ber of Armenian poets-among them N. Zarian, G. Sarian, S. Taronts, H. Shiraz, S. Bauni, S. Kaputikian and R. Bogosian-but made specific mention of their "well-known harmful tendencies," "national narrowmindedness and provincial thinking," which he labeled "expressions of literary backwardness" that did not conform to "our international world view." He did, however, tell the writers of Armenia that it was their "duty" to deal with the heroic struggle of those Armenians abroad who were in danger of being assimilated. The Armenian party chief A. E. Kochinian addressed the Congress a few days later in similar tones. Deploring the attention given by Armenian writers to "outworn national ethnographic categories and geographic expressions," he asserted that true patriotism involves not only a love of the progressive heritage of the past, but pride in the "socialist present."

99 10

During the years of Soviet rule, the influence of the Armenian church has grown weaker. Family life and village life have also been transformed in various ways to accommodate the changes brought about by modernization, greater educational facilities and the spread of communications. In general, however, Russification has not taken hold, particularly in rural areas. Armenian is still the language of business, local government and education, and Armenian culture and traditions are kept alive by an energetic group of writers, artists and

musicians.

A modus vivendi seems to have been reached between the Armenians and Moscow. Fearful of

10 Ibid., Nov. 18, 19, and Dec. 1, 1966.

11 Population statistics for Soviet Armenia for 1959 per 1000 population show births 41.0, deaths 7.9 or a net gain of 33.1. Comparable statistics for the entire Soviet Union show births 23.8, deaths 7.2, or a net gain of 16.6 See Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda SSSR, Moscow, 1962, p. 280; and Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia 1959 goda: Armianskaia SSR, (Moscow 1963), p. 110.

12 The repatriation of Armenians to Soviet Armenia has not, however, been a complete success from the Soviet point of view. Many of these "returnees" found no warm welcome and have been the most vocal critics of living conditions and of Armenia's isolation from the outside world. Quite a number have since left Soviet Armenia.

intensifying the Armenians' volatile nationalist sentiment, the Soviet government chooses not to risk any open attacks. Furthermore, any harsh suppression of the Armenian minority would have unpleasant reverberations abroad in the Armenian Diaspora. Over the years Moscow has shown itself Armenians to visit their homeland and to study in eager to court the latter, encouraging scattered the educational institutions of Yerevan.13

Like all national groups with a long history and clearly defined traditions that distinguish them from their neighbors, the Armenians of the Soviet Union manifest a stubborn will to survive. Whatever the eventual outcome of their irredentist claims on Turkey, it is safe to predict that the Armenians will never forget them, and that they will serve as a constant reminder to Moscow, a warning that Armenian nationalism has not yet disappeared into the sea of "socialist brotherhood."

13 In the 1966-67 academic year at least 274 "foreign born" Armenians are enrolled in the higher educational institutions of Soviet Armenia. Kommunist (Yerevan), Jan. 3, 1967.

Sources and Signs

Despite Soviet Armenia's impressive gains in terms of education, industrialization and productivity, the local Armenians tend to regard their successes as a reward earned by their own labor, their own creativity and their cultural separateness. They do not deny that they have profited to some degree from their relationship with the Russians, but neither do they hide their resentment over what they consider to be perfidious betrayals of their interests. Their complaints cover the entire history of Soviet Armenia, although many have only been given verbal expression since the death of Stalin.

Armenia Irridenta

Armenian claims to territory in neighboring Soviet republics as well as in Turkey constitute the most serious issue between the Armenians and the central authorities in Moscow. The Armenian position, as it emerges from the writings of scholars both abroad and in the USSR, is that the Russians forced the Armenians to give up their eastern provinces to Turkey in treaties of 1921, and that subsequent promises to restore to Armenia two regions of Transcaucasia-Karabagh and Nakhitchevan, now under Azerbaijan administration-have never been honored. The issue was supposedly "settled” in 1927, when a Commission to Resolve Conflicts Between the Transcaucasian Republics denied all of the Armenian claims and even made further modifications in certain frontiers in favor of Armenia's neighbors. But the Armenian people remained unreconciled to this settlement.

At the end of World War II, the issue was raised again this time by the Supreme Patriarch of the Armenian Church. On November 27, 1945, the Patriarch took the step of issuing direct appeals to the governments of the United States and Great Britain, as well as to the Soviet central authorities, with respect to the situation of Armenians. His plea for a reconsideration of territorial claims was based in part on the Armenians' contribution to the Allied victory. (Some 300,000 Armenians had taken part in the conflict, including-among senior officers -58 generals, two marshals and one admiral; years later, in 1961, the then Premier Nikita Khrushchev publicly noted that some 106 Armenian soldiers had been awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union and another 70,000 had won medals for bravery.1) The Patriarch's appeal was to no avail, however; the official record of subsequent diplomatic exchanges indicates that the Soviet government omitted any reference to the territorial claims in question. In the postwar era sentiment on this issue has remained strong, finding its main expression as a direct and indirect theme of Armenian literature, poetry, and painting.

Another serious problem has its roots in the rivalry that has for centuries marked relations between the Armenian and Georgian peoples. This mutual antagonism has not diminished since the two peoples became part of the

1 Speech published in the Moscow News Supplement, May 13, 1961.

Soviet Union. Indeed, in Stalin's time, their relations became even more strained, for, in the view of the Armenians, Georgia-the birthplace of both Stalin and Beriawas the only part of Transcaucasia to which the Soviet dictator paid any attention. Even loyal Armenian Communists complained of the preferential treatment given to the Georgians, as borne out by reports of the Ninth Congress of the Armenian Communist Party, held in Yerevan in January 1934.2

That Armenian resentment continues to this day has been confirmed by countless Western tourists who have visited Soviet Armenia over the past decade or so. Understandably, official sources are reticent on this highly sensitive issue. However, an interesting clue to Soviet policy with regard to Armenia and Georgia, and to the feelings it engenders among the Armenians, was provided at the Eighth Congress of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, when an Armenian deputy pointed out that in budget allocations, 638,825,000 rubles went to Armenia as compared to 979,910,000 for Georgia and 1,007,580,000 for Azerbaijan. As reported in Sovetakan Hayastan, the party daily published in Yerevan, on December 20, 1966, the Armenian deputy claimed that the Union Ministries “abrogated basic principles in the preparation of the budget for 1967, over which they had not even consulted the Government of Soviet Armenia."

As for Stalin's Great Purge of the middle 1930's it affected Armenia as much as any other area of the USSR. Yet if Armenians single out---as they did, say, in Sovetakan Hayastan on November 15, 1961-the thousands of their compatriots "shot, without trial or investigation," they do so out of a knowledge that many of these victims were accused not merely of "oppositionism," but also of "bourgeois nationalism"-in other words, not only of a general, but of a specifically "Armenian" crime. Their bitterness is further compounded by the punishment that was meted out to such Armenian leaders as Stepan Shaumian and Al Miassnigian.3 They cannot easily forget that the last two had been chosen by Lenin himself to lead the Transcaucasian Federation, only to be subsequently denigrated by Stalin, who appointed one of "his" Georgians-Lavrenti Beria--in their stead. It was Beria who,

2 H.K.K. Kentkomee Hashwedvoutioone Ennerort Hamakoumaroum (Report of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia), Yerevan, Jan. 10-14, 1934, pp. 168-69.

3 Stepan Shaumian was a Marxist theoretician and an old confidant of Lenin, with whom he corresponded continuously before the Bolshevik Revolution. He was also the principal organize of the armed contingents that fiercely defended Baku against the Turks. By thus denying access to the strategic Baku oil fields, he helped accelerate the German surrender of 1918, as Ludendorf's memoirs indicate. Shaumian subsequently fell into the hands of anti-Bolshevik forces near the Caspian Sea and was executed there in the autumn of 1918. Al Miassnigian was the commandant of the Red Army in the Ukraine during the Civil War. Like Shaumian, he wrote prolifically on Marxist theory. In 1926, while First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Federation, he was killed in a plane crash near Tbilisi. The cause of the accident was never properly determined or publicly revealed, and most Armenians suspect sabotage by the Georgians.

of Armenian Unrest

during an official meeting in Tbilisi in 1936, personally shot to death Aghassi Khandjian, then First Secretary of the Armenian Communist Party and one of the most popular leaders of Armenia; and it was Beria who was personally responsible for rewriting the history of the Bolshevik movement in Transcaucasia, giving Stalin almost exclusive credit for all its successes from 1900 onwards.1 Beria has now, of course, been roundly condemned by Soviet spokesmen, and Shaumian has been officially rehabilitated, most notably in an October 13, 1963 editorial in Pravda. But the memory of the wounds inflicted by Stalin's and Beria's policies lingers on in the national consciousness of the Armenians and no doubt contributes to the recurrent manifestations of anti-Soviet ferment in that part of the country.

Recent Cultural Pressures

The most recent manifestations of this unrest occurred in 1965 and 1966, on the anniversary of the Turkish genocide of April 24, 1915, to which approximately 1.5 million Armenians fell victim. Following mass demonstrations held on that date in Yerevan both in 1965 and 1966, Moscow let it be known that it would hold Armenian intellectuals responsible for containing local nationalism within reasonable limits. Instead of accepting the challenge, however, the Armenian intelligentsia, even those that consider themselves loyal Marxists, have scored the Russian complaints and issued warnings that the nationality question, particularly regarding Armenia, is a complex problem that is far from solved.

At the Fifth Congress of the Union of Soviet Armenian Writers, held at Yerevan in November 1966, two prominent Armenian writers lashed out against the prevalence of attitudes which distorted legitimate national sentiments, and complained of "informers" within their midst who sought to bring ruin on the Armenian intellectual community. As reported in Kuragan Tert (Literary Journal), Yerevan, on December 16 and December 23, 1966, both Barouyr Sevag and Kevork Emin asserted the right to national self-respect and pride. Emin denounced in particular those who "by attaching political stigma to our national sentiments are in vain trying to restore the grim era of the cult of personality."

Probably the most resolute complaints against Moscow's interference with and failure to satisfy the demands of the Armenian people came from Sylva Kapoutikian, Armenia's best-known poet, an ardent Communist and one of the most celebrated writers in the Soviet Union. In a speech delivered on March 2, 1966, on the eve of the 24th Congress of the Armenian Communist Party in Yerevan, Miss Kapoutikian answered Soviet critics in Moscow who had labeled the recent manifestations of

4 See Beria's On the History of the Bolshevik Organizations in Transcaucasia (Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1949), based on a lecture delivered by Beria at a party meeting in Tbilisi on July 21-22, 1935.

Armenian nationalism as "secessionist and anti-state." Although the speech has not appeared in any Soviet publication, the full text was published in Armenian exile publications in Beirut (Aztag and Spiurk) and Boston (Hairenik). Its authenticity has also been confirmed by the pro-Soviet-Armenian daily Baikar, published in Boston. Here are some of her remarks:

It would be naive to assume that the patriotic and vehement pathos of more than 100,000 Armenians, who on the noon of April 24th (1965) jammed the streets of Yerevan, and the inflamed mood of our people on the eve and the wake of that day, were the result of incitement by Armenian intellectuals. . . . We are Marxists, and we know that it is the existing situation that determines one's consciousness. No idea or thought can take root in the heart of the masses without the presence of a corresponding fertile soil in which these ideas and thoughts are born and nurtured.

And further:

...

The fidelity of the Armenians vis-à-vis Russia is conditioned not only by geography and history, but also by an affinity of soul and mind. . . However, with great chagrin we must observe that instead of realizing and appreciating this devotion, occasionally the leaders of the Soviet Union exhibit disconcerting carelessness regarding some of the problems that deeply touch people.

Perhaps the most crucial point of the speech was its implied suggestion that Soviet industrialization and the cultural emphasis of Soviet nationality policy have combined to foster a new brand of nationalism which has Soviet overtones, but which is quite ethnocentric in its roots and aspirations. There is, according to Miss Kapoutikian, a "renaissance" of nationalities in the Soviet Union, which contrary to Soviet suppositions-has been brought about by overall Soviet progress in education, economy, industry and science. Soviet nationalities, she asserted, "are all resolved to preserve and to develop their national existence and culture, and they are entitled to assert fully their unique individuality." There is nothing incompatible between national pride and the building of communism, she said, for the latter cannot take place without the former.

Referring to the pressures on national groups from the Kremlin, the poetess attacked the "sense of almightiness" emanating from the Kremlin and the predominance of one nation (the Russians) over all others. She further warned that such conditions might have dire consequences:

Comrades, the nationality question is a complex one. History is replete with examples where, having failed to solve the nationality problem, multinational states disintegrated.

V. N. Dadrian

(Mr. Dadrian is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Florida Atlantic University.)

By Geoffrey Wheeler

A.

t the 1959 Soviet census, the Muslims of the USSR numbered some 25 million,' or 13 percent of the total population. They live in three main areas: the Central Asian and Kazakh republics (55 percent), the Caucasus (25 percent), and the Volga and Ural regions (20 percent). Although the Muslims are classified as belonging to 38 different nationalities, 84 percent of them are of Turkic stock, speaking closely interrelated languages. Of the remainder, 8 percent are of Iranian and 7 percent of Ibero-Caucasian stock. (See accompanying table.)

During the 19th century, Russian rule expanded southwards through the Caucasus and Central Asia to the frontiers of Iran, Afghanistan and China. This brought into the Tsarist Empire a number of Muslim lands, possession of which presented the Imperial government with a number of political, eco

1 Assuming a rate of natural increase of 3 percent per annum, this total must have risen over 30 million by the end of 1966.

Mr. Wheeler is the Director of the Central Asian Research Center in London. The Peoples of Soviet Central Asia (London, Bodley, 1966) is his most recent work.

nomic and cultural problems. Unlike the Muslim lands forming part of the British and French colonial empires, the new provinces of the Caucasus, the Steppe Region and Turkestan were territorially contiguous with the metropolitan country and, except for the vassal states of Bukhara and Khiva, were regarded as integral parts of Russia. This meant that the southern fringe of the Empire was now peopled by Muslims and bordered directly on Muslim Iran, Afghanistan, and the largely Muslim Chinese province of Sinkiang. Separated from Russia only by a narrow strip of Afghan territory was Muslim northern India. Economically, the newly-acquired Muslim territories quickly became important not only as a vital source of oil and cotton but also as an area for Russian colonization.

Culturally, the Muslims confronted the Russians with a far greater problem than did the other nonRussian peoples of the Empire, the vast majority of whom were Christian and followed a way of life not greatly different from that of the Russians themselves. Although there were ethnic and linguistic

2 V. V. Barthold, Four Studies on the History of Central Asia, Leiden, 1956, Vol. I, p. 1.