| |
On Wednesday
Armenians around the world marked the 88th anniversary of the 1921 February
Uprising against the Soviet occupation of Armenia. A memorial event
commemorating the revolt's legacy was held by the Armenian Revolutionary
Federation at the khachkar in Yerevan dedicated to the Armenian leaders
jailed and murdered by the Bolshevik Secret Police in the early months of
that occupation.
Those murders and a series of brutally repressive policies spurred Armenia's
population to rise up against the Bolshevik regime that had overthrown its
democratically elected government.
Having coordinating its invasion of Armenia with the Turkish assault on Kars,
Russia had forced the republic's government to dissolve and accept Soviet
Rule or face certain annihilation by the Turkish army.
The republic's last Prime Minister, Simon Vratzian, wrote about the revolt
in his seminal work on the Republic of Armenia. A shorter essay on how
Armenia was Sovietized was translated and published in the Armenian Review
in 1948, Vratzian's essay provided a first hand account of those turbulent
days. Appointed to lead the uprising, he detailed the occupying regime's
brutal rule and how it led a deprived, destitute and demoralized population
to rise up against their occupiers.
Immediately after coming to power, he wrote, the Bolshevik authority (the
Revcom), under the chairmanship of Sarkis Gazian, organized a secrete police
force (Cheka) and arrested or exiled Armenia's top political, cultural, and
military leadership. They launched endless searches and arrests throughout
the country, confiscating property and wealth and jailing distinguished
political and cultural leaders such as Levon Shant, Hovhaness Katchaznouni,
Nigol Aghbalian and hundreds of others.
“All the prisoners were kept under insufferable conditions and they lived
under the perpetual dread of pending execution,” wrote Vratzian, describing
how Armenia's leaders were rounded up, while the country was raped and
pillaged by “an orgy of raids and seizures.”
“The population's last morsel of bread was being plucked and sent to
Russia,” he wrote, noting how the Bolsheviks seized everything the small
republic had, from homes, furniture, and clothing to basic foodstuffs,
horses, cattle, chicken and eggs. Aside from jailing the country's
leadership and stealing its national wealth, the Revcom also set out on a
systematic campaign to eradicate Armenian national identity, banning the
Armenian Tricolor and the national anthem (Mer Hairenik), and going so far
as to destroy historic documents and archives of the country's first
Republic.
Vratzian described the February Revolt as an outburst of popular sentiment
against the Soviet occupation. The movement, he explained, saved countless
lives that would have otherwise ended in the damp prisons of the Bolshevik
Cheka or frozen abyss of Siberia. After the popular uprising, the ARF
established a Committee for the Salvation of the Fatherland to regain
control of the republic's lost territories.
One such territory was the mountainous region of Zangezur in Southern
Armenia, where General Garegin Njdeh had been fighting a guerilla war
against the Red Army with his fedayee forces. At the time of Sovietization,
the Armenian government had negotiated a deal to secure Zangezur's inclusion
in a future Soviet Armenian Republic. But Moscow and Turkey had colluded to
award it to Soviet Azerbaijan in a bid to create a land corridor with Turkey
through Karabakh and Nakhichevan.
The February Revolt changed all that. When the Soviet Army eventually
reentered Armenia, Vratzian's Salvation Committee made its last stand in the
mountains of Zangezur with Njdeh's volunteers. The Mountainous Republic of
Armenia in Zangezur became a fortress on the flank, allowing the leaders of
the February Revolt enough time and leverage to negotiate with Moscow for
the inclusion of the region within the territory of the Sovietized Armenian
republic.
The toppling of the Bolshevik regime in Armenia, although short-lived, sent
shockwaves to Moscow and forced the Soviet central authorities to rethink
their policies in Armenia. From that point forward, up to the 1960s, Moscow
only appointed moderate Armenian communist leaders sympathetic to national
interests. The new generation of Soviet Armenian leaders, men like Aleksandr
Miasnikyan and Andon Kochinian, worked to preserve national heritage, as
much as possible. Miasnikyan saved the remnants of independent Armenia's
archives, while Kochinian provided instrumental support for the building of
the Sardarabad and Dzidzernagapert monuments in the 1960s.
The February Revolt also forced Moscow to make good on its initial promise
to preserve the 1920 borders of the republic by including in them the region
of Zangezur-- without which Armenia would not have been large enough to
qualify as a Soviet Republic. With no control over its territory, its
population, like that of Nakhichevan, would have slowly been replaced by
Azeri Turks.
If it was not for the February Revolt, the independence of Armenia and the
liberation of Nagorno-Karabakh 70 years after Soviet occupation would surely
never have come to fruition. And Armenia as a country would have disappeared
in the annals of history forever.
|
|
