Материал: Payaslian S., The History of Armenia From the Origins to the Present

on Armenian education, culture, and language. In a memorandum dated August 10, 1923, and classified as strictly confidential, a special internal security committee reported to the Communist Party leadership in Erevan that the Armenian Apostolic Church represented the ideology and interests of the bourgeoisie and that the clergy maintained close ties with the Dashnakists in Armenia and the diaspora. The memorandum identified a number of clergy in Iran, among them Bishop Nerses Melik-Tangyan, as cooperating closely with the Dashnakists to undermine the proletarian revolution. In Armenia, the memorandum noted, nearly 1,115 clergy in 850 churches remained under the influence of the Dashnakist ideology and sought to revive Christian life in the republic. The higher clergy, the memorandum emphasized, maintained ties with the western imperialist powers and the diasporan communities, most notably the United States and England. The document also pointed to two factions within the church: conservative traditionalists and reformists. The former adhered to the customs of orthodoxy and rejected interjections of Communist values, while the reformists were more inclined to embrace Communism. In fact, the memorandum noted, the clergy permitted Dashnak leaders to hold meetings in churches and monasteries at Echmiadzin, Sevan, Alexandropol, Ghamarlu, Oshakan, Lori, and Shahnazar, where the clergy worked with local Dashnakist cells, kept the party pamphlets and documents in fireproof safes, and continued their struggle against Communism. The memorandum underscored the imperative of combating the anti-Communist disposition of the Armenian Church and recommended that the Communist leadership find the means to exploit the existing economic hardships and ideological divisions within the church, systematically and scientifically to challenge the church hierarchy and its followers, and to employ various propaganda strategies through the press and local committees to undermine the church. A similar memorandum in February 1924 reiterated the urgency to sow conflict and division within the church by employing secret informants among the discontented.22

In early 1924 the Armenian Christmas, which according to tradition is observed in January rather than December, provided an opportunity for such a campaign against the church. In the Siuniats diocese, for instance, the local Komsomols at the town of Goris held meetings in early January to organize antichurch demonstrations during the Holy Mass planned at the Vorotan River that ran through the town. Prelate Bishop Artak Smbatyants expressed his concerns to the local authorities and requested several guards so as to prevent disorderly conduct by the Komsomols. On Christmas day, hundreds of parishioners closed their shops to attend Holy Mass, and as the procession marched by the Communist Party offices in the city, the local Cheka chief and Komsomol youths armed with guns and farm instruments attacked the churchgoers. Bishop Smbatyants communicated his protests to the local authorities for their failure to

provide guards. He maintained that the attack appeared to have been planned in advance and that government officials stood by and watched. This barbaric attack, Bishop Smbatyants wrote, represented the party policy toward the Armenian Church, as similar instances had occurred in other towns and villages, where the culprits had gone unpunished. Centuries of such barbarous attacks, the bishop stressed, whether by the Mongols, the Seljuks, and the Arabs, have failed to destroy the Armenian Church. Referring to the Armenian struggle for religious freedom in the fifth century against the imposition of Zoroastrianism, he concluded that the events on Christmas day reminded the parishioners the significance of protecting the church against the modern variant of the Persian Yazdgird and his Armenian collaborator Vasaks of the very same Siuniats region. The Communist Party regional office of Zangezur, clearly perturbed by his acerbic tone, in a letter accused the bishop of provocative lies and exaggerations. The attack was not premeditated, the letter noted, but was merely the act of a single person. In fact, the letter added, the Soviet government should not be equated with the Mongols and the Seljuks, for Soviet policy sought to improve the economic lot of the masses rather than engage in barbaric acts.23 As the accusations on both sides continued, Communist Party officials considered Bishop Smbatyants a threat to the Soviet regime.

The Soviet regime did not eliminate the Armenian Church but instead preferred to impose total control over the catholicosal seat at Echmiadzin, a policy reminiscent of the Polozhenie instituted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1836, which restricted the activities of the catholicosate. The Communist leadership in Moscow pursued a similar policy toward Echmiadzin but with the added ideological justification to support its hegemonic rule. An Armenian Communist, S. Surgunyan, commented in the Tiflis daily Proletar in 1938 that the clergy represented a cadre of thieves and liars who preached about fantastic tales labeled miracles as performed by imaginary people called saints who promised salvation in an imaginary place called heaven. In so doing, Surgunyan added, the Armenian clergy for centuries had impeded progress toward enlightenment and scientific thought, while serving the interests of the repressive institutions of such governments as the tsarist regime and the Dashnaktsutiun. The Communist revolutionaries led by Lenin, Surgunyan argued, struggled against the church, and the current government had to be vigilant to prevent the clergy from encroaching on the enlightened ways of the Communist proletariat.24

Beginning in early 1929, all religious freedoms were officially suspended, and heavy taxes were imposed on churches, including Echmiadzin. Failure to comply led to confiscation of land, animals, agricultural tools, vehicles, and even treasured sacred vessels. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, especially at the height of the Stalinist purges, Armenian

Communist Party leaders Haykaz Kostanyan, Aghasi Khanjyan, and Hayk Amatuni exiled several priests to Siberia and converted some churches to theaters, clubs, and warehouses. Khanjyan, who led the party in Armenia from 1930 to 1936, accused the Dashnaktsutiun of manipulating the Armenian Church to undermine Soviet Armenia. “Monks were forbidden to leave Echmiadzin in monastic garb or to talk to the people. No one could go to Echmiadzin without police permission.”25 Catholicos Gevorg V Surenyants, who had vehemently opposed Communist rule, died in May 1930 and was succeeded in November 1932 by the more pro-Moscow Archbishop of Erevan, Khoren I Muradbekyan. Catholicos Khoren did not survive the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938, however, and his death, on April 6, 1938, is believed to have been ordered by the secret police.26

The case of Bishop Artak Smbatyants illustrates the brutality of the Soviet regime against the Armenian Church. Smbatyants had graduated from the Nersisian Academy in Tiflis in 1894 and subsequently the Gevorgian Seminary of Echmiadzin, where he was ordained into priesthood in 1902. He was elevated to bishophood in November 1922, a year and a half after the final removal of the Dashnakist government. Beginning in 1910, he had assumed various administrative responsibilities within the church and played a leading role in relief assistance in the region of Gumri (Alexandropol) for the refugees fleeing the genocide in Western Armenia. Smbatyants served as prelate of the Shirak and Ararat dioceses from 1922 to 1935 and 1935 to 1937, respectively. By then, however, the Stalinist regime had launched its major offensive against all religious institutions, which culminated in the closing of nearly all churches in Soviet Armenia, with the exception of the Mother See at Echmiadzin. Smbatyants protested the government’s repressive policies toward the church and the confiscation of its properties. As early as 1923, he compiled a list of the sacred vessels and other treasured valuables at the Tatev monastery for safekeeping at Echmiadzin, since, he noted in a letter to Catholicos Gevorg V, the political situation required precautionary measures to protect the church and its properties. In a letter dated January 29, 1929, for example, he petitioned the interior commissariat of the republic to be more lenient with respect to the heavy taxation imposed on the church and the clergy. Appointed in 1934 as a representative of the catholicos in Erevan, Bishop Smbatyants in numerous communications with the Communist Party at the capital pleaded for the reinstitution of the church’s ecclesiastical authority and for an end to the religious and political persecutions. On April 13, 1937, the Communist authorities, under direct orders from the internal security chief in Erevan, arrested the bishop at the Echmiadzin monastery. The warrant for his arrest listed possession of nationalist literature (eighteen books).27 After trials began on April 14, 1937, the internal security court found him guilty of propagating nationalist and antiSoviet ideologies in his sermons and public statements, illegally preparing

candles, and raising funds to assist the families of his collaborators now in exile or in prison.28 On August 31, 1937, the court sentenced the bishop to death, despite repeated pleas by Catholicos Khoren I to the Communist leadership in Erevan for his release. At 2:00 o’clock in the early morning of September 3, a firing squad executed Bishop Smbatyants in an Erevan Cheka prison.29

The hardship endured under Stalin notwithstanding, World War II, referred to as the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union, accelerated Armenia’s integration into the Soviet industrial networks and seemed to have strengthened Armenian loyalty to the system. Soviet Armenian contribution to the war effort ranged from the enlistment of thousands of nurses to about 500,000 soldiers serving in combat. The war claimed more than 25 million Soviet lives, including an estimated 175,000 Armenians.30 After Catholicos Khoren’s death in 1938, the Soviet government left the pontifical seat at Echmiadzin vacant for the next seven years. In 1945, with the participation of Catholicos Garegin I Hovsepian of the Cilician See at Antelias, Gevorg VI Chorekchyan was elected Catholicos of All Armenians at Echmiadzin. Gevorg VI whom the Communist Party utilized for purposes of propaganda cooperated with the Communist regime in support of the Western Armenian question and the repatriation policy in 1946–1947. The Communist government in turn permitted the reopening of the Gevorgian Jemaran (Academy) in 1948 and encouraged closer relations between Echmiadzin and the diaspora communities.31

STALINIST GEOPOLITICS AND THE ARMENIAN DIASPORA

Despite political and economic difficulties, two issues appeared to provide an opportunity for cooperation between Moscow and Armenians in the post-World War II period. The first involved territorial claims, including reannexation of Kars and Ardahan to Armenia, which would require renegotiation of the Treaty of Kars (1921), and Karabagh. While Stalin’s motives can be debated, for Armenians at home and abroad the reemergence of the issue as an international question revived hopes for territorial, albeit partial, unification.32 In 1945 Grigor Harutyunyan, the First Secretary of the Communist Party in Armenia from 1937 to 1953, submitted a proposal to Stalin to reunify Karabagh with Armenia. Harutyunyan sent a similar petition in 1949. Both attempts failed to convince the Kremlin of the urgency to rectify the situation in Karabagh.33 The second issue concerned the repatriation (nergaght) of Armenians to Soviet Armenia. Stalin sought to draw diasporan Armenians to Soviet Armenia to replenish the labor force devastated during World War II and to improve relations with the Armenian communities abroad.34

By then Armenians had migrated or returned to Soviet Armenia in three phases. The first wave, from 1921 to 1925, involved about 25,000

Armenian hayrenadartsner (repatriates), most of whom arrived from the Middle East (Syria, Iraq, and Iran), France, and Greece. During the second wave (1926 to 1936), approximately 10,000 Armenians repatriated, mostly from Bulgaria, Greece, and France. It is likely that the worldwide economic depression contributed to this phase of repatriation. Although the third phase proved shortest, from 1946 to 1948, it nevertheless resulted in the repatriation of between 70,000 and 100,000 Armenians, the highest number since the collapse of the republic in 1921.35 Armenians repatriated during this phase came from the Middle East (the first group was from Beirut, Lebanon), Bulgaria, France, and the United States.

The experiences of the repatriates varied depending on their personal and familial circumstances, but two contradictory views have emerged regarding their condition. Soviet Armenian historians, largely reflecting the views of the Communist Party, maintained that native Armenians welcomed their repatriating compatriots with open arms. The government built new schools, hospitals, and shops, and set aside large tracts of land for the construction of about 40,000 units to house the repatriates. According to this view, the repatriates had finally found spiritual solace in the bosom of the motherland and, with Stalin’s blessings, began to enjoy the fruits of socialism and participated in the political process. The opposing view held that life was not so easy for the repatriates. There were hardly any government services for their well-being, some had to build their own houses, and an unknown number were sent to the villages for hard labor and others to Siberia. The native Armenians generally resented the large influx of foreigners that added to the existing economic and financial difficulties immediately after the war. The economic paralysis and political repression of postwar Soviet Armenia could hardly provide the repatriates an environment conducive to assimilation. The advent of the Cold War virtually froze relations between Soviet Armenia and the diaspora, and the worldwide East-West ideological polarization erected the Iron Curtain through Armenia as well. Stalin’s cosmetic rapprochement with Armenians was reversed, and attacks on Armenian intellectuals and institutions resumed.

World War II severely affected the republic’s economy; according to one estimate, by 1946 the GNP declined by about 7 percent of the 1940 level. The economy recovered rapidly in part due to the growing heavy industry sector in machine production and the creation of more than forty industrial companies.36 By the time Stalin died in March 1953, Soviet Armenia had established an industrial base that the Republic of Armenia never had, but it lacked the privileges of sovereignty in domestic and international politics. Stalin’s policies left behind a Russified Armenian language, a terrorized and a traumatized public, and a national political culture and economy dominated by the secret police and the Communist Party elite with little regard for the well-being of the population.