Minorities in the Middle East: A History of Struggle and Self-Expression by Mordechai Nisan

Author:Mordechai Nisan [Nisan, Mordechai]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-01-30T10:21:00+00:00

The Armenian people had become highly dispersed with the majority living in the Soviet Union. There 3.5 million Armenians focused their efforts in the Armenian Socialist Soviet Republic with its capital at Erevan. In that city alone approximately one million Armenians resided in the beginning of the 1980s. It is true that Communist policy in the 1920s had already set out to undermine Armenian society, destroy traditional elites, and nationalize all private land.44 The kolkhoz was intended to replace the church as the focus of organized Armenian life and faith. Yet, resistance arose as peasants tried to avoid military service and taxes. Communist ideology nonetheless appeared to overwhelm the Armenians through the years as the Sovietization of Armenia proceeded apace. Never, however, did ethnic resilience fade. The development of the Armenian republic itself strengthened national pride. Erevan was referred to as the Paris of Asia, a beautiful city, modern and elegant in its physical ambience, with a reputable university. Symptomatic of Armenian diligence and advance within the Soviet Union was the figure of Anastas Mikoyan (1895-1978), a native Armenian who was a member of the Politburo of the Communist party of the USSR and chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet during 1964-1965. The relative attractiveness of the USSR as an Armenian option was demonstrated when 100,000 people "repatriated" in 1945-46 to this rump-remaining Armenian entity.

In October 1968, Armenians in the Soviet Union celebrated the 2,750th anniversary of Erevan's founding. This orderly but joyous demonstration of national pride was recast two decades later when, in massive and angry demonstrations in February 1988, Armenians in Erevan demanded nationalist recognition for an alteration of the republic's boundaries. The initial focus of Armenian unrest arose in the nearby Karabagh province, part of Shiite Azerbaijan, eighty-five percent of whose inhabitants were fellow Armenians.45 Reports indicated hundreds dead in ethnic riots whose spark was Azeri reforms to forbid the teaching of Armenian history.

Armenians in the Erevan republic became agitated over the ethnicpolitical anomaly of fellow Armenians subject to Muslim Azeri domination nearby. This episode attested to the vibrancy of Armenian identity and its trials and tribulations in the Soviet Union. It was czarist Russian policy, as it was Communist Soviet policy, to utilize the Armenians to the point where they become a disturbing minority problem that must be contained. The Armenians were in fact caught in the complex maze of sectarian-minority diversity within the USSR. Violent confrontations between Armenians and Azeris, and Armenians and the Soviet security forces, continued throughout 1988-1990. In the Azerbaijani city of Sumgait in February and March 1988, Muslims carried out atrocities against Armenian women in a maternity hospital.

Later, with the dismantlement of the Soviet Union in 1991, along with Baltic secession and Central Asian Muslim independence, the autonomous Armenian republic within the USSR became a sovereign state. This constituted a great national triumph, except for two troubling political sores: one, that most of historic Armenia lay within Turkish territory to the west; and two, that the Karabagh enclave within Azerbaijan to the east remained outside of Armenia's newly sovereign borders.

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