The Abdulhamid regime had been tottering since 1902. On July 3rd 1908 an eccentric military officer, Niyazi of Resen, who belonged to the Society of Union and Progress, ‘went rogue’ with the two hundred soldiers under his command and took to the mountains. In three weeks the mutiny in the Ottoman military had grown like an avalanche and the monarchy began to collapse. The spark turned into a fire that spread to almost all the Ottoman armed forces in Macedonia and to a significant section in the rest of the Empire.

After three years organizing and six years of intense activity, by 1896 two clear factions had appeared within the Revolutionary Hunchak Party. One was led by Avetis Nazarbekian and his wife Maro Vardanian, who controlled the party center. The other was formed by their opponents. However this split within the Party was far from being simply about the personalities of Nazarbekian and Vardanian. The dissidents were opposing a very basic and integral part of the party line, namely that it was socialist.