Abstract

Chroniclers of the Constitutional Revolution have often hailed the courage and fearless commitment of the Armenian revolutionaries who participated in the restoration of the constitutional order in 1327/1909. What is often lost in these accounts, however, is the contribution of Armenian social democrats to the debates over revolutionary and democratic ideas in the Second Constitutional Period of 1327-29/1909-11. As historians in the West have become more committed to documenting the multicultural nature of their societies and social movements, so should we pay more attention to the fact that the democratic order of the Constitutional Revolution stemmed in part from the multicultural and multi-ethnic leadership of the revolutionary movement, which included religious dissidents, non-Persians, and non-Muslims.