The First Republic of Armenia

Collapse, genocide and war

The First World War devastated the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in 1915, deportations and massacres destroyed communities across Anatolia, and hundreds of thousands of survivors fled east into the Russian Caucasus. There they joined a region already strained by war, disease and food shortages, and relief organisations struggled to feed the camps that formed around Yerevan and Etchmiadzin.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 removed the imperial administration and, with it, the Caucasus front. Russian troops left their positions through the winter, and by early 1918 the defence of the region rested on locally raised Armenian units. In April the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic briefly united Armenians, Georgians and Azerbaijanis, but the three national councils wanted different things and the federation dissolved within weeks.

Ottoman forces advanced into the Caucasus in the spring of 1918. In late May they were stopped in three engagements, at Sardarapat, Bash Aparan and Karakilisa, fought by regular units alongside volunteers and villagers. Sardarapat in particular is remembered as the battle that prevented the destruction of the remaining Armenian population of the region and made a declaration of independence possible.

Founding the republic

The Armenian National Council declared independence on 28 May 1918, and the new state was governed largely by the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, with Hovhannes Kajaznuni as its first prime minister and Aram Manukian, the organiser of the defence of Yerevan, as a central figure until his death from typhus in 1919. The Treaty of Batum, signed in June under Ottoman pressure, left the republic with only a small territory around Yerevan and Lake Sevan.

Conditions were desperate. Roughly a third of the population were refugees, harvests had failed, and epidemics of typhus and cholera spread through overcrowded settlements. Famine and epidemic in the winter of 1918 to 1919 killed on the order of a hundred and fifty thousand people, close to a fifth of the population. American and other international relief efforts, including the organisation later known as Near East Relief, kept large numbers of people, especially orphans, alive.

Despite this the government built institutions quickly. Ministries were organised, a parliament was elected in June 1919 with women both voting and standing as candidates, a national currency and postal service were introduced, and a state university was established by decree in May 1919, opening in Alexandropol at the start of 1920 before moving to Yerevan. The tricolour of red, blue and orange was adopted as the national flag.

• Independence declared on 28 May 1918
• First prime minister: Hovhannes Kajaznuni
• Parliamentary elections held in June 1919 with women voting and serving as deputies
• State university founded in 1919, the ancestor of Yerevan State University

Borders and diplomacy

The republic sent delegations to the Paris Peace Conference and pressed for recognition and for a viable territory. In 1920 the Treaty of Sevres awarded Armenia extensive lands in eastern Anatolia, with the boundary to be drawn by United States President Woodrow Wilson. Wilson delivered his arbitration award in November 1920, but by then the treaty had no force on the ground, because the Turkish national movement rejected it and the United States Senate declined to accept a mandate over Armenia.

Relations with neighbours were tense. Disputes with Georgia over the Lori district led to brief fighting in December 1918, and conflict with Azerbaijan over Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhichevan continued through 1919 and 1920. These wars consumed resources the republic could not spare and left it isolated when a serious threat arrived.

In September 1920 Turkish nationalist forces under Kazim Karabekir attacked from the west and captured Kars and Alexandropol. As the Red Army entered from the east, the government transferred power to a Soviet administration on 2 December 1920. The Treaty of Alexandropol, imposing severe terms, was signed at almost the same moment by a government that had already given up its authority, which is why its legal standing has been disputed ever since.

Sovietisation and the February uprising

Armenia became a Soviet republic, and the new authorities moved rapidly against former officials and officers. Arrests and requisitions provoked a revolt in February 1921, during which insurgents held Yerevan for several weeks before Red Army units retook the city in April. Many of the leaders retreated to Zangezur, where Garegin Nzhdeh had organised a mountain resistance that held out until July 1921.

That resistance had one lasting result. When Nzhdeh finally withdrew, it was on the condition that Zangezur remain part of Soviet Armenia, and the region, today the province of Syunik, has been Armenian territory ever since. Kars and Ardahan were confirmed as Turkish under the treaties of Moscow and Kars in 1921, and Nakhichevan was placed under Azerbaijani jurisdiction.

Soviet Armenia brought stability, industrialisation and mass literacy, alongside political repression that fell heavily on writers and intellectuals in the 1930s. Independence returned only in 1991, when the Armenian population voted overwhelmingly for it and the Republic of Armenia declared itself the successor to the state founded in 1918.

The republic in Armenian memory

The First Republic lasted two and a half years, but its achievements were real. It kept a population alive through famine, established a functioning administration in the worst possible conditions, held a democratic election, and founded a university that still operates. It also demonstrated that Armenians could organise a modern state, which mattered enormously to a generation that had just survived the genocide.

Its symbols carried forward. The tricolour flag was readopted in August 1990, a year before independence; the republic that followed recognised 28 May as Republic Day, and treated the First Republic as its legal and moral predecessor. The Sardarapat memorial, built in 1968, is one of the country's principal national monuments, and its bell is rung at commemorations each May.

For students, the period offers a demanding but rewarding subject. It requires weighing decisions made under extreme pressure, understanding how great-power diplomacy affected small states after the First World War, and recognising that a short-lived government can still shape a national future.