Hovhannes Katchaznouni - Report To The 1923 ARF Congress

Report To The 1923 ARF Congress

Katchaznouni prepared a critical report for the April 1923 ARF congress in Bucharest titled "The Federation Has Nothing More to Do," which called for the dissolution of the Party and Armenian support of Soviet Armenia. Its incendiary claims immediately drew rebuke from the party. Until recently, the report was best known through its abridged English translation by Matthew Aram Callender, The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnagtzoutiun) Has Nothing to Do Any More and edited by Avedis Boghos Derounian. The translation emanated from the New York branch of the Armenian General Benevolent Union's Armenian Information Service. The booklet's elusive nature can be attributed to the fact that the Congress was "highly secret and closed to the public" with little information about its circumstances being released.

Recently, a historian from Istanbul University named Mehmet Perinçek found an unabridged Russian copy (printed in Tblisi, 1927) of the book in the Russian State Library in Moscow. Perinçek said that he was the first person to have entered the Russian State archives (due to a simple absence of applications), and that he has spent seven years studying them.

Though this story might be credible, it is disputed by some Armenian intellectuals like Viken L. Attarian, who claim that all of this "discoveries" are actually forgeries of this document, made by alleged Turkish unscrupulous historians to rebuke the fact of the Armenian Genocide, which is proven by the fact that translations of the text into several other languages were published by Kaynak Press, Istanbul, as part of a book series titled "The Lie of 'Armenian Genocide' in Armenian Documents".