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(continued from page 87)0$G. o[Toynbee, Arnold Joseph]. The Treatment ofArmenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916:Documents Presented to Viscount Grey of Fallodan,Secretary of State for Foreign A+airs, byViscount Bryce. Preface by Viscount Bryce.Presented to both Houses of Parliament byCommand of His Majesty. London: His Majesty'sStationery Office, 1916. LC 17-2893.The first official report of the destructionof the Armenian population, the collectionconsists of 149 documents compiled by ArnoldToynbee. They include numerous eyewitnessaccounts of the deportations and their consequencesby European residents, travelers, missionaries,and diplomatic personnel. The documentsare organized according to provincesstretching from the war zone in the east throughtowns and districts removed from the conflictin the west of Anatolia all the way to the capitaland then southward in the direction of thedeportations. There are also sections on "TheAnatolian Railway" and its use in the transportof deportees, "The Refugees in the Caucasus"who had fled the Ottoman Empire, and "Azerbaijanand Hakkiari" in northern Iran where theOttoman forces advanced in the beginning of thewar and where some of the earliest mass killingsof the Christian population, including Armeniansand Syrian Nestorians, occurred. For reasonsof security many names were withheld and onesection in the collection appears under theheading of "The Town of X. " "The Key" tothese names and places was published in thesecond edition of the book (Beirut: G. Doniguianand Sons, 1972). In the final section, Toynbeeanalyzed the data gathered by mid-1916 andestimated that 1, 200, 000 were deported in 1915and that half of them perished that year.remained of the Ottoman Empire was assumed by anew circle of ministers. The central government inIstanbul, however, was weak. It appeared compromisedbecause it accommodated the Allied-imposed settlement.Upon the insistence of the British, and to a lesserdegree the French, some of the Young Turk leaderswere court-martialed in 1919-1920. Indicted also weremembers of the two wartime CUP cabinets. Thetribunal handed down a series of verdicts finding theaccused guilty of "the organization and execution" ofthe crime of massacre. ' Indicative of its moral indeci-sion and evasion of domestic responsibility for dealingwith the CUP officials, the Ottoman government wasreluctant to carry out most of the sentences. In the caseof the top CUP officials, however, the sentences wereonly a formality. The officials had eluded the law bytaking refuge in Germany immediately after the warand were tried only in absentia. The final evasion ofany personal culpabilityoccurred with the refusal ofGermany to extradite the accused war criminals. ' Thefailure to assign criminality to the policies of the YoungTurks set the stage for translating the responsibility forexterminating a population into the subject of a debate.Eastern Armenia Under CommunismEastern Armenia had been part of the RussianEmpire since the early nineteenth century. When, theRussian state disintegrated, as a result of the OctoberRevolution the government of this province wasassumed by the local people. In May 1918 they formedan independent republic which lasted only two and ahalf years. The Red Army put an end to Armenianindependence in 1920. Almost immediately the Communistgovernment internally imposed a complete silenceon the Armenian genocide.The lack of Allied resolve to adhere to theobjectives of defining the concept of "crimes againsthumanity" and applying it to the case of the mistreatmentof the Armenians was thus matched by theRussian Communists' rejection of all Western notionsof appropriate and acceptable political conduct. TheSoviet regime introduced new norms of politicalbehavior. The ideological underpinnings of Communismwhich elevated mass terror into state policy onlycontributed to the environment in which it could bedenied that the fate of the Armenians had been in anyway exceptional. These were the years in which thetotalitarian state was taking shape and the Communistshad reached their own reconciliation with this kind ofbrutal ization. 'After six years of warfare and incalculable lossand suffering, Armenian identity became hostage toa redefinition at the hands of ideologues whose manipulationof the historical record only served to furtheralienate and isolate the Armenian people. Even aminimal effort to document the Armenian genocide wasnot contemplated. The single greatest catastrophe inArmenian history, virtually all-encompassing in itsdimensions and implications, was dismissed as a nonevent.With no effort made to preserve a record of thepast, the Communists left the field all the more opento revisionism and denial. They added a powerfulincentive, and in many respects accorded virtualencouragement, for Turkey to deny everything to theArmenians.88 GENOCIDE