Origins of the Hnchakian Party in Geneva and the Legacy of the Twenty Gallows, The

The Hnchakian Party was the first revolutionary socialist party in the Ottoman Empire and Persia. All its founders and theorists were Marxists. It was formed by seven Armenian students who had left the Caucasus to continue their higher education at universities in Western Europe, mainly in Paris, Montpellier, Lausanne, Zurich, Geneva and Leipzig. They were young persons, in their twenties, and were from well-to-do bourgeois families who were financially supporting them. None of them ever were Ottoman citizens, yet they were personally concerned with the living conditions of their ethnic brothers and sisters in Western Armenia. For the purpose of furthering revolutionary activity in Western Armenia, the seven young Armenians formed what was later to be called the Social Democrat Hnchakian Party in Geneva, Switzerland, in August 1887.

The current volume explores in detail the historical event of the Hnchakian Twenty Gallows, specifically from the perspective of the extensive reports and communications which appeared in the Swiss press, as well as Imperial German diplomatic correspondence. It highlights the Hnchakian Twenty Gallows as the first victims of the Armenian Genocide, in an event that can be described as a chilling and alarming prelude to full-scale genocide.