The Armenian independence movement had begun as…

The Armenian independence movement had begun as agitation on behalf of liberal democracy by writers, journalists, and teachers, but by the last decade of the nineteenth century, moderate nationalist intellectuals have been pushed aside by younger, more radical socialists.

Armenian revolutionary parties, founded in the early 1890s in Russia and Europe, send their cadres to organize in Turkey.

Because of the self-destruction of one major party, the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party, and the relative isolation of the liberals and the"internationalist" Social Democrats in the cities of Transcaucasia, the more nationalist of the socialist parties, the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF, also known as the Dashnak, a shortened form of its Armenian name), will emerge by the early twentieth century as the only real contender for Armenian loyalties.

The ARF favors Armenian autonomy in both the Russian and the Ottoman empires rather than full independence for an Armenia in which Russian- and Ottoman-held components would be unified.