About Alexander Atabekian
Alexander Movsesi Atabekian (Armenian: Ալեքսանդր Մովսեսի Աթաբեկյան; 2 February 1869 – 5 December 1933) was an Armenian physician, publisher and anarchist communist. Born in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, he moved abroad to study medicine, enrolling in the University of Geneva in Switzerland. There he began working as a typesetter and became experienced in publishing while working on the journal Hunchak, the organ of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party (SDHP). In 1890, he became a disciple of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and joined the anarchist movement. In Geneva, Atabekian established the Anarchist Library, which published several seminal anarchist texts in the Armenian and Russian languages, with the intention of smuggling them into the Russian Empire. He also made links with the nascent Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF), helping to set up publication of its newspaper Droshak in Geneva. He pursued his medical studies to Paris, where he began publishing the journal Hamaink, the first anarchist periodical in the Armenian language. He wrote extensively about the oppression of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and European countries and elaborated his vision for a social revolution in Armenia. He ceased publication after hearing news of the Hamidian massacres, after which he re-established connections with other anarchists within the ARF. Together they issued a declaration to the Second International, denouncing both the actions of the Ottoman Empire and the complicity of its European allies. After graduating as a Doctor of Medicine, Atabekian moved to Rasht, in Iran, where he worked as a physician and published a Persian edition of Hamaink. He also worked as a combat medic during World War I, during which he treated refugees that had fled the Armenian genocide. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, he moved to Moscow and began writing works of anarchist theory and critique. He was critical of the rise of the Bolsheviks, whom he saw as working in opposition to the will of the people. He instead advocated for the strengthening of the co-operative movement, seeing particular promise in Moscow's house committees as a means to establish socialist anarchism. He also acted as Kropotkin's personal doctor and confidant, staying by his side until his death. He then participated in the management of a museum of Kropotkin, which he maintained throughout the period of the New Economic Policy (NEP). Atabekian suffered a stroke and died in his home in Moscow in 1933, although reference literature would end up reporting that he had died in the Gulag, following the repression of the anarchist movement during Joseph Stalin's rise to power. He has since been held as a key example of an anarchist from outside the Western tradition, and his work on anti-authoritarianism, co-operative economics and tenants rights has been studied in Russia and Ukraine.
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