172 |
The History of Armenia |
or state capitalism). Under the NEP, Moscow returned expropriated enterprises to their previous owners but retained exclusive control over the “commanding heights” economic sectors such as finance, transportation, utilities, and heavy industries. During this period, the Armenian economy was primarily an agricultural economy, with little prospects for rapid industrial development. The city of Erevan had a population of about 65,000 in the middle of 1920s, many of whom were survivors of the genocide. Nearly 80 to 90 percent of the populace lived in the rural areas, and urban workers (or the proletariat, in Marxist parlance) constituted no more than 13 percent of the population.2
The Communist Party in Armenia confronted the unenviable task of building an industrial infrastructure out of the agricultural economy. Allocated according to family size and production capacity, peasant landholdings consisted of three types: independent households, individual households within the village commune, and collective farms.3 The crucial problem, however, was not the form of land allocation but the scarcity of land itself. Nor did the Armenian peasants, especially the Western Armenian refugees, show much inclination to work within the agricultural cooperative structures. In order to address the economic crisis, the Armenian leadership, headed by Miasnikyan, embraced the proposal by Joseph Stalin, General Secretary of the Communist Party from April 1922 to December 1952, and Gregory Sergo Ordjonikidze, Stalin’s close ally who headed Kavkazskoe Biuro (Kavbiuro, Caucasian Bureau) and orchestrated the Bolshevik takeover in Georgia in 1921, to integrate the economies of the Caucasian republics—Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.4 Immediately after they seized power, the Communists placed the foreign trade policies of the three republics under a single authority, as they did with the railroads in the region. Moscow subsequently removed trade barriers between the three republics; however, the next two years witnessed intensive negotiations on the part of the leaders in the republics and in Moscow to determine the boundaries of the republics.
Under the NEP, Moscow experimented with some degree of reliberalization of the economy, but no such experimentation was tolerated in the realm of government and politics. Miasnikyan advised party leaders in Erevan to permit some flexibility in local administration and in matters concerning the intelligentsia and the bourgeoisie. Only the Communist Party could claim legitimate rule throughout the system, and in the early 1920s all opposition or “counterrevolutionary” parties were abolished. Given the unstable economic condition in Armenia, its government favored revival of the Transcaucasian federal arrangement abandoned in 1918, and on March 12, 1921, the three republics created the Federal Union of Soviet Socialist Republics of Transcaucasia.5 Further, the Communist government in Moscow sought to resolve amicably issues related to the Armenian-Turkish
The Leninist-Stalinist Legacy |
173 |
border and signed the Treaty of Moscow (March 16, 1921) and the Treaty of Kars (October 13, 1921) with the Kemalists. Soviet Russia, like the western powers before, was not disposed to antagonizing Turkey and the Muslims within the Soviet empire on behalf of the Armenian interests.6
The administrative structure of Armenia comprised of thirty-three districts (gavarak) divided among eight counties (gavar), with separate administrative status granted to Erevan, Alexandropol (Leninakan after 1924; now Gumri), and Nor Bayazid. The constitution also provided for the separation of church and state. Under the Soviet constitution, Moscow retained absolute authority over the conduct of foreign and national security policies, the formulation of the Soviet budget and implementation of economic policies, administration of transportation and communication networks and of the legal system, and the direction of all policies with respect to natural resources, education, religion, health, labor, and the mass media.7
Although Communists accounted for no more than 1 percent of the population in Armenia, the Communist Party maintained control over Armenian organizational activities through its agencies of repression and fear. These included the Red Army, the Armenian Cheka, the local police, as well as the Komsomol (the Communist Youth Union)—all geared toward, on the one hand, the imposition of national conformity to Soviet unity across the empire and, on the other hand, the institutionalization of korenizatsiia (rooting or nativization), the process of localization of sovietization through the employment of Armenians in the national bureaucracies and the use of the Armenian language in state agencies. The Communist Party, under the leadership of such Bolshevik loyalists as Ashot Hovhannisyan, Hayk Hovsepyan, and Haykaz Kostanyan, insisted on the sovietization of virtually all aspects of Armenian life, including the church and the intelligentsia, with little tolerance for deviations from the dictates of Communist rule.8
Armenia had to rely on primitive infrastructures for transportation and communication, and it lacked rudimentary industrial bases. The economy therefore depended heavily on agricultural production, which in turn depended on weather and other natural conditions. In 1922, for instance, locusts caused enormous damage to crops in the region of Zangezur. The following year, expecting a similar crisis, Armenian peasants in large numbers abandoned the land altogether. The fact that in the meantime the Communist government confiscated all private lands further exacerbated the situation for the peasants.9 Despite the magnitude of the difficulties, the economy nevertheless registered some advances in irrigation and hydroelectric projects; for example, the Shirak and Sardarabad canals were put into operation in 1925 and 1932, respectively.
By the late 1920s Communist industrial policy was yet to produce positive results. State-owned factories were built in Leninakan, and during the
174 |
The History of Armenia |
period 1922 to 1928 employment in industry and transport increased from 4,941 to 20,361 workers. During the second half of the 1920s, the total value of industrial production did not exceed 71.5 percent of the 1914 level, and nationwide unemployment persisted. In Erevan alone, for example, the unemployment level was estimated to be as high as 50 percent of the labor force.10 The Communist government encouraged the development of consumer and state cooperatives but stressed rapid industrialization with various sectors of heavy industry and chemical production. Cooperatives included the Haykoop, a consumer cooperative union already established during the republic, and the Armentorg engaged in external commerce. By 1928, as the state expanded its domain across different economic sectors, the share of private trade had declined from 46.4 percent in 1925 to 36.7 percent.11 The government’s initial policies aimed at the infrastructural, industrial, and financial integration of the Soviet economy across the enormous territory now under Soviet control.
In the name of national unity, the Communist Party “solved” the territorial issues, which had caused so many difficulties for the Republic of Armenia, through fiat on July 5, 1921. Lori was added to Soviet Armenia, while Karabagh and Nakhijevan were given to Azerbaijan.12 The Caucasian Bureau of the Communist Party, which included Stalin, Orjonikidize, Nariman Narimanov (the chairman of the first Communist government in Azerbaijan), Miasnikyan, and Sergei Kirov (deputy chairman of Kavbiuro), rendered the final decision regarding Karabagh during a meeting in Tiflis on July 5, 1921. On July 4, the conferees favored the unification of Karabagh with Armenia and decided to hold a referendum on the matter. Narimanov protested and insisted that the case be presented to the Central Committee in Moscow. The following day, during the second meeting, the bureau reversed its decision and without further debate decided that peace between Muslims and Christians as well as the economic ties between Karabagh and Azerbaijan necessitated that Karabagh be “left within the borders of Azerbaijan with the city of Shushi as the center of this Autonomous Region.”13
The conflict over Karabagh did not end until July 1, 1923, when Baku accepted Karabagh as an autonomous region with its administrative center at Stepanakert (Khankend, Vararakn). Moscow had appointed Asad Karaiev as the Communist leader in Karabagh while the boundaries were being determined. The borders promulgated under him did not provide a corridor between Karabagh and Armenia on the west, an area that consisted of Lachin (Abdaljar), Kelbajar, and Kedabek. Large numbers of Armenians had been removed from this region and from the northern part of Karabagh (Shamkhor, Khanlar, Dashkesan, and Shahumyan), where they had constituted as much as 90 percent of the population. When the first congress of the Soviet Autonomous Region of Karabagh convened in November 1923, 116 of the deputies were Armenians, and 16 Azerbaijanis.
The Leninist-Stalinist Legacy |
175 |
In July 1924 the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan adopted the constitution for Karabagh, which kept the region within the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic for the next seven decades.14
The economic difficulties aside, Armenia in the 1920s and 1930s registered significant, albeit quantitatively limited, accomplishments in cultural development. In 1925, the Institute of Science and Art (renamed the Academy of Sciences) was established in Erevan. Among the luminaries were historians Hakob Manandyan (1873–1952) and Leo (Arakel Babakhanian, 1860–1935), linguists Hachia Ajaryan (1876–1953) and Manuk Abeghyan (1865–1944), writers Avetik Isahakyan (1875–1957) and Eghishe Charents (1897–1937), and musician Alksandr Spendiarov or Spendiaryan (1871–1928).Their works were published and supported by the state, as historian Ronald Suny has noted, “with all the advantages and disadvantages such an arrangement implies.”15
THE STALINIST REGIME, 1928–1953
After Lenin’s death in January 1924, political and economic conditions deteriorated rapidly as Stalin consolidated power in opposition to the more moderate Communists. By 1928 he terminated the NEP and launched rapid industrialization and collectivization campaigns across the nation to combat “peasant backwardness.”16 In the process, Moscow insisted on absolute orthodoxy along the lines of Stalinist dogma objectives. Many Armenian Communist leaders who criticized this sharp turn against the peasants were quickly removed from positions of power despite their strong credentials as loyal Bolsheviks. The government sent students to the farms to introduce the new policy for agricultural collectivization (Armenian: koltntesutyunner, literally, collective economies; Russian: kolkhozy). Resistance, unorganized or organized (as in the case of Daralagiaz), led to police crackdowns, and a large number of peasants were removed from their lands and exiled to Siberia. While the state collectives took control of peasant economy, farmers en masse migrated to the cities for industrial jobs. Industrial production in Armenia, as specified by the Communist government in Moscow, concentrated on chemical production and production of nonferrous metals. According to official statistics, industrial production between 1928 and 1940 rose by about eight times “as a result of the construction of about one hundred large industrial enterprises. In addition, the share of industrial production in the gross national product (GNP) increased from 23 percent in 1923 to 78 percent in 1940.”17 By the late 1930s industrial production accounted for 62 percent of total national production, and industrial workers constituted 31.2 percent of the population. In the economic sphere, the transition to Soviet “command economy” and industrialization required enormous human
176 |
The History of Armenia |
sacrifices on the part of the Armenian population in general and the peasantry in particular.
Despite the promises for and the sacrifices made in the name of industrialization and modernization, Armenia’s economy remained underdeveloped for the duration of Stalin’s era. The established factories served mainly to complement the production processes linked to the other republics, and the local economy failed to develop its own infrastructural base necessary for a comprehensive development. Armenia lacked sufficient communications and transportation networks to build a modern economy, even when its industrial output was higher than the agricultural sector.18
The political situation proved equally tragic. Stalinism placed a premium on loyalty to Stalin himself and the propagation of the cult of personality. The main strategy to achieve that objective was the elevation of loyalists to key positions within the party and bureaucratic hierarchies while eliminating all real or potential opposition to the Stalinist order. One early Stalinist loyalists was Aghasi Khanjyan, who once in power as the first secretary of the Communist Party in Erevan sought to undermine the Leninist Bolsheviks. In 1936, having “committed suicide,” he himself became a victim of Stalin’s purges of 1936 to 1938, however, under the ruthless machinations of Stalin’s henchman in the Caucasus, Lavrenti Beria.19 The Communist leadership in Erevan was quickly transformed from Leninistto Stalinist-oriented “socialism” under the unusually long tenure of Grigor Harutyunyan, a Beria protégé, from 1937 to 1953. The Great Purges brought in a new generation of Communist leaders with a strong sense of loyalty to Stalin, and in the process they “ended any pretension by regional or republic leaders to autonomy from the center.”20
Soviet unity, however, manifested itself most virulently in the form of Russification campaigns launched by the Stalinist regime. The latter viewed national identity as a threat to the Soviet Union. The “New Soviet Man” was expected to transcend boundaries of national identity and to supplant it with patriotism toward the Soviet Union, while Russian culture and language assumed a superior status among those of the nationalities within the empire. Armenian literary giants (e.g., Raffi, Rafayel Patkanian, Charents) were vilified as “nationalists.” In fact, all expressions of criticisms against the Communist regime in Armenia were denounced as “Dashnakism.”21
THE SOVIET REGIME AGAINST
THE ARMENIAN CHURCH
A similarly severe attack was launched against the Armenian Church. Communist ideology, in the tradition of orthodox Marxism, viewed religion as the “opium of the masses” and sought to eradicate all religious influences