Katastrofizm ocalający: z problematyki poezji tzw. Drugiej Awangardy, 2nd ed., enl., Bydgoszcz, Pomorze, 1985.  ISBN8370030068.
Józef Zięba, "Żywot Józefa Łobodowskiego", in 8 installments, Relacje, Nos. 3–10, 1989.
Wacław Iwaniuk, Ostatni romantyk: wspomnienie o Józefie Łobodowskim, ed. J.Kryszak, Toruń, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika, 1998.  ISBN832310915X.
Marek Zaleski, Przygoda drugiej awangardy, 2nd ed., corr. & enl., 	Wrocław, Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 2000.  ISBN8304045699.  (1st ed., 1984.)
Irena Szypowska, Łobodowski: od "Atamana Łobody" do "Seniora Lobo", Warsaw, Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 2001.  ISBN8320545897.
Ludmiła Siryk, Naznaczony Ukrainą: o twórczości Józefa Łobodowskiego, Lublin, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2002.  ISBN8322719604.
Paweł Libera, "Józef Łobodowski (1909–1988): szkic do biografii politycznej pisarza zaangażowanego", Zeszyty Historyczne, No.160, Paris, Instytut Literacki, 2007, pages3–34.  ISSN 0406-0393; ISBN2716802076.  (Useful as an overview despite obvious inaccuracies of detail: Łobodowski's date of birth given as "9March 1909" instead of 19 March (p.11), Tymon Terlecki misnamed "Olgierd Terlecki" (p.14), etc.)
Łobodowski: życie, twórczość, publicystyka, wspomnienia: w stulecie urodzin Józefa Łobodowskiego, ed. M.Skrzypek & A.Zińczuk, Lublin, Ośrodek Brama Grodzka-Teatr NN & Stowarzyszenie Brama Grodzka, 2009.
See also
Zuzanna Ginczanka
Julian Tuwim
Józef Czechowicz
Second Avant-garde (Druga Awangarda)
Ukrainian school
Kurjer Lubelski
Sanacja
Wanda Wasilewska
List of Poles
List of Polish-language poets

Photos

 Photo by Adam Tomaszewski.
Texts

 beginning, "Tyle czasu bez żadnych widomości o Was..." (So much time [has passed] without any news from you...).

What were Józef Stanisław Łobodowski's political leanings?


History of Armenia

Etymology
Timeline
Traditional
Urheimat

Prehistory
Stone and Copper Age
Shulaveri-Shomu culturec. 6500–3400 BCE
Areni-1 Cave Complex
Kura–Araxes culturec. 3400–2000 BCE
Legend of Hayk(?) 2492 BCE

Bronze and Iron Age
Trialeti-Vanadzorc. 2200–1600 BCE
Hayasa-Azzic. 1500–1290 BCE
Arme-Shupriac. 1300s–1190 BCE
Mushki

Ararat/Urartu
Nairi Tribes 1114–860 BCE
Kingdom of Van 860–590 BCE
Scythian and Mede invasions 6th cen. BCE

Antiquity
Achaemenid period
Satrapy of Armina 549–331 BCE
Orontid Dynasty

Kingdom of Armenia
Armenia Minor 331–72 BCE
Kingdom of Armenia 321 BCE–428 CE
Artaxiad dynasty 189 BCE–12 CE
Empire 84–34 BCE
Arsacid dynasty 52–428 CE
Roman–Parthian War58–63 CE
Roman Province of Armenia 114–118 CE
Christianization 301 CE
Kingdom of Sophene c.200–94 BCE
Kingdom of Commagene 163 BCE–72 CE

Marzpanate period
Byzantine Armenia 387–536
Persian Armenia 428–646
Mamikonian dynasty
Battle of Avarayr 451
Muslim conquest of Armenia 645

Middle Ages
Arabic period
Emirate of Armenia 653–884
Hamamshen 700s–1300s
Amatuni Dynasty

Kingdom of Armenia
Bagratid Armenia 884–1045
Bagratid dynasty 861–1118
Sajid dynasty 889–929
Kingdom of Vaspurakan 908–1021
Artsruni dynasty
Sallarid dynasty 919–1062
Kingdom of Tashir-Dzoraget 979–1118
Kingdom of Syunik 987–1170
Kingdom of Artsakh 1000–1261
House of Hasan-Jalalyan
Battle of Manzikert 1071

Cilician and Turko-Mongol Period
Seljuk Empire 1071–1201
Kingdom of Georgia
Georgian Armenia 1118–1466
Principality of Khachen 1261–15th cen.
Mongol Empire & Ilkhanate
Mongol Armenia 1236–1335
Turkomania 14th—15th cen.
Timurid Empire 15th cen.

Kingdom of Cilicia 1198–1375
Rubenid dynasty 1000–1261
Hethumid dynasty 1226–1373
Lusignan dynasty 1341–1375

Early modern age
Perso-Ottoman period
Safavid and Qajar rule 1502–1828
Five Melikdoms 15th cen.—1822
Shah Abbas I's deportation 1606
Russo-Persian War 1804–13
Treaty of Gulistan 1813
Russo-Persian War 1826–1828
Treaty of Turkmenchay 1828
Ottoman Empire 1548–1915
Armenian Millet
Russo-Turkish War 1877–1878
Armenian Question
Six Vilayets 1878
Hamidian massacres 1895–1896
Adana massacre 1909
Armenian Genocide 1909–1918
Confiscation of
Armenian properties

Russian period
Russian rule 1828–1918
Armenian Oblast 1828–1840
Western Armenia 1915–1918
Caucasus Campaign 1914–1918
National Liberation Movement
Armenakan 1885
S.D. Hunchakian Party 1887
ARF (Dashnaktsutyun) 1890

Modern age
Independence
First Republic of Armenia 1918–1920
War with Azerbaijan 1918–1920
War with Georgia 1918
Treaty of Sèvres 1920
Wilsonian Armenia 1920
War with Turkey 1920
Treaty of Alexandropol 1920

Soviet period
Armenian S.S.R. 1920–1991
February Uprising 1921
Republic of Mountainous Armenia 1921
Treaty of Moscow 1921
Treaty of Kars 1921
Soviet Claims in Turkey 1945–1953
Nagorno-Karabakh A.O. 1923–1991

Diaspora
Armenian diaspora
Hidden Armenians
Repatriation

Contemporary Armenia
Republic of Armenia since 1991
Post-Soviet transition 1991–1995
Modern era since 1995
Republic of Artsakh since 1994
Nagorno-Karabakh War 1989–1994vt
Russian Armenia is the period of Armenian history under Russian rule from 1828, when Eastern Armenia became part of the Russian Empire following Qajar Iran's loss in the Russo-Persian War (1826–1828) and the subsequent ceding of its territories that included Eastern Armenia per the out coming Treaty of Turkmenchay of 1828.[1]
Eastern Armenia remained part of the Russian Empire until its collapse in 1917.
Background

For hundreds of years, the inhabitants of Eastern Armenia lived under the rule of successive Iranian empires. Starting from the early 16th century, up to 1828, Eastern Armenia was ruled by the Iranian Safavid, Afsharid, and Qajar dynasties. Subsequent wars between the Ottoman and Safavid empires led to the destruction of many of the Armenian towns, and made Armenian life difficult. Added to this, the Christian Armenians were dhimmi subjects (forming a millet) under Muslim rulers, whether Ottomans or Persians.
In 1678, the Armenian leadership secretly conducted a congress in Echmiadzin, and decided that Armenia had to be liberated from foreign domination. At this stage, the Armenians were unable to fight against two empires at once, so they searched for help from abroad. Israel Ori, an Armenian native of Karabagh, son of an Armenian melik or prince, searched for help in many of the European capitals.  Israel Ori died in 1711, without seeing the Armenian Dream realized.  In 1722, the Tsar of Russia, Peter the Great, declared war against the Safavid Iranians, who were at that time in heavy decline. Georgians and Karabagh's Armenians helped the Russians by rebelling against Safavid rule. David Bek commanded the rebellion for six years, until he died on the battlefield.
The Russian annexation and Persia's ceding

A turning-point came in 1801 when the Russians annexed the Georgian Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, giving them a foothold in Transcaucasia. Over the next three decades, Russia sought to further expand its territory in the Caucasus at the expense of Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Iran. The Russian campaigns found enthusiastic support amongst the Armenians, led by the Bishop of Tbilisi, Nerses Ashtaraketsi, who took part in the fighting in person.[2][3] The Russo-Persian War of 1804 to 1813 saw the Russians conquer a bit of territory in eastern Armenia only to renounce most of it at the Treaty of Gulistan.
In 1826, in violation of the Gulistan treaty, the Russians occupied parts of Iran's Erivan Khanate.[4][5] This sparked the final bout of hostilities between the two; the Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828. In the subsequent war that raged, (Russo-Persian War, 1826-1828), the Qajarid Iranians suffered an even bigger disaster, as Russia occupied as far as Tabriz in  mainland Iran. At the end of the war, in 1828, with the Treaty of Turkmenchay, Iran was forced to cede its territories comprising the Erivan khanate (comprising modern-day Armenia), the Nakhichevan Khanate, as well as the remainder of the Republic of Azerbaijan that had not been ceded forcefully in 1813.[1] By this time, in 1828, the century-long Iranian rule over Eastern Armenia had thus officially come to an end.
Demographic shifts
Until the mid-fourteenth century, Armenians had constituted a majority in Eastern Armenia.[6]
At the close of the fourteenth century, after Timur's campaigns, Islam had become the dominant faith, and Armenians became a minority in Eastern Armenia.[6]
Some 80% of the population of Iranian Armenia were Muslims (Persians, Turkics, and Kurds) whereas Christian Armenians constituted a minority of about 20%.[7] As a result of the Treaty of Gulistan (1813) and the Treaty of Turkmenchay (1828), Iran was forced to cede Iranian Armenia (which also constituted the present-day Armenia), to the Russians.[8][9]
After the Russian administration took hold of Iranian Armenia, the ethnic make-up shifted, and thus for the first time in more than four centuries, ethnic Armenians started to form a majority once again in one part of historic Armenia.[10] The new Russian administration encouraged the settling of ethnic Armenians from Iran proper and Ottoman Turkey. As a result, by 1832, the number of ethnic Armenians had matched that of the Muslims.[7] Anyhow, it would be only after the Crimean War and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, which brought another influx of Turkish Armenians, that ethnic Armenians once again established a solid majority in Eastern Armenia.[11] Nevertheless, the city of Erivan remained having a Muslim majority up to the twentieth century.[11] According to the traveller H. F. B. Lynch, the city was about 50% Armenian and 50% Muslim (Azerbaijanis and Persians) in the early 1890s.[12]
Establishment of Russian rule

Armenian patriots such as Bishop Nerses had hoped for an autonomous Armenia within the Russian Empire, but they were to be disappointed by the new government. Tsar Nicholas and his governor in Transcaucasia, Ivan Paskevich, had other plans. They wanted the Russian Empire to be a centralised state and when Nerses complained he was soon sent to Bessarabia, far away from the Caucasus region.[13]
In 1836 a regulation, the Polozhenie (Statute) was enacted by the Russian government that greatly reduced the political powers of the Armenian religious leadership, including that of the Catholicos, while preserving the autonomy of the Armenian Church.[14] After 1836, in accordance with the new regulation, the Catholicos of Echmiadzin was to be elected in congresses in Echmiadzin, in which religious and non-religious dignitaries would participate. The Tsar would have a last word in the choice of the Catholicos. Armenians greatly profited from the fact that the Catholicosate retained the authority to open schools. Notable ones are Moscow's Lazarian Tiflis' Nersessian schools. Moreover, the Catholicosate opened printing houses and encouraged the publication of Armenian newspapers.
Armenians within the Russian Empire
A significant number of Armenians were already living in the Russian Empire before the 1820s. After the destruction of the last remaining independent Armenian states in the Middle Ages, the nobility disintegrated, leaving Armenian society composed of a mass of peasants plus a middle class who were either craftsmen or merchants. Such Armenians were to be found in most towns of Transcaucasia; indeed, at the beginning of the 19th century they formed the majority of the population in cities such as Tbilisi. Armenian merchants conducted their trade across the world and many had set up base within Russia. In 1778, Catherine the Great invited Armenian merchants from the Crimea to Russia and they established a settlement at Nor Nakhichevan near Rostov-on-Don.[15] The Russian ruling classes welcomed the Armenians' entrepreneurial skills as a boost to the economy, but they also regarded them with some suspicion. The image of the Armenian as a "wily merchant" was already widespread. Russian nobles derived their income from their estates worked by serfs and, with their aristocratic distaste for engaging in business, they had little understanding or sympathy for the way of life of mercantile Armenians.
Nevertheless, middle-class Armenians prospered under Russian rule and they were the first to seize the new opportunities and transform themselves into a prosperous bourgeoisie when capitalism and industrialisation came to Transcaucasia in the later half of the 19th century. The Armenians were much more skilled at adapting to the new economic circumstances than their neighbours in Transcaucasia, the Georgians and the  Azeris. They became the most powerful element in the municipal life of Tbilisi, the city regarded by Georgians as their capital, and in the late 19th century they began to buy up the lands of the Georgian nobility, who had gone into decline after the emancipation of their serfs. Armenian entrepreneurs were quick to exploit the oil boom which began in Transcaucasia in the 1870s, having large investments in the oil-fields in Baku in Azerbaijan and the refineries of Batumi on the Black Sea coast. All this meant that the tensions between Armenians, Georgians and Azeris in Russian Transcaucasia were not simply ethnic or religious in nature but were due to social and economic factors too. Nevertheless, in spite of the popular image of the typical Armenian as a successful businessman, at the end of the 19th century 80 per cent of Russian Armenians were still peasants working the land.[16]
Russian rule until 1877

Relations between the Russian authorities and their new Armenian subjects did not begin smoothly. Since Armenia was on Russia's frontline against the rival empires of the Ottomans and Persians, it was initially treated as a military zone. Until 1840, Russian Armenia was a separate administrative unit, the Armenian Oblast, but it was then merged into other Transcaucasian provinces with no regard to its national identity. Things improved when Nerses Ashtaraketsi was recalled from Bessarabia and made Catholicos of the Armenian Church in 1843. Moreover, Mikhail Vorontsov, who ruled Russian Armenia as Viceroy of the Caucasus between 1845 and 1854, was highly sympathetic to the Armenians.
As a consequence, by the mid-19th century, most of the Armenian intelligentsia had become highly Russophile. Armenian culture flourished in these years as the new unified province under Russian rule gave Armenians a sense of their shared identity once more. Being part of the Russian Empire also turned Armenia away from the Middle East and towards Europe and modern intellectual currents such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism. A wide array of Armenian newspapers were published and there was a literary revival headed by Mikael Nalbandian, who wanted to modernise the Armenian language, and the poet and novelist Raffi. The pro-Russian outlook of the Armenian intelligentsia continued under Tsar Alexander II, who was widely praised for his reforms.[16]
The Russo-Turkish War

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78 marked a watershed in the relationship between the Russian authorities and their Armenian subjects. Armenians still living in western Armenia under the Ottoman Empire had grown increasingly discontented and looked towards Russia to free them from Turkish rule. In 1877, war broke out between the Russia and the Ottomans over the treatment of Christians in the Balkans. The Russians were keen to mobilise Armenian patriotism when they advanced on a second front against the Turks in the Caucasus, and many of the commanders they employed were of Armenian descent. The Russians made large territorial gains in western Armenia before an armistice was called in January, 1878.
The Treaty of San Stefano, signed in March, 1878, did not grant Russia the whole of western Armenia but it contained a special clause, Article 16, by which Russia guaranteed the rights of Armenians still under Ottoman rule against oppression. However, Russia's Great Power rivals, Great Britain and Austria, had been disturbed at the gains Russia had made at the expense of the Ottomans and pressed for a revision of the treaty. At the Congress of Berlin, amongst other territories, Russia was forced to give up all its Armenian gains except the regions of Kars and Ardahan and Article 16 was replaced by the "meaningless"[17] Article 61, which stated that reforms need only be carried out in the Ottoman Armenian provinces after the Russian army had withdrawn.[18][19]
The reign of Alexander III, 1881–1894
After the assassination of the reform-minded Tsar Alexander II in 1881, the attitude of the Russian authorities towards the national minorities of the empire changed dramatically.
The new tsar, Alexander III, was ultra-conservative in outlook and wanted to create a highly centralised, autocratic state. He viewed any expression of a desire for increased freedom and autonomy by his subjects as evidence of rebellion.
Russification

The last decades of the 19th century also saw a rise in Russian chauvinism with non-Russians described in increasingly racist terms. Armenians came in for particular abuse in ways which often resembled anti-Semitism. The first sign of this was the new regime's dismissal of Alexander II's leading minister, the Armenian Count Loris-Melikov. Loris-Melikov was viewed as too liberal but he was also labeled a "frenzied Asiatic" and "not a true Russian patriot".[17] The Russian authorities also began to be suspicious of Armenian economic dominance in Transcaucasia.[20] Ironically, such suspicions of the Armenians - who were among the most Russophile of the tsar's subjects - as an untrustworthy people prone to revolutionary conspiracy led the Russians to introduce policies which produced the very thing they were aimed at preventing, as Armenians turned more and more towards new nationalist movements.
Russification began in earnest in 1885, when the Viceroy of the Caucasus, Dondukov-Korsakov, ordered the closure of all Armenian parish schools and their replacement by Russian ones. Though the Armenian schools were reopened the following year, they were now subject to strict tsarist control and the use of the Armenian language was discouraged in favour of Russian. The Russians also began to persecute the Armenian Church, which had been separate from the Orthodox Church since the year 451.[21][22] The Russian attitude to the Ottoman Empire also changed and by the 1890s, Russia and Britain had exchanged roles. Now it was Russia who supported the status quo in western Armenia, with the British urging improvement in conditions for Christians in the region. The Russian authorities were disturbed by revolutionary Armenian nationalist movements within the Ottoman Empire and feared their links with eastern  Armenians would increase subversion within Russian Transcaucasia too. The tsarist regime cracked down on any attempt by Russian Armenians to engage in action across the border, a leading example being the Gugunian Expedition of 1890.[23]
The growth of Armenian nationalism

Armenians played little role in the revolutionary movements of the Russian Empire until the 1880s. Until that point, the ideas of Grigor Artsruni, the editor of the Tbilisi-based newspaper Mshak ("The Cultivator"), enjoyed great popularity among the Armenian intelligentsia. Artsruni believed that life under the Russian Empire represented the "lesser evil" for his people. Russian Armenians were deeply concerned about the plight of their compatriots under the Persian and Ottoman Empires, especially the peasants of western Armenia who were mostly ignored by Ottoman Armenian intellectuals far away in Istanbul and Smyrna. Tbilisi and Yerevan were much more obvious choices for a base for promoting revolutionary activity among Armenians in the eastern Ottoman Empire. The importance of the unity of the Armenia, divided between three empires, ensured that Armenian political movements would have little in common with other political movements in the Russian Empire.[24]
The growth of Armenian nationalism was given impetus by the Russian authorities' anti-Armenian measures of the 1880s. In 1889, Christapor Mikaelian founded the "Young Armenia" movement in Tbilisi. Its aims were carrying out reprisals against Kurds believed to be guilty of persecuting Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, as well as smuggling arms and encouraging guerrilla action. They also established links with a new Ottoman Armenian nationalist party, the Hunchaks. In 1890, Mikaelian and his colleague Simon Zavarian replaced Young Armenia with a new party: the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, usually known as the "Dashnaks". The Dashnaks tried to get the Hunchaks to join them but the two split in 1891 and rivalry between the parties would be a major feature of subsequent Armenian nationalism. Both parties were socialist in their economic programmes. The primary focus of the Dashnaks was nationalism, however, and their chief concern was the fate of the Ottoman Armenians. They soon had branches in Russia, Persia and Turkey and after the fragmentation of the Hunchaks in the mid-1890s, they became the dominant nationalist force in Russian Armenia.[25]
The reign of Nicholas II 1894–1917
Tsar Nicholas II, who came to the throne in 1894, continued his father's policy of Russification. Anti-Armenian feeling among the Georgians and Azeris of Transcaucasia was also on the rise, inflamed by the editor of the official newspaper Kavkaz ("Caucasus"), V.L. Velichko, who was an ardent Russian chauvinist.

Edict on Armenian church property 1903–1904
In 1897, Tsar Nicholas appointed the Armenophobic Grigory Sergeyevich Golitsin as governor of Transcaucasia, and Armenian schools, cultural associations, newspapers and libraries were closed. Armenian nationalism as practised by the Dashnaks, with their penchant for revolutionary violence and socialist economic policies, had at first had little appeal for the Armenian bourgeoisie, but Russian cultural repression gained them more sympathy. Russified middle-class Armenians began changing their names back to their Armenian form (e.g. Mirzoev became Mirzoian) and engaged private tutors to teach their children the Armenian language.[26][27]
The tsar's Russification programme reached its peak with the decree of June 12, 1903 ordering the confiscation of the properties of the Armenian Church. The Catholicos of Armenia begged the Russians to overturn the decree but when they refused he turned to the Dashnaks. The Armenian clergy had previously been very wary of the Dashnaks, condemning their socialism as anti-clerical, but now they saw them as their protectors. The Dashnaks formed a Central Committee for Self-Defence in the Caucasus and organised a series of protests among Armenians. At Gandzak the Russian army responded by firing into the crowd, killing ten, and further demonstrations were met with more bloodshed. The Dashnaks and Hunchaks began a campaign of assassinations against tsarist officials in Transcaucasia and they even succeeded in wounding Prince Golitsin. In 1904, the Dashnak congress specifically extended their programme to look after the rights of Armenians within the Russian Empire as well as Ottoman Turkey.
The 1905 Revolution

Unrest in Transcaucasia, which also included major strikes, reached a climax with the widespread uprisings throughout the Russian Empire known as the 1905 Revolution. 1905 saw a wave of mutinies, strikes and peasant uprisings across imperial Russia and events in Transcaucasia were particularly violent. In Baku, the centre of the Russian oil industry, class tensions mixed with ethnic rivalries. The city was almost wholly composed of Azeris and Armenians, but the Armenian middle-class tended to have a greater share in the ownership of the oil companies and Armenian workers generally had better salaries and working conditions than the Azeris. In December 1904, after a major strike was declared in Baku, the two communities began fighting each other on the streets and the violence spread to the countryside. By the time it was over, an estimated 1,500 Armenians and 700 Azeris were dead. The events of 1905 convinced Tsar Nicholas that he must reverse his policies. He replaced Golitsin with the Armenophile governor Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov and returned the property of the Armenian Church. Gradually order was restored and the Armenian bourgeoisie once more began to distance itself from the revolutionary nationalists.[28]
Tribune of People, 1912
In January 1912, a total of 159 Armenians were charged with membership of an anti-"Revolutionary" organization. During the revolution Armenian revolutionaries were split into "Old Dashnaks", allied with the Kadets and "Young Dashnaks" aligned with the SRs. To determine the position of Armenians all forms of Armenian national movement put into trial. The entire Armenian intelligentsia, including writers, physicians, lawyers, bankers, and even merchants" on trial.[29] When the tribune finished its work, 64 charges were dropped and the rest were either imprisoned or exiled for varying periods.[30]
World War One and independence, 1914–1918

The years between the 1905 Revolution and World War I saw a rapprochement between most Armenians and the Russian authorities. Russia became concerned when her enemy Germany began drawing closer to the Ottoman Empire, which led the Russians to take a renewed interest in the welfare of the Ottoman Armenians.
When World War I broke out in August 1914, the Russians sought to mobilise Armenian patriotic sentiment. Most Armenian troops were transferred to the European theatre of World War I (known as the Eastern Front). The Ottoman Empire did not join the world war until several months had passed and, as the possibility of a Caucasus Campaign come closer, in the summer of 1914, Count Illarion Ivanovich Vorontsov-Dashkov consulted with the Mayor of Tbilisi Alexandre Khatsian, the primate of Tbilisi, Bishop Mesrop, and the prominent civic leader Dr. Hakob Zavriev about the creation of Armenian volunteer detachments.[31]  The volunteer units would be made up from Armenians who were not subjects of the empire or not obliged to serve in the army. These units would be employed on the Caucasus Campaign. Many of them were living in the Caucasus and many were impatient to take up arms to liberate their homeland.[31] During the course of the war 150,000 Armenians fought in the Russian Army.
Occupation of Turkish Armenia

The Ottoman authorities embarked on the genocide of their Armenian subjects as early as April 1915 following the rapid Russian advance in the Caucasus Campaign and the Siege of Van. An Armenian provisional government [33] within the autonomous region was initially set up around Lake Van.[34] The Armenian government in the war zone was briefly referred to as "Free Vaspurakan",[35] and after an Ottoman advance in June 1915. With the Ottoman advance in June 1915 250,000 Armenians from Van and the neighbouring region of Alashkerd retreated to the Russian frontier. Russian Transcaucasia was flooded with refugees from the massacres.
While it scored military successes against the Turks, the Russian war machine began to disintegrate on its front against Germany and in February 1917 the tsarist regime was overthrown by a revolution in Saint Petersburg.[36][37]
Russian Armenians greeted the new government with enthusiasm, hoping it would secure Ottoman Armenia for them. The issue of the continuation of the war was a highly contentious one amongst the political parties of the new Russia, with most favouring a "democratic peace"; but since the provinces of Ottoman Armenia were under Russian military occupation at the time of the revolution, the Armenians believed that the government would agree to defend them. To help out, the Provisional Government began replacing Russian troops, whose commitment to continued fighting was in doubt, with Armenian ones on the Caucasian front. But as 1917 went on the Provisional Government lost support among Russian soldiers and workers and much of the army melted away from Transcaucasia.
Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians

The Bolshevik Revolution of October, 1917 forced the issue of independence for the peoples of Transcaucasia, since the Bolsheviks enjoyed little support in the region. In February, 1918, the Armenians, Georgians and Azeris formed their own Transcaucasian parliament. Armenians united under Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians. On April 22, 1918 it voted for independence, declaring itself to be the Democratic Federative Republic of Transcaucasia. The federation dissolved when Georgia declared its independence on May 26. Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians followed on May 28.
The Armenian Congress of Eastern Armenians devised policies to direct the war efforts and the relief and repatriation of refugees. The council passed a law to organise the defense of the Caucasus against the Ottoman Empire using the vast quantity of supplies and ammunition left over from the departure of the Russian army. The congress specifically devised a local control and administrative structure for Transcaucasia. Even if the Congress did not devise specific solutions for the soldiers left in Baku, Tbilisi, Kars, and other militias under the Occupation of Turkish Armenia under the civil governor Hakob Zavriev, they did not resist the ongoing reality of these soldiers serving for the other forces. The Congress also selected a fifteen-member permanent executive committee, known as the "Armenian National Council", whose leader was Avetis Aharonyan. This committee’s first task was to set the stage for the declaration of the First Republic of Armenia.
First Republic of Armenia

The major problem confronting the new state was the advancing Ottoman army, which by now had recaptured much of western Armenia, but the interests of the three peoples were very different. For obvious reasons, defence against the invading army was of paramount importance to the Armenians, while the Muslim Azeris were sympathetic to the Turks. The Georgians felt that their interests could best be guaranteed by coming to a deal with the Germans rather than the Turks and on May 26, 1918, at German prompting, Georgia declared its independence from the Transcaucasian Republic. This move was followed two days later by Azerbaijan. Reluctantly, the Dashnak leaders, who were the most powerful Armenian politicians in the region, declared the formation of a new independent state, the First Republic of Armenia on May 28, 1918.[38]
Republic of Mountainous Armenia

The Treaty of Batum was signed between the First Republic of Armenia and the Ottoman Empire after the last battles of the Caucasus Campaign. The Ottoman Empire initially gained a considerable portion of the South Caucasus with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed with the Russian SFSR and then following Treaty of Batum with Armenia. Andranik Ozanian rejected these new borders and proclaimed the new state, where his activities were concentrated at the link between the Ottoman Empire to the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic at Karabakh, Zanghezur and Nakhichevan. In January 1919, with Armenian troops advancing, the British forces (Lionel Dunsterville) ordered Andranik back to Zangezur, and gave him assurances that this conflict could be solved with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The Paris Peace Conference proclaimed the First Republic of Armenia an internationally recognized state and Republic of Mountainous Armenia dissolved.
Centrocaspian Dictatorship

The Centrocaspian Dictatorship was a British-backed anti-Soviet government founded in Baku on August 1, 1918. The government was composed by the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the Armenian national movement which majority was from Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaks). British force the Dunsterforce occupied the city and helped the mainly Dashnak-Armenian forces to defend the capital during the Battle of Baku. However, Baku fell on September 15, 1918 and an Azeri-Ottoman army entered the capital, causing British forces and much of the Armenian population to flee. The Ottoman Empire signed the Armistice of Mudros on November 30, 1918 and the British occupational force re-entered Baku.
Soviet rule
Eventually, the USSR annexed Eastern Armenia and rendered it the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Maps

Kars Oblast. Russian map.
Erivan Governorate. Russian map.
Elisabethpol Governorate. Russian map.

See also
History of Armenia
Timeline of Armenian history
Armenian Oblast
Erivan Governorate
Elisabethpol Governorate
Kars Oblast (since 1878)

Bibliography
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