CRRC, ARISC, and MWNO are pleased to announce the 2nd session of the Fall 2026 Tbilisi Works-in-Progress series!
“I, Faithful to the Oath of David Bek”: Karekin Nzdeh and Armenian Nation-Building in the 20th Century
Samuel Meguerditchian
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) – Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC) / Max Weber Foundation, Tbilisi Office
Date: 30 September 2026, 18:30 Tbilisi time / 10:30am US EDT
This week’s session will be held in hybrid in-person at CRRC Georgia and virtually via this Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/
My project centres around researching Armenian nation building by questioning its relation to the trajectory of one nationalist: Karekin Nzdeh (1886-1955) focusing on notions of nationality, identity, and heroism within these intersections of empires, borderlands and fragmented identities. Though celebrated by nationalists as a symbol of struggle against Bolsheviks and Turks alike, this belief in the trajectory of a titan who led Armenia to its birth is scarcely questioned and kept out of any timeline or tries at contextualisation. The relation between Nzdeh’s trajectory and Armenian nation building bears various approaches. In nationalist mythology, Nzdeh’s importance to Armenian national formation is depicted as evident and sacred. There it is a relation of concordance which sometimes even claims causality in central questions such as borders. In that view Nzdeh would be the sole guarantor of Armenia’s Southern region of Syunik’s borders. His heroism, already planted by Nzdeh himself in his many writings reappears constantly in nationalist claims. On the contrary, the Soviet Armenian tradition tends to minimise his role, pointing towards his failings, his ethnic nationalism, his collaboration with Nazi-Germany and towards the backwardness of the warlord attitude which indeed constitutes Nzdeh’s ethos as a nationalist leader wanting to carve his mark in pride amongst great names of the “race” he sees both as natural and wants to make appear. Heavily celebrated during the 2000’s and the 2010’s by the Kotcharyan and Sargsyan presidencies, his cult in Armenian nationalist memory is controversial to this day. This presentation aims at studying this trajectory itself while always exploring how its themes are mirrored in the memories that follow hence questioning local and national identities. Particularly engaged in the circulations between empires of Armenian nationalist actors in the beginning of the XXth century, Nzdeh serves in the First Balkan War as a volunteer in the Armenian battalion of the Bulgarian army. A volunteer in the Russian Army during WWI, his time as a nationalist leader in the South Caucasus achieves to bind him to the debates around nation-building in the region. As one of the dachnak (Armenian Revolutionary Federation) leaders of the First Republic of Armenia, his time in exile in the Middle East, Europe (The Balkans, France and Germany) and the United States explicitly connects the history of the South Caucasus to discussions about a global conception of nation-states and about the histories, contradictions and fights those communications create and share. In exile, Nzdeh continues to write in order to conquer the power to define what being Armenian means.
Samuel Meguerditchian is a master’s student in History at EHESS PARIS at the Centre for Russian, Caucasian and Central European Studies (CERCEC), specialising in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands and their transformations during the XXth century. He researches trajectories of Armenian political militants. Having first followed Armenian translation classes at INALCO Paris to help him in the treatment of his first archival materials from the Nubar Library in Paris in his first year of Master’s, he then spent 6 months in Armenia during the last school year to gather documents and study at the Armenian National Archives. During this time, he also was able to present parts of his work at two Max Weber events: “Global Publics and Global History” with Valeska Huber on the 9th of April in Tbilisi and “Global History Today: From Premodern to Modern History” with Sebastian Conrad and Thomas Ertl on the 22nd of May in Yerevan. He is now doing an internship at the Max Weber Foundation’s office in Tbilisi while also visiting the Georgian National Archives.
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Works-in-Progress is an ongoing academic discussion series based in Tbilisi, Georgia, that takes place at the CRRC office at Chavchavadze Ave. 5 and online. It is co-organized by the Caucasus Research Resource Centers (CRRC) Georgia, the American Research Institute of the South Caucasus (ARISC), and Max Weber Network Eastern Europe (MWNO). All of the talks are free and open to the public.
In observation of the spirit of the Chatham House Rule, the talks will not be recorded, and we courteously request that the other participants refrain from recording and/or distributing recordings as well or citing anything expressed therein in the press without explicit permission. The opinions expressed in WiP talks are those of the speakers alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of CRRC, ARISC, or of MWNO.