This chapter traces the political and economic factors that rendered Armenians key to tsarist imperialism. It focuses particularly on Russia's conquest of Eastern Armenia during the Second Russo-Persian War, on the Lazarev family of entrepreneurs, and on the inconsistent economic policies that governed the commerce of Armenians in several southern Russian regions. The chapter also explores the contingent objectives of an imperial project aimed toward distinct communities of the Armenian diaspora. It illustrates impoverished immigrants from the Ottoman and Persian empires, established merchants in southern Russia, and elite families aspiring for social and political prominence in St. Petersburg and Moscow. It also analyzes how the autocracy both recruited and distrusted Armenians from abroad and promoted and restrained the commerce of Armenians already settled in southern Russian cities.
This chapter clarifies the forging of the Russo-Armenian political partnership in the fires of the First Russo-Persian War, during which the shah's Armenians systematically assisted the tsar's military and political agents. It examines Russo-Georgian and Armeno-Georgian tensions and Russia's rivalries with its Western and Eastern counterparts. The chapter also explores how, and why, Armenians emerged as imperial Russia's primary partners in the early nineteenth century. Although the political symbiosis between Russia and Armenia blossomed in that era, they were already familiar to each other well before the onset of tsarist imperialism in the Caucasus. It investigates the Russo-Armenian encounter that happened centuries before the Romanov incorporation of Eastern Armenia in 1828.
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