By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 9 April 2026
Academic Consensus and the Armenian Genocide
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Category Archives: History
A Note on the Early Tensions in the Soviet Active Measures Using Armenians
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 7 April 2026
In the early phase of the Soviet Union instrumentalising the Armenian desire for the 1915-16 massacres in the Ottoman Empire to be recognised as genocide, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Moscow allowed histories to be written about 1915, mostly by Armenians. The villains in these books were the Young Turks and the Armenian Dashnak revolutionaries, since both were nationalists, and the former was supposedly supported by British “imperialists”. This was troublesome at a popular level in Soviet Armenia.
This was merely one indication of the tensions inherent to using the Armenian national tragedy for Communist active measures. The whole point was to raise the salience of 1915 in Armenian memory, identity, and political organisation had to be raised: that was how Turkey would be pressured and Ankara’s relations with other NATO States strained. But in creating the space for this, the Soviets were running the risk the Armenians would develop ideas of their own.
Continue readingThe Armenian Revolutionary Movement: 1860s to 1915
Russia, the Armenians, and the Ottoman Empire: A First World War Memoir
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 3 March 2026
Gavriil Korganov, whose name is sometimes Anglicised as Gabriel Korganov, was born on 3 May 1880 in Tiflis in the Russian Empire, what is now Tbilisi, the capital of the Republic of Georgia. Korganov was from a military family and joined the Tiflis Cadet Corps in 1897. Two years later, Korganov enrolled in the Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy in Saint Petersburg and went on to the General Staff Academy. Korganov would become a General in the Imperial Russian Army, and at some point joined the Freemasons. Korganov was to be a significant player in the First World War.
The “Whites” in the Russian Civil War Were Not Monarchists
Ruth Morton and British Intelligence in the Falklands War
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on 23 December 2025
An article appeared today about an interview given by Ruth Morton, an Uruguayan woman of British descent in her late 90s, who says she worked for British intelligence during the Falklands War. Morton, whose family had served the British war effort in the 1940s, says that she was involved in spying on the Argentine submarine base at Mar del Plata, on the coast of north-eastern Argentina, 250 miles south of Buenos Aires, adjacent to the border with Uruguay. A translation of the article is given below.
