Prof. Ronald Grigor Suny
University of Michigan
The end of empire is often seen as an inevitable decline leading to the triumph of nationalism and the nation-state. But the tsarist and Ottoman empires in the early twentieth century were not ready to give in or give up to nationalism. Instead they were engaged in processes of reform, experiments in constitutionalism, while refusing to compromise seriously their autocracy and imperial control over disparate peoples. The two empires responded differently to the challenges from Armenians, who tragically straddled the frontier between two antagonistic competitors. Professor Suny explores the plans and ambitions of the Russian and Ottoman imperial regimes in Caucasia and Eastern Anatolia on the eve and during the First World War. Ronald Grigor Suny is Wiliam H. Sewell Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan; Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago; and Senior Researcher at the Higher School of Economics, National Research University, St. Petersburg, Russia. He is author of The Baku Commune, 1917-1918; The Making of the Georgian Nation; Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History; The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union; The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States; “They Can Live in the Desert But Nowhere Else”: A History of the Armenian Genocide; co-author of Russia’s Empires; and co-editor of A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire