In 1951 a massive statue of Stalin was erected in Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia. It was so huge that Vasily Grossman would write: “This monument towers over Yerevan and the whole of Armenia. It towers over Russia, over the Ukraine, over the Black and Caspian seas, over the Arctic Ocean, over the forest of eastern Siberia, over the sands of Kazakhstan. Stalin and the state are one and the same.”9 This statue symbolized the iron grip that the Soviets had on the Armenians. From its inception, this grip had led to bloody confrontations, the most dramatic being the murder of an Armenian archbishop in New York City in 1933, which in turn created a schism in the diaspora that would endure for decades.
The genesis of this schism lay in the nature of Armenia’s “salvation” by the Soviets. For the Armenian diaspora, the new Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic was a glass half-full. Here was a “soviet republic” made up almost entirely of Armenians, many of whom had been either refugees from Anatolian Turkey or children of those refugees. Though the fighting and killing had finally ended, Armenia was a landlocked state with almost no resources other than its weary populace. Yerevan could trace its history back over two thousand years. Within its boundaries stood Etchmiadzin, the fifteen-hundred-year-old holy city founded by Gregory the Illuminator. Etchmiadzin was the home to the Catholicos of all Armenian Apostolic Christians, making the city and the tiny SSR a kind of mecca for Armenians scattered across the world. Yet for many Armenians living in the West, the Republic of Armenia was on the wrong side of what would soon be labeled the “iron curtain.”
The Armenian revolutionaries who had led the republic during its short life at the end of World War I had been ousted when the Armenian SSR was founded. Most had sought safety in Iran or the new French and British protectorates in the Levant. To further complicate the matter, while securing the new SSR, Stalin broke off Armenian territories and “gave” them to Azerbaijan (also an SSR). This move would preserve a violent enmity between the nations which endures to this day. Those Tashnags remaining in Armenia were disposed of by Lenin’s security forces, the Cheka.
An equal number of Armenians lived in the United States, France, Lebanon, Syria, Greece, Serbia, and Bulgaria (former possessions of the Ottoman Empire) as lived in Armenia proper. Within each community were thousands of survivors who had mixed feelings about Tashnags. Some sided with the ARF, believing that in the years leading up to and including World War I, the only appropriate Armenian response to Turkish violence was strong revolutionary, often violent action. Others (and among these I would include my own grandparents) felt that the politically activist Armenians were troublemakers who willingly courted violence. These “moderate” Armenians wanted to put the past behind them and live peaceably in their adopted country, whether it be the United States, the Soviet Union, or Lebanon.
As Turkey “emerged” as a state, Armenia had to contend with its own complex kaleidoscope of truth. Stalin’s hold on Armenia was absolute. Appealing to the nationalistic feelings of many diasporans, Stalin had invited the scattered Armenians to return to the homeland, and many had accepted the invitation. Unfortunately, this invitation was as much a trap as an opportunity. As he would do so often, Stalin gathered up his imagined enemies so he could more easily dispose of them. The secret police worked relentlessly to root out anyone with even the slightest inclination toward independent thought or self-determination, and thousands of these Armenian returnees were exiled to Siberia. It is estimated that ten thousand Armenians died or were sent to Siberia in the first two decades of the Armenian SSR. Life in urban Armenia, as in all of Stalinist Russia, became paranoid and insecure.10
In the period between the wars, the Armenian communities in the United States centered on the church. Virtually every Armenian attended church, through which most social events were organized. Around the world, the hierarchy of the church was complex, with patriarchs residing in Etchmiadzin (near Yerevan), Jerusalem, and Istanbul, and Catholicoi in Sis (then in Antelias, Lebanon) and Etchmiadzin. (Confusingly, the “Catholicos of All Armenians” in Etchmiadzin also has the title of patriarch.) Since the Holy See of Etchmiadzin was located within the Armenian SSR, the Catholicos embraced the Soviet system for the sake of harmony with the mother country. This position was unacceptable to the Tashnags, who held fast to their dream of a totally independent Armenia. The Tashnags honored an alternative Catholicos living outside the Soviet Union.
In the United States, Tashnags and moderate Armenians fought openly. In New England, the Tashnags badgered Archbishop Ghevont Tourian, the church’s representative in the eastern United States. Arriving at church-sponsored events, nationalists would unfurl the flag of the short-lived first Armenian Republic. Fights would break out. Archbishop Tourian held to the position that since Etchmiadzin was the Armenian holy city, and since it existed within the USSR, it was essential to maintain peaceful relations with Moscow. The Tashnags were adamant, insisting that “a free, independent, and united Armenia has been, and continues to be, the goal of Tashnag and Armenian national aspirations.”11
On Christmas Eve 1933, Archbishop Tourian performed mass at the Holy Cross Armenian Apostolic Church in the Bronx. As he made his way down the center aisle, blessing the congregation as part of the Badarak, the holy liturgy of the Armenian Apostolic Church, a parishioner in an overcoat stood up from his pew and stepped toward the cleric. This man in the overcoat was followed by another and then another. The men shouldered their way past the acolytes on either side of Tourian and surrounded him. Blocking the view of the congregation, Tourian was stabbed repeatedly with a long butcher knife. As the holy father collapsed onto the Oriental carpeting, the men made for the exits. Tourian would soon bleed to death as the terrorized churchgoers fled onto 187th Street.
Several men were arrested, convicted of first-degree murder, and sent to prison. Two received death sentences, later commuted to life imprisonment by the governor of New York State. But the damage had been done. From this point on, the diaspora in the United States would be split into clearly defined Tashnag and non-Tashnag camps. New churches were built for the Tashnag congregations. As a youngster I remember passing the Watertown Tashnag church, Saint Stephen’s, and asking my father why there were two Armenian churches only a few blocks apart. I’m not sure he knew himself.
The ARF was now isolated, yet it continued to see itself as the champion of Armenian destiny. Armenian nationalism became the religion of the Tashnag organization, with the Soviet state replacing the Ottoman Empire as enemy. Then, in the late 1930s, the very same church fathers living in Soviet Armenia who had tried to make peace with Moscow were rounded up by the GPU, heirs to the Cheka security forces and forerunners of the KGB. “Catholicos Khoren [I Muradbekyan] did not survive the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938.… [H]is death, on April 6, 1938, is believed to have been ordered by the secret police.”12 A new sense of desperation set in.
In time, Tashnag and non-Tashnag Armenians would see that some kind of uneasy unity was inevitable, especially since a new consciousness was rising within Soviet Armenia itself. In the spring of 1962, the massive statue of Stalin described by Grossman was replaced by an equally impressive statue of “Mother Armenia.” On April 24, 1965, Armenians in Yerevan memorialized the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide with a massive demonstration. Uncharacteristically, the local apparatchiks refrained from cracking down on the demonstrators. Political awareness and activism in Armenia grew.