Chemistry of Revolution: Naum Tyufekchiev and the Trajectories of Revolutionary Violence in the Late Ottoman Europe
Chemistry of Revolution: Naum Tyufekchiev and the Trajectories of Revolutionary Violence in the Late Ottoman Europe
This study charts the life of Naum A. Tyufekchiev, a chemist who hailed from the Ottoman Macedonian town of Resen. Educated in Belgium, Tufekchiev participated in multiple assassination plots against figures such as the Bulgarian prime minister and cabinet members, the Bulgarian ambassador to Istanbul, the Ottoman Sultan, and the Iranian Shah. A skillful chemist-turned-revolutionary, he designed his own hand grenades and secured illicit transfer of weapons for a range of revolutionary organizations such as the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, Young Turk committees, Macedonian revolutionaries, and the Bolsheviks. While Tyufekchiev became an asset for various intelligence agencies at different times, he had also cultivated an ideological and materialist agenda of his own. By reconstructing his life story, I hope to utilize Tyufekchiev as a lens to understand the late trans-imperial politics from the late 1880s to the First World War. The goal is to reconstruct the life of a revolutionary figure that is layered, complex, and resistant to simple historical categorizations. In doing so, I would not only be challenging nationalist histories which had dominated the study of Balkan revolutionaries, but also re-assert the central roles played by such entrepreneurs of violence in the construction of identities in Southeastern Europe.
Keywords: Ottoman Empire, Macedonia, Bulgaria, revolutionary organizations, violence, dynamite, explosives, assassination, conspiracy
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