abstract
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This chapter highlights the rise of a diverse Armenian nationalist sentiment in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It describes the manifestations that Russian officials lumped under the label Armenian nationalism, which took on multiple forms and were not always distinct to Romanov imperial agents that struggled to discern and disarm the various Armenian political agendas. It also demonstrates, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the Russo-Armenian symbiosis that faltered in the tempest of Russian reactionism and Armenian nationalism. The chapter analyzes the tsarist responses to Armenian nationalism under the rule of Tsar Alexander III. In order to grasp the bases of St. Petersburg's unprecedented measures toward Armenians in the 1880s and 1890s, the chapter provides an overview of the new tsar's political ideology.