On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Tuesday 21st May Dr Thomas Welsford (All Souls)
An Armenian Liberal in Revolutionary Samarkand
In 1917, as Armenian socialists and Dashnaks in Samarkand joined other political activists in celebrating the collapse of tsarist authority, the political commentator A.H. Muradian struck a discordant note, observing that this revolutionary dawn posed a direct threat to the long-term welfare of an Armenian community that had been living and flourishing in Central Asia for the last 35 years. Not for the first time in his career, Muradian’s dissident opinion was vindicated by subsequent events. In this paper I draw upon Russian-language archival documents and Armenian-language newspaper reports to trace the course of Muradian’s career from nationalist agitator to liberal sceptic, and consider how attention to this little-known figure usefully complicates conventional narratives about the Armenians in Central Asia, and more generally about the nature of Russia’s multi-ethnic empire.
