„They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else“: Explaining the Armenian Genocide

  • 01.06.2015
  • 19.00 Uhr
  • Memorial (Karetnyj Rjad 5/10)
  • Russland und die Sowjetunion im 20. Jahrhundert: Neue Themen, neue Zugänge

Referent: Ronald Grigor Suny (Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Chicago, Academic Director of the International Research Project "Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism" HSE-SPb)

Sponsored by National Research Unviersity - Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg

Der Vortrag wird in englischer Sprache stattfinden.

Abstract
„This is the story of why, when, and how the genocide of the Armenians
of the Ottoman Empire happened.  It is a story of a moment of
historical passage, when empires attempted to accommodate themselves
to a transforming world in which nations and national states
challenged their sources of power and legitimacy.  Yet those empires
were not ready to give in or give up; they were not prepared to
surrender to what later would appear to be irresistible pressures of
nationalism, popular empowerment, and regimes based on equality and
merit rather than inherited privilege and hierarchy.  Looking back
from the future the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence
of subject nations appear to be historically inevitable.  But for the
actors in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of
the twentieth there were many possible roads that could have been
taken.  My talk today and the book on which it is based investigates
those moments of choice when political actors might have acted
differently but decided instead to embark on a course that led to
devastation and destruction“ (Ronald Grigor Suny)