Electronic version of  “ARMENIA: The Survival of a Nation”, revised second edition © 1990 Christopher J. Walker

 

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Epilogue

 

 

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9 Peace on the Plain of Ararat

 

 

Armenia Soviet

 

Eastern Armenia was now securely behind the Soviet shield, and with this protection she was able to start the immense task of reconstruction. All of Western Armenia, and some of Eastern, was lost, but the border was fixed, and even in these cramped and deprived conditions the nation could at last begin to fulfil, in a radically changed form, the hopes expressed by Noel Buxton as he saw the sun set over Ararat in September 1913.

            The status of Soviet Armenia was initially that of an independent Soviet republic (roughly in the sense that Poland or Bulgaria is independent today). She negotiated agreements bilaterally with Soviet Russia, and maintained consular relations with Persia (in Tabriz) and Turkey (in Kars), as well as with other Soviet republics. She had her own stamps and currency. Her semi-independent status came to an end in 1922, when, on 13 December, she was absorbed into the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, which in turn became a constituent part of the USSR upon its formation on 30 December 1922.¹ The situation remained thus until the USSR's constitution of 1936, when the Transcaucasian SFSR was dissolved, and Armenia became a union republic of the new Soviet state.^*

            The New Economic Policy (NEP) was instituted by Lenin in March 1921, and its adoption in Armenia paved the way for rebuilding a country that was economically shattered. The NEP allowed a mixed economy, being tolerant of small-scale private enterprise, while keeping the most important sectors in government hands. In 1925 46 per cent of Armenia's trade was privately owned.² The peasants were allowed to run their own affairs; there was no collectivisation yet. But progress in the rural economy was held up by the shortage of land; the problem of the 200,000–300,000 Turkish Armenian refugees remained and put as much strain on Armenia now as during the period of Dashnak rule.

            Peace, and the dedication of the new rulers of Soviet Armenia, led to a kind of normality in a surprisingly short time. Even those who one would imagine hostile to Bolshevism noted the achievements of the commissars. Dr Clarence Ussher, the eyewitness of the defence of Van and of the anti-Bolshevik rebellion of February 1921, wrote of the leaders of Armenia on 15 December 1921:

 

                * There is a widespread belief that Stalin planned to deny the status of republic to regions with less than a million inhabitants. Armenia would thereby have been reduced to an autonomous region. Apparently it was only the advocacy of Mikoyan which dissuaded him.

 

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Map 12. Soviet Armenia.

 

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            I am convinced that under present circumstances it would be a mistake to oust them… They are all amateurs. The real Communists in Armenia are very few. They deserve credit for what they have accomplished. [Here Ussher criticises them severely for their taxation policies.] Whatever happened to the country I hope the old partisan government will not again take control. It will be pure adventure if they do.³

 

And the Revd. Harold Buxton noted:

 

            Individually the members of the government at Erivan are serious, intelligent and hard-working men; it was a common sight to see these commissars sitting in cold, fireless rooms with their overcoats on while the available fuel was reserved for heating the larger rooms of their staffs.⁴

 

            Until 1928 Armenia moved towards socialism at leisurely pace. Merely getting the country on its feet again absorbed almost all the energies of the leadership. At the same time there was no attempt to make the inhabitants of Soviet Armenia conform to the new model of Soviet man. Non-Communist writers or thinkers were tolerated, because the government needed their skills. Such men were usually socialists with a nationalist hue, such as the 'Specifist' David Ananoun.⁵ (Dashnaktsutiun was of course a proscribed organisation, and had 'abolished' itself within Armenia at a showy meeting in November 1923, set up by the Communists.⁶) The Church, too, came under no direct attack in the 1920s (although religion per se was ridiculed), and the clergy were tolerated. Secularism had in any case become entrenched in Armenia in the years before Sovietisation; the Dashnaks had themselves taken most of the parochial schools out of the control of the Church.⁷

            Despite the problems which beset Soviet Armenia, the first decade or so of her existence saw a burst of cultural activity, signalling that the country was prepared to put the past behind it, and build for the future. Communist party First Secretary Alexander Miasnikian was himself a highly cultural man, a poet and essayist who had the capacity to recognise genius in others. Of Armenian writers, he held the poet Yeghishe Charents in the highest esteem. Charents was a wild, romantic figure, who became the unofficial poet laureate of Soviet Armenia in her early years. His poetry was characterised by a passionate vitality; it touched on the past with restraint and with what one might describe as a magnificent burnt-out pathos; but dwelt forcefully and brilliantly on the future which the nation would fashion for itself. His work seemed both to reflect and to create the new mood of Armenia. Others who articulated the mood of the country, its muted yearning and militant hope, were Axel Bakounts, Vahan Totovents, Zabel Yesaian and Gurgen Mahari, writers who transmuted the experience of their countrymen into an indelible identity for the citizens of the new state.⁸

            But this period did not last for long. The regimentation of art and poetry that

 

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accompanied Stalinism crushed those with talent or genius, just as its political manifestations bowed the people down. Not all of Armenia's 'second revolution' was bad, but for those who ventured an opinion, and for the human spirit, the effect was devastating.

            The abandonment of NEP and the adoption of the first five-year plan (1928–32) signalled the fundamental change. In 1928 agriculture was collectivised, initially on a voluntary basis. This met with almost no response from the peasantry, so forced collectivisation was introduced in 1930. Peasants who refused to co-operate were deported, one estimate puts their number at 25,000. So great was the opposition to the initial government measures that the unbelievable occurred in some mountainous districts: Armenians and Tatars united to resist collectivisation. To the forced measures of late 1930 the Armenian mountaineers responded with an armed rebellion; Zangezur, which had been the seat of the fiercest resistance to the Communists ten years earlier, held out against Stalin's imposition until 1934, when, as in 1921, the rebels were forced to flee into Persia. Nevertheless, collectivisation proceeded apace, and could be said to have succeeded in 1936, by which time four-fifths of peasant households were included in the scheme.⁹

            Armenia's industrialisation took place at the same time, laying the foundations for what is one of the most heavily industrialised of the Soviet republics today. Factories were set up in Yerevan and Leninakan (as Alexandropol was renamed in 1924), which were already centres of small-scale industry; and the mining districts of Alaverdi, Artik and Ghapan were expanded. For the first time Armenia developed a proletariat; her new labour force came from the villages, from the unemployed (of whom there were a substantial number in the 1920s), and from the women. Out of the whole population of the country, the percentage figure for industrial and white-collar workers was, in 1935, almost double that of 1926. At the same time houses were being built throughout the land, and public services were established.¹⁰

            In charge of the 'second revolution' in Armenia was Aghasi Khandjian. He had been in Russia, not the Caucasus, since 1921, and had been close to Stalin; in fact one could regard him, from 1928, when he returned south, as Stalin's man in Transcaucasia. He became First Secretary of the Armenian Communist party in May 1930. He developed a genuine popularity with the peasantry, and worked hard to build the new Armenia; but as Soviet Communism became characterised more and more by paranoia and purge, so he too purged the Communists of Armenia. The party became taken up with frightening, labyrinthine quarrels, with ruthless power struggles, and with bitter betrayals. The intrigues even crept up upon Khandjian himself, despite Stalin's support for him; for above Khandjian, in Tiflis, there was Lavrenti Beria, First Secretary of the Transcaucasian regional committee of the Communist party. Beria was jealous at the reception that a speech of his, On the History of Bolshevik Organisations in Transcaucasia (a grisly fabrication), had received in Armenia, and sought to destroy anyone who might rival his authority. So

 

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despite six years of struggle and purge to assure his place as party leader in Armenia, Khandjian was himself murdered by Beria in July 1936.¹¹

            Khandjian's murder signalled the start of the great purge, which lasted until 1939. The presence of Beria meant that the terror hit Armenia, and Transcaucasia in general, with particular ferocity. Absurd charges were made against men and women from all sections of the population; tens of thousands were failed; the prisons became filled beyond capacity, so that all basements of government buildings were commandeered for use as extra jails.¹² The 'Old Bolsheviks' were finally wiped out, as were the men who had pioneered the second revolution. Thousands were liquidated in Armenia. One of the most tragic losses was Charents himself, who died in jail in 1937.

            The extent of the purge, and its quality of a vast violent nightmare, may cause one to wonder: was Bolshevik Russia really a better choice for Armenia than Kemalist Turkey? The answer must be that for all their blood-stained horror, the Stalinist purges had none of the entirely genocidal qualities that the Turks manifested towards Armenians, right up to the period of Karabekir's occupation of Alexandropol. Women and children were not killed merely for the sake of eliminating them. If the Turks, rather than Stalin's henchmen, had unleashed their fury on the Armenians, there would have been no Armenians left, and the buildings of Armenians would have been razed as if they had never been. By contrast, the sheer amount of construction (both of factories and homes) that the Communists had undertaken in the decade before the purges assured Armenia of security and ultimate progress.^* Once the purges were past, progress could re-start.

            The purgers were themselves purged from January 1938 to February 1939. The paranoia of the past years receded, and relative normality returned. Political stability was re-established, and the witch-hunts for 'nationalists' ceased. The novels of Raffi were republished in 1940, and the edition sold out (in considerable disorder) within a few hours. The following year the 135th anniversary of Abovian's birth was celebrated in Yerevan. On the eve of the entry of the USSR into the second world war, it was clear that, within the confines of Stalinist Communism, considerable concessions were being made to Armenia.¹³

 

 

Turkey and the Remnant of Turkish Armenians, 1919–39

 

After the first world war the Ittihadist leaders who had planned and executed the Armenian genocide fled, mostly to Germany. With the presence of an Allied fleet at Constantinople, the Ottoman council of ministers began an investigation into the war crimes. But it was carried out in such a dilatory

 

            *This period was, in fact, the first occasion in modern times that any government had actually built anything for Armenians within Armenia.

 

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fashion as to make sure that as little justice as possible was done.¹⁴ Only in April 1919 were any Ittihadists arrested; but the following month the British, impatient with the inertia of Turkish justice, shipped to Malta some suspected war criminals (or 'statesmen and intellectuals', as Professor Niyazi Berkes calls them in his article on Zia Gökalp in the Encyclopedia of Islam). The tribunals sat, with increasing ineffectiveness, throughout 1919 and 1920. Only one man of even slight significance – Kemal of Yozgat – was convicted, sentenced and hanged (June 1919). Enver, Talaat and the bleak fanatic Dr Nazim were sentenced to death in absentia in July 1919; Behaeddin Shakir in January 1920. All these men had escaped, or were in hiding. No attempt was made to extradite them to Ottoman Turkey. Moreover, after Kiazim Karabekir's assault on Armenia in the late autumn of 1920, some further sentences which had been passed were 'reconsidered' by the military court of appeals, which ultimately, on 9 January 1921, annulled the verdicts and set the criminals free.

            So Dashnaktsutiun decided that it would carry out its own executions of the mass-murders of Armenians. A secret Dashnak network, named Nemesis, was set up to track down the convicted war criminals and to execute them. First to go was Talaat himself, 'the soul of the Armenian persecutions'; after weeks of watching and waiting, a young Armenian named Soghomon Tehlirian, almost all of whose family had been exterminated in the genocide, gunned down the former Ottoman minister of the interior in a Berlin street on 15 March 1921.¹⁵ (Tehlirian was arrested, and tried on 2–3 June; among those appearing for the defence were Dr Lepsius and Liman von Sanders. It did not take the jury long to acquit him.) Next to die was Said Halim, former Ottoman foreign minister, assassinated in Rome by Arshavir Shirakian on 6 December 1921.¹⁶ Two quite different but equally murderous individuals were next to be skittled down, again by Shirakian (working with a colleague); Behaeddin Shakir, the cold-blooded 'intellectual' and Paris-trained doctor, and Djemal Azmi, the butcher of Trebizond.¹⁷ Both were assassinated in Berlin on 17 April 1922. Djemal Pasha met his end in Tiflis on 25 July 1922, gunned down in front of the Cheka headquarters by two Armenians. Enver himself, pursuing some crazy pan-Turkist fantasy, was killed in an ambush while leading Muslim Basmachis against the Red Army in Central Asia two weeks later, on 4 August – a 'martyr to Turkism', in the words of Dr Nazim.¹⁸ There is an unsubstantiated story that the Soviet soldier who fired the shot was an Armenian.¹⁹ Dr Nazim himself, a chilling intellectual like Behaeddin Shakir with a European medical background, and a dönme – a member of a Jewish–Muslim syncretist sect, eluded them. (He was hanged for treason in 1926.)

            With the establishment of the Nationalist regime of Mustafa Kemal, and the birth of modern Turkey, it would be comfortable to believe that persecution of Armenians had ended, and that the few survivors were permitted to live unmolested: Armenians had been pitilessly exterminated during the genocide of 1915–16; the Turkish Nationalists had crushed the Republic of Armenia, and forced the Sovietisation of the remnant of it; and Turkey had received quite

 

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disproportionately favourable terms by the treaties of Moscow and Kars. Mustafa Kemal was known personally to hate fanaticism and to despise religious extremism, and to be devoid of anti-minority sentiments that had characterised Turkish leaders in the past. Would he use his authority to let the frightened remnants of the Armenians subsist quietly?

            Unfortunately this was not to be. The Pontic Greeks (in Trebizond province) were savagely persecuted in the years 1922–4, until the community was virtually wiped out; and as a spin-off of their persecution Armenians were subject to renewed attacks. In May 1922 Major Yowell of Near East Relief reported from Kharput:

 

            Armenians in this district are in a state of virtual slavery, and are not permitted to travel even within the country. All property of the Armenians who died in the recent deportations has been confiscated by the Turks. Armenians have no rights in the courts.²⁰

 

            Other relief workers confirmed Yowell's account, despite an attempt to hush the facts up by the United States, which was longing to do business with Kemal's new Turkey.^*

            Most spectacular (and subject to the most careful cover-up) was the Kemalist conquest of Smyrna (Izmir), on 9 September 1922, which was followed by looting, rape and murder by the Turkish forces, and by their setting fire to the Greek and Armenian quarters. For decades afterwards the myth was fostered that the Greeks and Armenians set fire to their own areas before quitting them – an untruth, recently (and finally) exploded in a book by Marjorie Housepian.²¹ In its ferocity and ruthlessness the sack of Smyrna resembled the sack of Baku by the Turkish army almost exactly four years earlier.

            While Smyrna was being sacked and burnt by the Kemalists, a fleet of warships belonging to Great Britain, France, Italy and the United States was anchored in the harbour. No attempt was made to intervene (to have expected that would have been an insult to the virtue of the Allies) and only the most reluctant efforts were made to rescue some of the 280,000 refugees who stood, crushed together and terrified, on the quayside. Little attempt was even made to 'protect the national property' of the immobile powers: despite the existence of

 

                * Notable by Admiral Mark L. Bristol, United States High Commissioner in Constantinople. He was a great admirer of Turkish rule, especially its harsher aspects. There was also the concession hunting family of the Chesters (father and son). Chester senior believed he was on the point of building 2,800 miles of railways in Turkey. In the September 1922 issue of the magazine Current History (New York) he had written that

 

the Armenians in 1915 were moved from the inhospitable regions where they were not welcome and could not actually prosper, to the most delightful and fertile parts of Syria … where the climate is as benign as in Florida and California whither New York millionaires journey every year for health and recreation. Al this was done at great expense of money and effort.

 

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American buildings and stores in Smyrna, the United States landed sailors to protect only one of any importance, the plant of the Standard Oil Company.²² Armenian refugees from the city (of whom there are a number in London) claim that British sailors turned hosepipes on any refugees swimming towards their vessels and trying to board them.

            The episode was the climax of the relationship that had developed between the Ottoman empire and the 'Western' powers since the Crimean war loan. Underneath all was the relentless and basic support for Turkey for commercial reasons, and for strategic reasons when those and other commercial enterprises were endangered. Support for the non-Turks, or for those forces which sought to modify the oppressive government (which a number of dedicated imperialists supported just because it was so merciless) was seldom more than transitory. The assurances that the European powers gave the minorities were propaganda, designed to appease their liberals at home, while they got on with the job of working with the Turks.

            After the capture of Smyrna, and the re-occupation of Constantinople (henceforward Istanbul), the Allies were compelled to sign an armistice with the forces of Mustafa Kemal. This they did at Mudanya, on 11 October 1922. Just over two weeks late the Nationalists were invited to a peace conference, which eventually was convened at Lausanne on 21 November 1922.

            The negotiations at Lausanne and subsequent peace treaty represent the final collapse of the hopes of the Western Armenians that they would be permitted to have any independent or autonomous existence on former Ottoman territory, either in Turkish Armenia or Cilicia. The Turkish delegation, representing a nation victorious now, only four years after being quite defeated, was headed by Ismet (Inönü). Ismet's diplomacy was a mixture of unbending inflexibility, irrelevant objection and exasperating lecture, which served his own purpose ideally. The Capitulations were abolished, the Greco-Turkish frontier was fixed to his liking, and no homeland was given to the Western Armenians, despite the advocacy of Lord Curzon. Armenians were indeed not mentioned in the subsequent treaty, although the subject came up in an insubstantial way.²³ Ismet indicated that any serious discussion of the Armenian question would lead to the break-up of the conference. American representative Joseph Grew noted, 'There is no subject upon which the Turks are more fixed in obstinacy. '²⁴

            One argument which Ismet used at Lausanne has been echoed by supporters of the Turks ever since. It is summed up in a simple phrase: Turkey for the Turks. By a magical alchemy the Ottoman empire – with a ruling people and subject peoples, just like any other empire – had become 'Turkey' – an appellation of European origin, signifying to the European mind a normal nation-state with a reasonably homogeneous population, which Turkey, with boundaries as defined by Ismet, was not. No one could object to 'Turkey for the Turks' if Turkey consisted only of the lands indubitably and legitimately Turkish. But not only were there Kurds and Laz in the east; there were also the deserted

 

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homes and villages of the hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had been exterminated or driven out. 'Turkey for the Turks' seems just to be the banal statement of a political truism; but really it is a concealed argument for not recognising the crimes of the past, and for denying that the former empire should be decolonised.

            Although the treaty of Lausanne did not mention Armenians, seven of its articles (38–44) refer to them.²⁵ Life and liberty were guaranteed, without distinction of 'birth, nationality, language, race or religion'; free movement was allowed, and all were equal before the law (articles 38 and 39). Article 40 established that Turkish nationals belonging to non-Muslim minorities might 'establish, manage and control at their own expense any charitable, religious and social institutions, and any schools and other establishments for instruction and education'. The minorities might teach their children in their own languages, and the government would provide facilities; but the teaching of Turkish would be obligatory (article 41). The next two clauses stated that the minorities' own customs might be used for regulating their own internal affairs, and that they would not be compelled to do anything which their religion forbade. Article 44 stated that the League of Nations itself guaranteed the foregoing articles, thereby giving them international significance.

            If we accept today that the United Nations is the legal successor to the League of Nations – a claim which has been definitely established in the case of South-West Africa (Namibia) – then the UN must be bound to be guardian of articles 38–43 of the Lausanne treaty. They are in fact disregarded by the Turkish government, especially article 40. The harassment and government obstruction which Armenians have faced in their attempts in recent years to keep their schools going is reminiscent of the days of Abdul Hamid. The United Nations could prove that it is guardian of those disregarded pledges, and though there is little chance of the world body doing so, it is worth remembering that it has the power to do so.

            The Turkish government refused to discuss Armenian claims for compensation for Armenian material losses during the massacres and deportations. Everything was done to pretend that such events had never really taken place; so naturally claims for compensation were superfluous.

            In one place, however, Mustafa Kemal allowed his drive for modernisation to override the traditional Turkish attitude towards Armenians. In 1928 the villagers of Everek Fenese, near Kayseri, petitioned the Turkish leader for the re-opening of their church; and they wrote out their request in the reformed Latinised script, which had only just been introduced. Impressed by the manner in which Armenians demonstrated their support for his modernisation plans, he assented at once.²⁶

            But in the following year further grim events awaited Turkish Armenians. On 1 January 1929 the Turkish government issued a punitive, discriminatory decree which stated that Armenians might not sell or bequeath their property, which was to go to the state upon their death. Then, in the summer of that year,

 

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new deportations of the sad remnants of Armenian peasants and artisans, living on the fringes of the ancient homeland of Turkish Armenia, were set in motion. In a despatch dated Aleppo, 14 November 1929, British consul A. Monck-Mason reported that refugees had been arriving continually for the preceding six months from the regions of Kharput, Diyarbekir and Mardin.²⁷ In his opinion, 'the settled policy of the Turkish government seems to be to get rid of all Christian elements in the distant Anatolian provinces by all means short of absolute massacre, of which there has been admittedly very little.' Aleppo, he continues, has been the sanctuary for the daily caravans of Armenians. 'Whole families are sick, and nearly all are absolutely destitute.' He quotes an Armenian from Kharput saying: 'In Turkey today we have no means of existence; we are persecuted, suspected, robbed, ill-treated, thrown into prison, judged, and, if we are lucky, deported.'²⁸ Bombs had been thrown into churches, and the Armenian bishop of Diyarbekir murdered by seven drunken soldiers. Estimates of those expelled in the 1929–30 deportations put the number at 30,000.²⁹

            After these deportations had died down, leaving Turkish Armenians who still clung to their ancient soil more remote, more frightened and more prepared than ever to 'pass for Turk', Armenians were free from more than the usual discrimination or government hostility for the next few years.

            Less than ten years later republican Turkey began agitating for the annexation from Syria of the sanjak of Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean coastline. France was the mandatory for Syria, and when she had occupied Syria after the battle of Khan Maysalun, she effected an administrative division of the country, showing a high degree of colonial cynicism. The sanjak of Alexandretta enjoyed 'special administrative status' within what the French deigned to call the 'state of Syria' – a sadly truncated entity, deprived of the Djebel Druz and the region of Latakia (the latter known as the 'state of the Alawites').³⁰ Alexandretta's special status derived from the Franklin-Bouillon agreement of October 1921. Turkish agitation for the sanjak began in September 1936, and did not cease until she had annexed it in October 1939.

            Within the sanjak were about 23,000 Armenians. Most of them were villagers who had lived there since medieval times; 6,000 were refugees from Cilicia, whom the American Near East Relief had settled there. In all, they constituted 11 per cent of the total population of the district. No linguistic or religious group was in the majority in the sanjak. The Turks constituted 39 per cent of the population, and were outnumbered by the combined total of the Arabic speakers. Of all those Turks, only about a third actually wanted union with the Turkish republic. Nevertheless Mustafa Kemal's threats of force eventually compelled the French, and the League of Nations, to give way; and in 1938, in an action which recalls Hitler's occupation of the Rhineland two years before, the Turkish leader sent his troops to occupy the sanjak. When the Armenians realised that they were faced with Turkish rule, they saw no alter-

 

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native but to quit.^* Eight thousand left in the year following the Turkish military occupation, and in one week in the summer of 1939, there was a mass exodus of 14,000. All left to face the poverty, refugee camps and harsh struggle for life that fellow Armenians faced in Lebanon and Syria.^† Only 600 Armenians remained to face the Turkish administration in the sanjak (renamed 'Hatay' for phoney historical reasons).³¹ Although not directly aimed at the Armenians, the Kemalist annexation of the sanjak of Alexandretta had further wretched consequences for Armenians; nor was this to be the last time, as events during the second world war will show.

 

 

Refugees and Relief

 

During the period of the Republic of Armenia, there were about 300,000 refugees from Turkish Armenia scratching a living from her dry and stony soil. By the time that Armenia became Soviet they had been reduced probably to nearer 200,000, mainly as a result of starvation and exposure. Of all the refugees, they were probably the luckiest, since they were in an Armenia, whose inhabitants spoke the same language as themselves, and which, during the industrialisation of the 1930s, could assimilate them. Indeed 40,000 Armenians who were almost all refugees from Turkish Armenia, but had sought shelter in other countries, went to Soviet Armenia to settle in the period 1922–36.

            The situation of the refugees in the Near East was the gravest. In all there were about 200,000 of these throughout the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, distributed approximately as follows:

 

Greece                        45,000

Bulgaria                         6,000

Egypt                            4,000

Syria and Lebanon       90,000

Constantinople   5,000

Iraq                             14,500

Palestine                        2,500

 

            Of these, the situation of the refugees in Greece was widely considered to be the most acute, since Greece was herself saddled with the gigantic problem of

 

                * It also appears that some Armenian leaders actually encouraged their people to leave, obeying in a rather craven manner the dictates of the French authorities in Damascus, who sought a counterbalance of Christian, non-Arab peoples in Syria to outweigh the gathering and insistent forces of Syrian nationalism.

                † The people from the villages of Musa Dagh were settled in a camp, which has become a village, at Ainjar, close to the Lebanese–Syrian border and just off the main road. Their distinctive church is clearly visible from the road. Visitors to the interesting Umayyad ruins at Ainjar are likely (as I did) to have an Armenian from the sanjak of Alexandretta as their courteous and informative guide.

 

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settling the Anatolian Greeks, who by early 1923 had reached the figure of 1,200,000. The greatest concentration of Armenians was in Syria and (especially) Lebanon, where they constituted in succeeding years a political force of some consequence.

            The problems of settling these refugees, and especially of looking after the orphans, seemed at first intractable, especially in Syria and Lebanon, which were themselves undeveloped countries. Nevertheless relief workers laboured with unflagging dedication, and the spirit of the people might have been low, but it was far from burnt out. The American Near East Relief spent almost $100,000,000 on relief (largely, but not all, in Lebanon and Syria); the British Armenian (Lord Mayor's) Fund also contributed; and the Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), which had been founded in 1906, worked tirelessly too. Indeed AGBU was the inheritor of the European and American philanthropic enterprises when these agencies wound down their activities, and remains today a most important Armenian charity and a vital resource for the Armenian people.

            International attempts to solve the refugee problem were bedevilled by politics. A scheme to resettle some of the Near Eastern refugees in Soviet Armenia was put forward by the Armenian National Delegation in Paris in August 1923.³³ The idea was to irrigate the Sardarabad desert, and populate it with 50,000 Armenians; it was taken up by the council of the League of Nations, which requested the great Norwegian explorer and philanthropist, Dr Fridtjof Nansen, to investigate the possibilities of the scheme. Dr Nansen had already won renown for his work with post-war refugees. Initially he declined the new assignment, but accepted when offered the co-operation of the International Labour Bureau.³⁴ Various countries offered aid; France put up 335,000 francs; Greece offered some, despite her own appalling problems. Even Albania, a largely Muslim country, was prepared to give cash for Armenian resettlement. Britain, however, did not offer anything, and when requested to do so (to give a moral lead, over and above any sum involved) in March 1924, the government responded coolly, saying that there was insufficient information to judge whether the scheme was workable. In the meantime H. H. Asquith and Stanley Baldwin, then out of government, had sent a joint memorandum to Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald proposing that 'a substantial contribution should be made to the scheme'.³⁵ Dr Nansen travelled to Armenia in the summer of 1925, and found the scheme to be technically and financially sound. About £1,000,000 was required – not a great sum, if divided among a number of countries. Thereby they would discharge themselves of having failed the Armenians so often in the past. It would be a small, but notable recompense. A Foreign Office draft memorandum put it thus:

 

            The withholding of so small a sum would be interpreted abroad, where our own needs and difficulties are imperfectly appreciated, as a cynical

 

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gesture, dispensing other countries from financial sacrifices. It would be regarded, and not least by the Armenians themselves, as a deliberate repudiation of our pledges as well as a disavowal of the humanitarian claims of a small and bitterly afflicted nation on a large and prosperous one.³⁶

 

            But despite the cogent pleading of Nansen at the League of Nations, Britain refused the small sum. The reason was political: control of Armenia rested with Moscow. Winston Churchill was chancellor of the exchequer in Baldwin's Conservative administration, which took office in November 1924, and he saw such a grant as tantamount to giving aid to Soviet Russia. Baldwin's advocacy of support for the scheme, of only a few months earlier, evaporated like so many other expressions of support for Armenians. Financial assistance to the refugees was blocked. It was not, however, the end of the matter. Another commission travelled to Yerevan, to check the soundness of the scheme, and came to the same conclusion of the earlier one. This time, the Norwegian philanthropist asked, in November 1926, for a repayable loan, to circumvent the political objection of aiding Soviet Russia. During 1927, five countries agreed to contribute to the new scheme: Germany, Greece, Norway, Romania and Switzerland.³⁸ What of Britain? After an inordinate delay, the Foreign Office delivered its judgement on 28 January 1928: even though as little as £100,000 was requested, His Majesty's government would not contribute to the later scheme. In justification, it was claimed that Britain had spent £1,180,000 on Armenian relief (in Iraq) since 1918. In a parliamentary question on 21 February 1928, the indefatigable Noel Buxton asked the government spokesman on foreign affairs 'if he can now state whether HMG had decided to comply with the request of the council of the League of Nations to assist with a grant the settlement of Armenian refugees in Yerevan': the reply was, wrapped round in the usual quasi-Ottoman verbiage, no.³⁹

            Nansen's own hopes were raised again later in 1928, when Armenians themselves contributed £100,000; but nothing further was actually received, apart from £50,000 from Germany; so a year later he announced that the entire scheme was to be abandoned for lack of support.⁴⁰ In future, Armenians carried on their charitable activities directly with the Soviet government, from which they got actual results, and avoided the high-principled but stone-fisted men who talked at the assembly of the League of Nations.

            It was a depressingly appropriate way for Britain to bow out of her engagements with Armenians. All the way back to the Berlin congress her record is a shabby one, to use no stronger word. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Armenians would have been more fortunate if Britain had never had anything at all to do with them.

 

 

Internal Armenian Politics

 

The mutual hostility between Dashnaktsutiun and Bolshevism should not be considered absolute. At the time of Armenia's Sovietisation there is evidence of

 

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a measure of goodwill from the Dashnaks towards the Bolsheviks, which was rapidly dispersed by the actions of the Revkom in entering Armenia, and was finally dissipated by the revolt of February 1921. The Bolsheviks for their part did not seek simply to crush Dashnaktsutiun. Even after Red forces had recaptured Yerevan they were prepared to negotiate a Dashnak surrender in Zangezur, rather than simply resort to a military solution.

            Negotiations to this end began at Kaladjik, in Zangezur, on 12 May 1921: A. Karinian and V. Melnikov represented the Soviet side.⁴¹ But less than a month after the start of the negotiations, on 10 June, the Dashnaks signed an agreement in Paris with the other ousted regimes of Transcaucasia and the North Caucasus, in which all four declared that they would unite in political and economic fields. (How much easier it was to unite in exile, than when the governments actually controlled tracts of land!) They planned to sign a military defence treaty, and to establish a united foreign policy. The four republics would work together in settling the Turko-Armenian frontier (which they clearly envisaged as including some pre-1914 Ottoman territory); they also demanded the withdrawal of the Red Army from the four Caucasian republics.⁴²

            This agreement was the first example of the shadow politics which were to give Dashnaktsutiun a sense of purposeful activity in the succeeding decades, but whose benefit to the Armenian people was questionable. On this occasion the agreement might possibly have given heart to the rebels of Zangezur, for on 15 June they attacked Soviet forces in Daralagiaz. On 19 June party chief Alexander Miasnikian proposed to the Dashnaks that they lay down their arms, but they refused, so the Red Army launched an all-out campaign against them, retaking Daralagiaz on 26 June, and conquering the rest of Zangezur village by village until Meghri was captured on 13 July, an event which signalled the end of Dashnak rule in Armenia.⁴³

            At the very same time that the Dashnaks were forming an anti-Bolshevik alliance in Paris, and refusing to co-operate with the Bolsheviks on the ground in Armenia, they were carrying on talks for an accommodation with the Bolsheviks. The initiative for these talks, held in the Latvian capital of Riga from 8 to 14 July 1921, came from the Dashnaks themselves. It is hard to see them as doing other than playing a double game. The Bolshevik side was represented by A. I. Ioffe, Vahan Ter-Vahanian and Sahak Ter-Gabrielian, and Dashnaks were Arshak Jamalian, Vahan Navasardian and Vahan Papazian (Koms). An agreement was reached under which the Armenian Bolsheviks would do all in their power to secure the return of Armenia's lost lands, while the Dashnaks would adopt a stance friendly to Soviet power. The agreement was initialled, but not signed; the Bolshevik side heard of the Paris agreement, and broke off relations with the Dashnaks.⁴⁴

            At the same time, in this strange period of alliances and counter-alliances, of secret and suspicious – and entirely profitless – discussions and pacts, another anti-Bolshevik agreement was made. Although similar to that agreed in Paris

 

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by the ousted Caucasian governments, it was different in that it planned to use Kemalist Turkey as the agent for overthrowing the Bolsheviks in the Caucasus. It was established in Tabriz in mid-July 1921, with the title of Prometheus (or Prométhée; it is spelt 'Promete' in Armenian). Khosrov Bek Sultanov was the Azerbaijani representative. Dashnaks say that they did not take part; however, non-Dashnaks say that they did, and that Simon Vratsian was their representative. Non-Dashnaks also hold that the treaty of Alexandropol was to be the basis of the pact (and that the Dashnak government had signed the Alexandropol treaty anticipating such a pact). It is further claimed by opponents of the Dashnaks, and indeed by one senior member of the party who formed an opposition splinter group and was later expelled from Dashnaktsutiun, that the Prometheus orientation was of great importance in Dashnak political councils throughout the 1920s.⁴⁵

            But one thing shows that by 1927 the Dashnaks sought no further contacts with Turkey, if they had ever had them. This was their participation in the steps which led to the Kurdish revolt of Ihsan Nuri and others in the summer of 1930. The Kurds had already been in revolt in Turkey in 1925, when Sheikh Sad raised a revolt which eventually encompassed a broad stretch of land from Lake Van westwards to Kharput and Siverek. The character of the 1925 Kurdish revolt was religious, but the large measure of success that it commanded showed that there were extensive political forces operating, since observers of the Kurds have habitually noted that their desires and aspirations lie much more with this world than the next.

            After Sheikh Said's revolt, Kurdish and Turkish activities took on an overtly political complexion. A Kurdish nationalist political organisation, called the Khoybun, was founded in 1927. At its inaugural meeting, held in Bhamdoun, Lebanon, leading Dashnaktsakan Vahan Papazian was present, and it is clear that in succeeding years the Dashnaks built up the political structure of the Khoybun, eventually enabling it to stage an armed revolt in 1930, in the region stretching from Mount Ararat to the north-east extremity of Lake Van.⁴⁶ If there ever had been a 'Prometheus orientation', it was now dead. The revolt lasted for two months, before the fate of the rebels was sealed by an agreement between the Turkish and Iranian governments.

            Thereafter the Dashnaks appear to have turned their attention away from Turkey, and to have focused again on Soviet Armenia.^* Three years later this change of emphasis was to be made grimly apparent.

            In March 1933 the Dashnak party held its general congress in Paris. It did so against a fairly widespread belief among party stalwarts that the Soviet government was using some of the Armenian clergy for political purposes.

 

                * There is a noticeable difference in attitude between Dashnaks of Ottoman origin and those born in the tsar's dominions. The former are more aware of the Turkish threat to their people, and consequently more ready to engage in anti-Turkish protests and demonstrations, while a number of Caucasian Dashnaks have been known to take a fiercely anti-Russian (and specifically anti-Bolshevik) stance, provoking charges of pro-Turkishness from their opponents.

 

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Dashnaktsutiun soon after showed that it was pursuing an activist policy among diaspora Armenians. One of the main points at issue was loyalty to the Armenian flag. The red, blue and orange tricolour had been rendered obsolete within Armenia by Sovietisation, which had introduced anew flag replete with Soviet symbols.^* Now the Dashnaks sought to kindle loyalty to the former flag, and their insistence led to a number of incidents in Armenian communities.

            At the Chicago World Fair, 1 June 1933 had been designated 'Armenian Day'. Guest speaker was Archbishop Ghevond Tourian, recently appointed by Catholicos Khoren I (of Echmiadzin) to be prelate of the Armenians of America. Unknown to the archbishop, the platform had been decorated with the tricolour; when he saw the old flag, he refused to speak until it was removed. Eventually he spoke beneath the Stars and Stripes.

            The archbishop was thereafter severely criticised in the Dashnak press. He was physically attacked in August at Westboro, Massachusetts. Then, on Sunday, 24 December 1933, as he was in procession down the aisle of the Armenian church of the Holy Cross on West 187th Street, New York, he was murdered by Dashnak hit men:⁴⁷ a shocking act, all the more grievous if one recalls that 15 years earlier Dashnaktsutiun had been the party of government in Armenia, with all the dignity and responsibility that that entailed.

            The parties in the diaspora realised that something had to be done to curb the fratricidal tendencies that were manifesting themselves. After the Sovietisation of Armenia, the parties of the diaspora amounted principally to three: the Hunchaks, whose Marxist socialism led them to support Soviet Armenia and her leadership in all major issues; the Dashnaks, unchanged in essential structure since their foundation in 1890, and a member of the Second International since 1907; and the Ramkavars. This last, properly the Ramkavar Azatakan Kusaktsutiun or Democratic Liberal party, was formed in 1921 out of a triple merger – of the Armenakans, of the Verakazmial, or Reformed, Hunchaks, who had seceded from the Hunchaks in 1896, and of the Sahmanadir Ramkavar party, founded in 1908 in Cairo. The two most powerful parties in the diaspora emerged as the Dashnaks and the Ramkavars; the Hunchaks commanded considerably less adherence and funds. Although the new Ramkavar Azatakan party numbered among its members rich merchants of a conservative outlook, like its predecessors it was the party of the Armenian open-minded intelligentsia, of teachers, doctors and lawyers. Ramkavars have always held that Soviet Armenia is the best Armenia that they are likely to get, since it is protected by Russia; and without Russian protection (of whatever political complexion) Armenia would disappear from the map of the world for ever. So, despite their liberal principles, the facts – as they see them – of Armenia's geography and history compel them to support Soviet Armenia.

 

                * Initially there was no specifically partisan identity to the tricolour. However, the current of political events meant that it had become obsolete, being identified with the period of Dashnak rule.

 

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            In the summer of 1938 representatives of the Dashnaks and the Ramkavars met in Cairo to see if they could establish some common goals, and to define their different spheres of interest. A measure of agreement was reached. Both parties accepted that Armenia, as it was constituted at that time, was the nucleus of Armenian existence, irrespective of the regime in power. The Dashnaks agreed not to take part in any act leading to the dismemberment of the USSR, upon which the safety of Armenia depended. They also agreed not to provoke any internal disorders or try to overthrow the regime. However, they would continue their relations with anti-Soviet forces, because, should the USSR collapse, it was prudent to be on good terms with any regime that might take its place. They remembered 1917–18. They would also give due respect to Echmiadzin, and not fight over Church administration outside Armenia. Both sides agreed to differ on which day they celebrated Armenia's rebirth – whether on 28 May or 29 November – as well as on the issue of the Armenian flag. By this agreement a dangerous collision was averted.⁴⁸

            In the years before the second world war a small Fascist element appeared within Dashnaktsutiun. It is wrong to say that the Dashnak party itself adopted Fascism; and the few pro-Fascist comments that appeared in its press at the time can no more be taken as wholesale endorsement of Fascism than can the favourable remarks of some European leaders on the first year of Fascist rule in Germany. Garegin Nzhdeh, dictator of Lernahayastan until it fell to the Bolsheviks in July 1921, arrived in the United Sates as a Dashnak field-worker in 1933, and founded a youth movement named the Tseghakrons, or racists (tsegh = race; kron is a suffix signifying 'devotee of'). The Dashnak party itself would not endorse Nzhdeh's notions, and some time afterwards it expelled him from its ranks.⁴⁹ The name of the youth movement he had founded was changed to 'Armenian Youth Federation'. Nevertheless, the flirtation of certain Armenian circles with Fascism was not over.

 

 

The Second World War

 

Armenia was not a theatre of the second world war, although in March and April 1940 Britain and France were seriously studying the possibility of bombing Baku (to which the French attached great importance) – a course of action which would have brought Transcaucasia into the war, with fearful consequences for Armenia: Turkey would have invaded from the west, overrunning Armenia, exterminating her people and wrecking her cities more thoroughly than in 1918 and 1920. Lack of enthusiasm on the part of Britain and the fall of France put paid to that piece of adventurism.⁵⁰

            After Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union (22 June 1941), and with the beginning of what is known in Soviet terminology as the 'great patriotic war', the Armenians contributed extensively to the Soviet armies. The number of Soviet Armenian serving soldiers has been estimated at between 300,000 and

 

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500,000; more than 50 Soviet generals were Armenians, including the renowned General (later Marshal) Baghramian. Three Soviet admirals were also Armenians, which is all the more surprising when one considers that Armenia has never had a coastline; they included Admiral Isakov, whose account of the Soviet war at sea has been translated into English. Over 32,000 Armenian soldiers were decorated in the war, and over 100 received the award 'Hero of the Soviet Union'.^*51

            Nor should one overlook the fact that on the other side of the world 20,000 Armenians served in the United States army during the war.

            Besides actually fighting, Armenians – those outside their homeland – also contributed to the establishment of a Soviet tank corps, known as Sasuntzi David (i.e. David of Sasun, the legendary fighter of the eleventh century, whose activities are recounted in the epic poem which bears his name). This corps was set up, initially from Echmiadzin, in January 1943. After a world-wide appeal for funds, the tank corps was in the field in late February 1944. Two months later Sasuntzi David was reported to have advanced 200 kilometres, destroying the occupying forces of the Axis. The main contributions from Armenians abroad were: United States, $115,000; Lebanon, £L185,000; Syria, £Syr276,000; Egypt,£14,000; Iran, 2½ million rials. Armenians in Tehran were planning to set up a 'Hovhannes Baghramian' tank corps when the war ended. Altogether it was a remarkable display of patriotic fervour, and of loyalty to the reality of Armenia both as part of the USSR, and as one of the components of the anti-Nazi alliance.⁵²

            Nevertheless, Armenian enthusiasm for the Allied cause in the second world war was not wholehearted. Armenia's history and geographical position meant that total support for the Allies could not be assumed automatically. The fact that some Armenians collaborated with the Germans should not be the cause of smug moralising. To have antagonised the Nazis would have been suicide.

            Members of the Dashnak party living in the occupied areas, including a number of names famous from the period of the republic, adopted a pro-Nazi stance. The whole Dashnak party did not take this stance; the section of the party in Cairo affirmed its loyalty to the Allies.⁵³

            A letter in The Times (London) of 19 July 1941 indignantly rebutted the idea that any of the Armenian people entertained pro-Axis sympathies. It was written by J. [Zhirair] Missakian, then the only Dashnak party member in Britain. He wrote of the 'fantastic hints' that Armenians were leaning towards the Axis – hints which had indeed been fed to The Times from its correspondent in Istanbul, whose despatches echoed official Turkish attempts

 

                * Marshal Baghramian's command of the First Baltic Front in Byelorussia and East Prussia (June–October 1944), which inflicted heavy defeats on the Nazis, is fairly well known. Less known are the exploits of Major-General Nver Safarian, commander from February 1943 of the 89th (Armenian) Army, liberating the Taman peninsula (on the east side of the straits of Kerch), gaining for the victors the title of the 'Tamanian' army. The Armenian army was the only one of the Soviet national armies to enter Berlin in 1945.

 

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to smear Armenians. Missakian also referred to a report in an American magazine which claimed that the Nazis had picked on Dashnaktsutiun to do fifth-column work, promising the party an autonomous state for their co-operation. All this was, he said, devoid of foundation. 'The utterances of German statesmen from Bismarck to Bethmann-Hollweg, and the preachings of a galaxy of militant German philosophers, cannot be described as manifestations of Teutonic affection for our people.'⁵⁴ Missakian's claims were bolstered by the action of his brother Shavarsh, who stopped publishing the Dashnak paper Haratch in Paris during the occupation.

            Nevertheless there remains the incontestable fact that relations between the Nazis and Dashnaks living in the occupied areas were close and active. On 30 December 1941 an Armenian battalion was created by a decision of the Wehrmacht, known as the 'Armenian 812th Battalion'. It was commanded by Dro, and was made up of a small number of committed recruits, and a larger number of Armenians from the prisoners of war taken by the Nazis in their sweep eastwards. Early on the total number was 8,000; this number later grew to 20,000. The 812th Battalion was operational in the Crimea and the North Caucasus.

            A year later, on 15 December 1942, an 'Armenian National Council' was granted official recognition by Alfred Rosenberg, the German minister of the occupied areas. The 'Council' 's president was Professor Ardashes Abeghian, its vice-president Abraham Giulkhandanian, and it numbered among its members Nzhdeh and Vahan Papazian. From that date until the end of 1944 it published a weekly journal, Armenien, edited by Viken Shant (the son of Levon), who also broadcast on Radio Berlin.⁵⁵

            Except for Nzhdeh, no Armenian has ever been a theoretical Fascist. So what was the motive for the collaboration in the occupied areas? It is possible to see it as a purely vengeful desire to retake Armenia from the Bolsheviks. But I do not think that the alliance was motivated by such a crude ambition. There were probably several considerations which led to the decision. In the first place, there is in the untutored mind a tendency to class Armenians and Jews together (offensive to both peoples); and the malevolent paranoia of the Nazis might have manifested itself against Armenians as well as Jews. Hence it was Important to prove to the Nazis that the Armenians were 'Aryans'. With the aid of Dr Paul Rohrbach they seem to have achieved this. The Nazis did not persecute Armenians, just for being Armenians, in the occupied lands. In the second place, Dashnaks such as Dro remembered – and the memory had been an overwhelming constituent of their policy in the preceding two decades – the events of 1917–18, when the strength and organisation of their party apparatus was the only guarantee against the final extermination of the children of Haik from the Armenian plateau. With Russia again threatening to break up, it made sense to prepare to enter Yerevan with the forces that might supplant Bolshevism, in order to assure public security before the Turks swept in from the west.

 

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            Nevertheless, it is hard to feel much sympathy for the pro-Axis group, since in terms of cosmic evil the Nazis surpassed the Young Turks. But perhaps that is a consideration one may only enjoy with the benefit of hindsight, and to the men there in the occupied areas, the immediate and overwhelming concern was to secure the safety of other Armenians.

            Turkey, for her part, maintained a grudging neutrality throughout the war, until it was won, when she joined the winning side. Although under the terms of the Anglo–Franco–Turkish treaty of 19 October 1939 she had pledged to join in a European conflict in which Britain or France were engaged, she chose not to, and, displaying the old Ottoman diplomatic skill, went on to sign an agreement with Germany on 18 June 1941, which, while not contradicting the earlier treaty, was directly opposed to it in spirit, and fulsomely lauded German–Turkish friendship.^*56

            During the second world war, two tendencies appeared in Turkey, which showed how shallow had been her much-lauded changes with regard to her non-Turkish populations. They showed that of her two treaty parties, she was much closer to Nazi Germany than to democratic Britain. The first was the revival of pan-Turkism. This murderous ideology resurfaced in July 1941 under the leadership of professor Zeki Velidi Togan of Istanbul University. Unashamedly racist, in imitation of the Nazis its leaders adopted the trappings of Fascism, down to an imitation-Hitler hairstyle and colourful uniform.⁵⁷

            On 5 August 1941 German ambassador Franz von Papen reported to Berlin that Turkish government – not just maverick party – circles were showing increasing interest in the fate of their kinsmen, 'particularly the Azerbaijan Turks'. Von Papen continued:

 

            These circles tend to recollect 1918 events: their wish is to annex the above area, especially the rich Baku oil fields. To these ends a committee of experts has been set up, embodying specialists who once officiated in this type of work during Abdul Hamid's time. This committee is to gather all pertinent material and is to enlist, in Turkey from the ranks of recent emigrants, and from immigrants – notably those in the Azerbaijan province of Iran – support for a union of the new Turkey with the Turk-inhabited regions bordering on it in the east, up to the Caspian sea.⁵⁸

 

            One year later, while the Nazi armies were pushing eastwards, Turkish premier Shukri Sarajoghlu said (5 August 1942):

 

            We are Turks, we are Turkists, and we shall always remain so. For us Turkism is a matter of blood, and no less of consciousness. Our ambition is

 

                * Four days later Germany invaded Russia. There is a curious parallel with the first world war here, since two days after the Turko-German agreement of 2 August 1914, Germany had invaded Belgium.

 

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to see 'the Turk' increase in numbers, and not to assist in his decrease, as in the past.⁵⁹

 

            After Stalingrad these Fascist notions were put back in the filing-cabinet, and the Turkish authorities felt compelled to prosecute the official Fascist party in September 1944, to sanitise the country before she joined the Allies.

            The second example of the re-emergence of the bullying, anti-minority spirit in Turkey was the affair of the Capital Levy Tax, or Varlik Vergisi. A number of Armenians were directly involved, and suffered accordingly.

            This tax, masterminded in theory and directed in practice by President Ismet Inönü, was introduced in November 1942. The ostensible intention was to get at war-profiteers. To this end tax returns and other relevant documents were examined by boards (composed only of Muslim Turks), and assessments made for the wealth tax. Once the assessment was made there was no appeal: the amount had to be paid in cash, and the penalty for non-payment was deportation to Ashkale (west of Erzerum), to engage in the harshest manual labour, mostly stone-breaking.⁶⁰

            The effect of the law was again to show the persistent unwillingness of the Turkish government to include non-Turks as citizens of the Turkish state, whether of empire or republic. The rule of law simply did not extend to Greeks, Armenians and Jews. The assessments of citizens from the minority communities were astronomical in comparison to those of Muslim Turks in similar financial circumstances. The assumption that only Muslim Turks were honest fellows was at once the most ridiculous and odious aspect of the law. (A memorandum issuing from the British embassy dated 1 December 1942 noted, by contrast, that corruption recalled the days of Abdul Hamid.⁶¹)

            Lewis V. Thomas, a staunch friend of Turkey, has pointed out that by this tax the government was effectively reviving the Capitulations, inasmuch as the government's official injustice sent members of the minorities scurrying again to the skirts of foreign powers. He adds, 'Overnight, Atatürk's attempts to incorporate the minorities into Turkey, in so far as those attempts had had some measure of success, were undone… Resentment and discrimination welled up everywhere. Republican Istanbul was lapsing into Ottoman Constantinople.'⁶²

            By late May 1943 the number unable to pay their exorbitant assessment had reached 500. The old and the sick were not spared. All were herded to the east in cramped and foul conditions. There they were forced to work without a break from 7.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m., even in the appalling cold of the Anatolian winter. (In addition, many had to spend three hours walking to and from work.) They were denied payment and any food except dry bread, and even this was stopped at one stage, leaving them to exist only on the gifts of relatives. (With the typical Turkish difference between the real and the paper world, the provisions of the published law laid down that the deportees were to be both paid and fed.) They slept 50 to a room, or in filthy cafés, or else shared

 

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stables with animals. On at least two occasions a sick deportee was denied medical assistance and subsequently died.⁶³

            Only after the liberation of Italy did Turkey show any pro-Ally sentiments. She eventually declared war on Germany and Japan on 23 February 1945, not with the intention of doing any fighting, but merely to get a seat at the fledgling United Nations. When the tardy and unwilling Turkish participation in the war was set against the massive sacrifice of Soviet Armenia, there was a feeling, as the war drew to an end, that legitimate Armenian national claims deserved a measure of satisfaction, something that they had been denied after the first world war.

 

 

Kars and Ardahan; Repatriation

 

On 19 March 1945 the USSR denounced the Soviet–Turkish treaty of friendship of 17 September 1925.

            Almost as soon as the war in Europe was over (8 May 1945) the Soviet Union re-opened the question of Kars and Ardahan, the region which had constituted the Kars oblast from 1878 until the first world war, and which the Kemalists had seized in their assault of September–November 1920. As early as 1939 British diplomats had noted minor indications that the Soviet Union might question the status of the region. Now, after the war, at a meeting with the Turkish ambassador, Soviet Foreign Minister V. M. Molotov confirmed that this territorial issue would have to be solved before a new treaty could be signed. Russia, said the Soviet ambassador in Ankara, wished to 'do something for the Armenian people'.⁶⁴

            At about the same time a conclave in Echmiadzin was given Soviet permission to meet in order to elect a new Catholicos. (The seat had been empty since 1938, when the then Catholicos had almost certainly become a victim of the purges.) Catholicos Gevorg VI was elected on 22 June 1945. One of his first actions was to address a letter to Stalin stressing two points: that Armenians keenly awaited the day when Armenian territories now under foreign rule would be joined to Soviet Armenia, and that Armenians abroad in the dispersion were waiting to return to the motherland.⁶⁵

            Now it is possible to see this as a cynical Stalinist stratagem: that Stalin merely permitted the election of the Catholicos, then told him what to write in his letter, so as to justify Soviet expansionism. But even if that did in fact happen, it is not a full description of those events; for on this occasion Soviet expansionism coincided with what was, in view of the events of the past seventy years, a legitimate Armenian national aspiration – one which was for Armenians overriding, and which, in the context of their history, was of far greater significance than this or that bit of Soviet pressure.

            As soon as the action of Catholicos Gevorg VI became known, a campaign began among world-wide Armenian communities of all political affiliations for the return of Kars and Ardahan. They were in no sense organised or directed

 

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by Soviet interests – their own national demands pre-dated the establishment of the Soviet state or even the foundation of the Communist party. They knew that the formula which had been valid before the first world war remained so: that Russian rule, despite its restrictions, was preferable to the hand of the Turk. The demand for Kars and Ardahan was even on this occasion supported by Dashnaktsutiun, whose leaders, convinced that on this occasion the USSR was acting in the fullest interests of the Armenians, were prepared to abandon their anti-Soviet stance and support the demand. (Indeed the Dashnaks went further and demanded the full retrocession to Soviet Armenia of President Wilson's award of November 1920.)

            Throughout the summer months of 1945 Armenian organisations delivered a flood of petitions to the Big Three, demanding the annexation of Kars and Ardahan to Soviet Armenia. But some of their agitation was unwittingly counter-productive. On 11 July a letter appeared in the New York Times from Leon Surmelian, the author and translator, which contained a sentence which was to be picked up by the British Foreign Office and used as evidence against the Soviet claim: 'The fortress of Kars is strategically indispensable to the Soviet Union.'⁶⁶ In the context of Surmelian's entire letter it was clear that he was saying that the fortress was indispensable as a defensive fortification – the classic view of military geographers from Beaujour onwards. Yet the British Foreign Office took this one sentence out of its context, and flashed it around as a typical 'Red scare', thereby, as so often in the past, creating an atmosphere antipathetic to Armenian claims.

            At the Potsdam Conference (17 July–2 August), which mapped out post-war Europe, Molotov formally raised the question of the USSR obtaining Kars and Ardahan; but Churchill refused to accept any frontier rectification. Truman, for his part, believed that it was a matter for Turkey and the USSR to solve bilaterally.⁶⁷

            Turkey was in a flattened and dejected state at this time. Her leaders were convinced that she would lose territory to the USSR. The war of nerves intensified in late 1945, with reports of Soviet troop movements along the Turkish border. On 6 January 1946 the Turkish prime minister, Sarajoglu, made a public response to the demands: 'Not one Armenian lives in those regions.'⁶⁸ It is a reply which had been heard many times before in Young Turk and Kemalist circles, quite often issuing from the very people who had contrived to make sure that there were no Armenians living in the districts. Yet on this occasion it was an assertion taken seriously, at least in the Foreign Office by the 1940s equivalents of D'Arcy Godolphin Osborne, Geoffrey L. McDermott and W. S. Edmonds, whose minutes display the immutable legacy of Palmerstonian pro-Turkishness. They and their colleagues saw no Armenian claims.

            Perhaps, of all the sophistries which shaped British policy in opposing the Armenian claims to the districts, the Foreign Office's most sweeping misconception was that the treaty of Kars (which had established the border in

 

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1921) was a 'freely negotiated' treaty.⁶⁹ Only an arid legalist could possibly accept that view. There was nothing freely negotiated about the Kars treaty, least of all as far as the Armenians were concerned (see above, pp. 329–30). The partiality and inaccuracy of Foreign Office views on Kars and Ardahan were summed up in a speech delivered in the House of Commons by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin on 21 February 1946:

 

            In the case of the two provinces, as I understand it from what I have read, the frontier between Turkey and Russia was fixed, not by conqueror and vanquished, but by defeated Turkey and an unfortunate Russia which had not come too well out of the last war through no fault of her own. Therefore this cannot be said to be an imposed frontier. There is the point of view of the people living in the provinces, but as far as I can study it, there has been such movement of population that there is no nationality problem at all.⁷⁰

 

            This far from confident passage was the subject of a trenchant memorandum from the great orientalist Professor V. Minorsky, living in retirement in Cambridge, which was passed on to Bevin by the admirably open-minded new Member of Parliament, Tom Driberg.⁷¹ Minorsky noted that 'It appears that massacres give a claim to the heritage of massacred persons.' He added:

 

            It is an astonishing coincidence that Hitler (evidence produced in Nuremberg) suggested that the extermination of enemy races could be carried out with impunity in view of human forgetfulness: 'Who does now remember the Armenians' – were the Führer's ipsissima verba.

            Now we have lived to hear in the British parliament that there is 'no nationality problem' in Armenia.

 

            However, both Foreign Office and foreign secretary remained as adamant as Abdul Hamid in not recognising any Armenian claims.

            As after the first world war, the critical time when alliances were fluid, and when international borders could be shifted with comparative ease, was coming to an end, and the sever hostile post-war pattern was emerging. In February 1946 Churchill made his famous Iron Curtain speech at Fulton, Missouri. Greece was tense, and about to explode into civil war. The cold war had begun, and Western statesmen showed even less ability than usual to distinguish the legitimate national aspirations of much-wronged people from Soviet expansionism.

            In April 1947 President Truman enunciated his famous 'Truman Doctrine', that the United States would go to the aid of any non-Communist country threatened by Soviet pressure. This effectively spelt the end of Armenia's post-war hopes for Kars and Ardahan. In the following month US Secretary of State Dean Acheson received an Armenian delegation, and indicated to them

 

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that from the point of view of the United States, in the current international situation, no change in the status of Kars and Ardahan could be considered.⁷²

            At the same time as the agitation for the additional territory, there was (as the Catholicos's letter to Stalin indicated) a drive for Armenian 'repatriation'. In fact it was settlement rather than repatriation, since most of those who went to Soviet Armenia were refugees from Western Armenia or Cilicia. From all over the Middle East, from Europe and from the USA, Armenians flocked to Soviet Armenia during 1945–8. An estimated 150,000 settled there in that period. (Of those, several thousands went from Turkey, saying that they had no equal rights and no work, a natural response to the capital levy racket.⁷³) Were they, too, part of a Soviet expansionist master plan, a plan to fill Armenia with Armenians so that pressure for wider borders would be more compelling? In a narrow sense, probably, but in the broader Armenian national sense (and the frustration felt by minority exile people, most of whom had been driven from their native homes and had become refugees), they were acting in their national interest, which happened to coincide with Stalin's designs.

            Complex problems beset those Armenians who emigrated to Soviet Armenia, although their settlement was eased by an interest-free loan of 30,000 roubles. The process of social and political integration was far from easy. One well known story runs as follows: an Armenian from Iran decided to repatriate to Soviet Armenia, and agreed to inform his family back home about conditions there by the simple scheme of sending a photograph of himself. If he was pictured standing up, all was fine; if sitting down, things were not so good. His family received a photo of him lying on the floor.

            Moreover, Stalinist paranoia hovered in the air, occasionally striking – as in 1949, when, on suspicion of 'nationalism', thousands of Armenians were rounded up and deported to the Altai region of the USSR.⁷⁴ The relief felt in Armenia on the death of Stalin was palpable; 1953, in that sense, was a key date in the emergence of Soviet Armenia not only as a land of workers and peasants, but of tourists, relatives, and of many contacts with the non-Communist world.

 

 

Armenians in the Arab World

 

Before the first world war a number of Armenians had established themselves in the Arab world. The Armenian community clustered around the patriarchate of Jerusalem had existed from pre-Arab times. The seat of the Armenian Catholics had been established at Bzommar, Mount Lebanon, in 1742. The Armenian family of Nubar had distinguished itself in the government of Egypt in the late nineteenth century. And the first and last governors of independent Mount Lebanon, Daud Pasha (1861–8) and Ohannes Pasha Kuyumjian (1912–15) were both Armenian Catholics. Besides these, there were numerous Armenian trading communities, notably in Egypt, Iraq and northern Syria.

 

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            Some months before the conclusion of the first world war Sherif Hussein of Mecca issued an edict requesting the protection and support of those Armenians who had been driven into the desert. It was expressed in magnanimous terms, and quoted the koran.⁷⁵ This mood of Arab hospitality and concerned interest lasted even when the Armenian presence in the Levant was much increased after the French withdrawal from Cilicia. In the words of British Consul E. C. Hole:

 

            When Cilicia was abandoned by the French, a large number of Armenian refugees found their way to Damascus and were on the whole well treated. Municipal ground was given to them for settlement, and a certain amount of public hospitality – possibly voluntary – was shown them by the community.⁷⁶

 

            The size of the community throughout the region meant that it became a political entity; and naturally the Armenians transported their political affiliations with them. In this way the Arab world became the authentic successor to Western (Turkish) Armenia as the repository of Armenian identity, and social and cultural organisation. Beirut succeeded Constantinople as the capital of the Western Armenians. (The only communities to rival those of Syria and Lebanon in this respect are those of Boston or California, but these are, despite their large numbers, too thinly spread and too far from their homeland seriously to contest those of the Levant.)

            The European mandatory powers saw the Armenians as a community which they could use to secure their shaky and resented authority. Armenians were offered Lebanese citizenship in August 1924, largely with the intention of bolstering the Christian community against the nationalism which the Muslims manifested. In Syria, the French drafted seasoned Armenian fighters into levies for suppressing the Druze revolt (1925–7).

            But Arabs are not Turks, and Armenians soon realised they should work with, rather than against, their new hosts. Consul Hole, in the despatch quoted above, noted that the Armenians were voting for Arab nationalist parties by 1928. It was there that their long-term interests lay, rather than with the transitory commercialised French administration. The more politically sensitive Armenians saw too the parallel between their history and that of the Arabs under the Ottoman Turks, and many more noted that the Arab temperament differed from the Turkish – it was for the most part sunny and warm and tolerant.

            Considering that, in the 1920s, the Arab countries were undeveloped, and that land and resources were at a premium, the relatively easy manner in which the Armenians were absorbed is remarkable. The Arabs were really the first people actually to do anything for the Western Armenians since the emergence of the 'Armenian question'; they enabled them to build up their lives after three decades of massacre, war and chronic instability. After the mendacity and

 

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deceit of the European nations it was left to the Syrians and Lebanese to provide living space, security and the essentials of life for Armenians.

            Lebanon, itself a country of minorities, became the land in which Armenians established themselves in greatest strength. They soon constituted, as they do today, about 6 per cent of the population. They were given their first seat in the confessionally organised Lebanese Parliament in 1934, and their representation there steadily rose until they were allocated five seats in the expanded 99-man chamber in 1960. In 1958 they were granted government ministries. Their record, in Parliament and government, has been beneficent towards their new country, and they have from time to time taken up causes which benefited the country generally without specific reference to their own community.⁷⁷

            Nevertheless, it has to be said that the Armenian sections of each Lebanese election have been marked by corruption, which has sometimes become electoral fraud.

            Until the recent (and continuing) catastrophe in Lebanon, elections, and the political power gained through them, were a matter more of interest than policy. Each election saw a bewildering series of alliances between groups who were prima facie hostile. In this situation Armenian allegiances were a blend, the greater part of which consisted of their own Armenian party loyalties (which often had international ramifications vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, or the interests of the great powers in the Middle East), and the lesser part of which was local Lebanese loyalties. In this matter Armenians were not in any way acting unpatriotically towards their land of refuge, since the native Arab Lebanese themselves put a lower priority on Lebanese national affairs, putting their own clans above everything else. Despite Lebanese independence in 1943, Lebanon has never been a unitary, independent state, as the recent and devastating civil war has shown. There has never been a Lebanese nationalism to act as a unifying force against sectarian divisiveness, which has had such tragic results.

            From the Lebanese elections of 1943 onwards, the international dimension of the Armenian voting pattern has been clear. In that year, following the rapprochement of the Dashnaks with the Soviet Union after the battle of Stalingrad, the Hunchaks and the Dashnaks united against the Ramkavar candidates; but in 1947, after the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, the Dashnaks stood on their own, as strongly pro-'Western'. The Hunchaks and Ramkavars combined to present an alternative policy, labelled Bolshevik by their opponents. In the bitter days of the cold war, the divisions within the Armenian community were profound. The elections of 1947 set the pattern; only one party received official support, and the other candidates withdrew at 10.30 a.m. The Ramkavar paper Zartonk commented bitterly on the outcome.⁷⁸

            In the early 1950s the Dashnaks strengthened their ideological commitment to the United States. The party joined the 'Paris Bloc', and its members broadcast to Soviet Armenia from the Munich-based Radio Liberty. Both in

 

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the Middle East and the United States they conducted a campaign against their Armenian rivals.

            With the split in the Armenian Church of 1956, the Lebanese elections of 1957 were conducted in a state of near hysteria. Battles developed between opposing factions in the Armenian quarters of Beirut. As in 1947, only one party received the backing of the police. No one was surprised by the result.⁷⁹

            The same pattern was apparent in the following year, when the first Lebanese civil war took place. Armenians had their own civil strife after the conclusion of the main war: in late November 1958 there was a vicious outbreak of bloodletting, in which over 50 Armenians were killed in Bourdj Hammoud and Nahr areas of Beirut. National and international tensions had combined to reduce Armenian intra-communal relations to the bullet and the knife.⁸⁰

            At about this time the Dashnaks formed close alliances with the Lebanese Maronite parliamentary groupings of the Kataib (Phalangists) of Pierre Gemayel, and the National Liberals (Ahrar) of Camille Chamoun. The Hunchaks for their part affiliated to Kemal Jumblatt's Progressive Socialist Party. It is hard to see if any benefit accrued to the Armenian community as a whole as a result of these moves. Were the Ramkavars, for all their caution and inertia, by not participating in activist politics the repository of Armenian political wisdom?

            The Dashnaks remained close to the Americans in their political thinking for much of the 1960s; but with the 1967 Middle Eastern war, which signalled a radically new political map in the area and the end of direct American tactics in Lebanon, they moved to a more middle-ground position. All Armenian groups realised that a new period of crisis and instability was inevitable, and that protection of their own communities should come before the intellectual enticements of international politics.

            This attitude was reinforced by the Lebanese civil war of 1976–7, in which Armenians of all factions remained neutral, a move which proved its benefit in the relatively small number of casualties in the war. It was a move which embittered the right-wing Maronite militias (who are said to have counted upon Dashnak support), but which again proved absolutely right when one sees the incapacity of the Maronites to think realistically in political terms for the future of Lebanon.

            Besides Lebanon, Armenians are scattered around the Middle East, but nowhere else are they sufficiently numerous to constitute a significant political force. In Syria their presence is strong around Aleppo, and in the clutch of villages along the border with the sanjak of Alexandretta. Currently they have one member in the Syrian Parliament, Krikor Eblighatian. In Egypt, the community is proportionately too small to be of any political significance.

            Communal politics and political alignments are only one way of looking at the Armenian presence in the Middle East. The part that they play in the

 

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professional life of their new countries is another aspect of it, one which is proportionately greater than their numbers. Throughout the region one finds Armenians as doctors, pharmacists, engineers, lecturers and artists (both in painting and music). Their role in keeping commerce, industry and the arts flourishing in the area is considerable.

            As regards the central Middle East problem, the Arab–Israeli conflict, most Armenians keep a cautious neutrality, which if anything slightly favours the Arab side – where after all most of them live. They have seldom, if ever, shown any real enthusiasm for Zionism, except for those who confuse in their emotions Turks and Arabs. Several hundreds were forced to flee from Palestine in the war of 1948–9; others lost property and businesses. They were of the wrong race to fit into the Procrustean bed of Zionist ideology, and were more at home in the ordinary, tapestry-like life of the real Middle East. And being themselves an indigenous people made homeless by political Turkism, some have a measure of sympathy for those dispossessed by political Zionism. When they have put forward ideas for a solution of the Middle East conflict, they have nearly always supported the United Nations position as put forward in Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

 

 

Conflicts in the Armenian Church: the Cilician Catholicosate and Jerusalem

 

The conflict over the Armenian catholicosate of Cilicia (situated at Antilias, Lebanon) is, despite its ecclesiastical garb and reference to theological precedent, essentially political in nature, or at least in origin.

            There have been two catholicoses – the word 'catholicoi' is a spurious classicism – in the Armenian Church since 1441. Until then the seat of the Catholicos had been determined by political and social phenomena; but in 1441, when the supreme patriarch resided at Sis, Cilicia, there was a move among sections of the clergy to reconsecrate Echmiadzin, the site of St Gregory the Illuminator's original vision, as the spiritual centre of the Armenian Church. But the Catholicos declined to move to Echmiadzin; so an assembly proceeded to elect and consecrate a new Catholicos there. In the following centuries there was little conflict between the two, except over minor matters of personal vanity. It became recognised that Echmiadzin had jurisdiction over Greater Armenia, and Sis over Cilicia and the Levant. Echmiadzin was recognised as the primal Armenian see, and the Catholicos who resided there had the title 'Catholicos of All Armenians'; but he had no actual rights to intervene in matters under the jurisdiction of the 'Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia'.⁸¹

            Until 1956 there were no fundamental disagreements between the two. It should be noted that both catholicoses are elected by a conclave of laymen and priests. (Indeed it is the democratic nature of the Armenian Church which makes it possible for divisions to occur.) Since political affiliations determine such a wide range of communal activities for Armenians, the members of the

 

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conclaves naturally voted in accordance with their political beliefs. Thus in 1943, when Garegin Hovsepiants was elected Cilician Catholicos, none of the parties raised any objection to his candidature, since there was at the time a united Armenian front. When Garegin died in 1952 the situation was very different: the cold war had sunk its icy blade into the Armenian community; moves which had been afoot in 1945–6 to re-unite the parts of the Church which had been virtually separate since the murder of Archbishop Ghevond Tourian in 1933 had come to an abrupt end. And one dedicated Dashnak party member was to note at about that time: 'An aggressive Dashnak electorate which could conceivably win the catholicosate of Sis (Antilias) would emasculate the power – political or otherwise – of Echmiadzin.'⁸²

            The date for the election of the new Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia was set for 14 February 1956.⁸³ A fortnight beforehand the Catholicos of All Armenians, Vazgen I, who had been elected in September 1954, announced that he was coming to Lebanon to attend the Cilician election. This was an unprecedented move, and not strictly justified canonically. Pro-'Western' observers simply saw it as Soviet intervention. But this is an over-simplification. It had become clear that the new Cilician Catholicos would most likely be the nominee of Dashnaktsutiun. About two-thirds of the fifty-man Cilician electorate were Dashnak supporters. With such an election at such a time, the Armenian Church, a vital force for her people scattered throughout the world, would be irremediably split, not on doctrinal matters, nor even on matters of jurisdiction (although this would become a problem), but purely as a result of the international hostility generated by the cold war. Vazgen I travelled to Beirut to try to avoid that split.

            At the same time it has to be said that a number of Diaspora Armenians simply did not want the ultimate authority of their Church to reside inside the Soviet Union, where there was always the possibility – indeed likelihood – of state manipulation. With the Dashnak party's espousal of the Western camp in the cold war, this aspiration could receive satisfaction. Until the second world war the Soviet record towards Echmiadzin had been a bleak one: the catholicosate had been left empty for long periods, and Catholicos Khoren had been murdered during the purges of 1938. It did not take much to shift the adherence of members of Dashnaktsutiun away from the catholicosate of Echmiadzin.

            Vazgen I arrived in Lebanon on 12 February 1956. So profound were the issues involved in the election that it was postponed for a week, to 20 February. One of the matters which was uppermost in the minds of those who sought to keep the Church united was the position of the lay delegates from Aleppo. One-fifth of these (who numbered 15 in all – sufficient to tip the balance) had to be re-elected in communal elections every two years, according to the Armenian National Constitution of 1863. No communal elections had been held in Syria since 1953, during the rule of Adib Shishakly, who had been overthrown in a coup in 1954.

 

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            The Syrian government, whose intervention demonstrated the seriousness of the affair, now indicated that, therefore, the credentials of the Aleppine delegates were invalid; and on 17 February the Syrian foreign minister, Said Ghazzi, travelled to Beirut to confer with the Lebanese prime minister, Rashid Karameh, concerning the election. He suggested its postponement. The position of the delegates from Aleppo remained unchanged.

            No compromise could be found, and so, with the matter unresolved, Catholicos Vazgen flew on to Cairo.

            The election took place on 20 February; Bishop Zareh Payaslian was legitimately elected by 32 votes out of 36 voting; the other 14 had withdrawn from the election.

            Vazgen I, who had been warmly welcomed on his arrival in Cairo by President Nasser, called an assembly of 16 bishops there, which condemned the recent election as 'defective'; but no formula could be found to resolve the difference between the parties. The consecration of the new Catholicos – a ceremony more akin to an enthronement – took place on 2 September. Traditionally three bishops have to be present at this ceremony; but only two were willing to attend, Khoren Paroyan and Ghevond Chebeyan. So a third was delegated by the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch (whose theology is very close to that of the Armenians), in the person of Mar Severios Yacoub. Present at the ceremony were leading Lebanese figures.

            Attempts to heal the breach between the two sees have, to date, not been successful. The Cilician see adopted a new constitution after 1956, which laid down that if a diocese hitherto under the jurisdiction of Echmiadzin desired to become attached to Antilias, it would be accepted by it. To Echmiadzin this was expansionist interference, at variance with the traditions of the relationships between the two sees. The dioceses which have thereby come under the jurisdiction of Antilias are Greece and the three Iranian diocese of Tabriz, Tehran and Isfahan, as well as sections of the Church in North America and Kuwait.

            The whole affair has the stamp of the cold war upon it, and once again one feels that the fragile barque, the Armenian people and its Church, has had needlessly to suffer indignity and affliction. Whatever views are held on Soviet Communism, no one can physically shift Echmiadzin out of the USSR, and to pretend otherwise is to produce an inevitable split, with its attendant communal weakness. Moreover, it is hardly possible today to sustain the claim that the Armenian priests an bishops loyal to Echmiadzin are agents of Soviet Communism; their supreme pontiff, Vazgen I, is too independent-minded and altogether of too noble a cast of mind to permit such a thing to happen. Most Armenians, although recognising the part politics play in all Armenian affairs, try nevertheless to minimise their part in the Church.

            The Middle East correspondent of The Times (London) commented:

 

There seems little doubt that the rank-and-file of Armenians in the Middle

 

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East are opposed to the Dashnak policy of involving the Church in political movements, and there is wide dissatisfaction at the election last year of a new Catholicos who was a Dashnak candidate and is alleged to have been 'railroaded' in with the support of the Americans in both Church and government, as well as the Roman Catholic Church and the Lebanese government.⁸⁴

 

            With the election in 1977 of Garegin II as co-adjutor Catholicos to the ailing Khoren I of Antilias, there is hope that a way will be found out of the impasse, since he has undertaken a review of the articles in the Cilician constitution which permit it to expand its jurisdiction. Garegin II is likewise a man of strong and independent mind, with a deep and broad understanding of his people's history and destiny.

 

The conflict over the patriarchate of Jerusalem is more curious; distressing to Armenians, especially to those who see in, say, Khrimian Hairik the model of an Armenian church and community leader. In the mid-1950s there was a conflict for the patriarchate between Bishop (later Archbishop) Yeghishe Derderian and Archbishop Tiran Nersoyan, which appeared to end with the latter being elected as patriarch of Jerusalem in March 1957.⁸⁵

            But on 30 August 1958, as the patriarch was in procession to the Tomb of Mary in Jerusalem to celebrate the Assumption, he was kidnapped by Jordanian soldiers, and at once put on a plane to Beirut, without even his passport or a change of clothing. We can only guess what political and personal motives led to this action.⁸⁶

            The Armenian patriarchate of Jerusalem remained vacant until March 1960, when a new election was scheduled to take place, with the elderly, frail Suren Kemhadjian as the only candidate. But again political and personal matters intervened, and the election did not take place. Only on 5 April 1960 did it occur, when the brothers were compelled at the gunpoint of the Jordanian army to elect Archbishop Derderian locum tenens of the patriarchate. Two months later he was elected patriarch, and consecrated to the office in August of that year.⁸⁷

            The un-ecclesiastical nature of circumstances surrounding the election distressed many Armenians, as did the attempted sale in 1967 of 23 important illuminated Gospel manuscripts from the treasury of the patriarchate, with an estimated value of £300,000–£500,000. Those with a historical perspective may be forgiven for wondering whether manuscripts from the Varak monastery would ever, during Khrimian's time, have appeared in the sale-rooms of Europe.

 

 

The Transformation

 

The greatest cause for pride among Armenians – a pride sorely needed after the cataclysm of death and disaster earlier in the century – has without doubt

 

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been the development of Soviet Armenia since 1953, and more especially in the relaxation which followed the Twentieth Party Congress of the CPSU, held in February 1956. One of the earliest indications that the ice of Stalinism was breaking was a speech delivered by Anastas Mikoyan in Yerevan in March 1954, in which he rehabilitated, besides certain nineteenth-century Armenian nationalist writers, the great poet Yeghishe Charents. Mikoyan said, 'The works of Charents, which are outstanding in their great talent, are steeped with revolutionary pathos and Soviet patriotism, and must become the property of the Soviet reader.'⁸⁸ Other writers, purged for their nationalism in the 1930s, were rehabilitated too.

            Yerevan was substantially rebuilt in 1956, so that it became a well-laid-out city of wide avenues. In the central square the architect consciously copied the motifs of the medieval Armenian stone-masons, so as to stress the continuity of the Armenian cultural heritage. (Some critics, however, hold that the designs and their embellishments are a trifle laborious and academic.) At about the same time the authorities permitted the building of two impressive monuments which related to the pre-Soviet period of Armenia. One was the sombre memorial, on the outskirts of Yerevan, to the victims of the 1915–16 genocide, which, in its stark simplicity, cannot leave the visitor unmoved. The other is a relief-sculpture recalling the battle of Sardarabad (modern Hoktemberian).

            Both memorials were a significant concession to the awareness of all Armenians of the critical events in their modern history which have shaped their destiny, but which fall outside the straitjacket of Marxist economic historiography. (And let us remember the large part played by the Dashnaks at the battle of Sardarabad.) Both, too, have contributed to the friendly feeling which Armenians in the dispersion (many of whose families were savagely cut down at that time) feel towards Soviet Armenia.

            Within Soviet Armenia there exists perhaps the most thriving, vigorous and open society anywhere in the Communist world. A small country, with a population of just under three million, its economic performance can today compare with that of advanced industrialised nations of similar size. It also has a flourishing cultural and scientific life. In the visual arts, paintings whose inspiration is far from dull political conformity can frequently be seen in the art galleries; and in opera, ballet, drama and cinema there is an exuberance of expression which would surprise those who are conditioned by sterile anti-Sovietism. Armenians are also very proud of possessing, since 1943, their own Academy of Sciences; attached to it is the Biurakan Observatory, which is directed by the internationally renowned astrophysicist Viktor Hambartsumian.

            There are, however, a handful of 'dissidents' in Soviet Armenia. They highlight abuses within the country, and there is no doubt that their allegations are of substance. They charge the regime with holding political prisoners, and with harassment of citizens. They also complain that the authorities give precedence to Russian over Armenian as an official language, and give greater

 

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support to Russian schools than to Armenian. (Shades of Prince Golitsyn!) But the complaint upon which the Yerevan Helsinki Monitoring Group lays greatest stress is the refusal of the USSR to pursue the legitimate claims of the Armenian people against Turkey. In other words, the heart of Armenian dissidence is the powerful and insistent complaint of Armenians throughout the world against the Turks; only in a secondary manner is it against the Russians.⁸⁹

            This impression is borne out by making the comparison, which Armenians have made since 1828, between Turkish and Russian treatment of their people. Of course, today there is but the barest handful of Armenians in Turkish Armenia. So Turkey's problem, inasmuch as it is unencumbered with people, is altogether lighter. But even where a sizeable concentration of Armenians exists, in Istanbul, the harassment and systematic anti-minority measures of the Turkish government make Soviet Armenia appear a free society by comparison. The community of Istanbul is hemmed in by bureaucratic restrictions and constraints. For instance, Armenians in Istanbul have to receive official permission even to put a coat of paint on their schools. If this is given at all, it is given tardily and lethargically, by which time the fabric of the school has deteriorated, presumably to the satisfaction of the authorities who, like their late-Ottoman predecessors, appear to detest ethnic diversity and aim to see even the tiny remnant of Armenians in the former imperial capital turned into Turks.

            Within Soviet Armenia the hostility towards Turkey remains, and the sense of grievance and injustice at the hands of the Turks. It is, however, concerned not with the minor details of the community in Istanbul, but with the wider issues. Sometimes this sentiment boils over in a manner which is embarrassing to the Soviet authorities. One such occasion was the gigantic demonstration in Yerevan on 24 April 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide. This was perhaps the largest genuinely popular demonstration that USSR has ever seen, and it expressed fury and resentment towards Turkey. Over and over again the participants shouted, 'We want our lands!' Disturbances occurred in the evening, and as a result the First Secretary of the Communist party was replaced. There is little question that the hostility of the people of Soviet Armenia towards Turkey is far greater than any resentment that they feel towards Moscow.

            Where there is grievance in Soviet Armenia (and this is another point raised by the Helsinki Monitoring Group), it is not against Moscow's authority per se as against the refusal of the authorities to grant Mountainous Karabagh, whose population is 85 per cent Armenian, to Armenia, rather than leaving it with the status that it has today, that of an autonomous region within Soviet Azerbaijan. As recently as October 1977, a leading member of the Armenian Communist party and of the Soviet Writers' Union, Sero Khanzatian, wrote a strongly worded letter to President Brezhnev putting forward the arguments for Karabagh to become Armenian. Really, it is only the Communist authorities'

 

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conservative fear of the unknown outcome of altering internal national boundaries which is preventing Karabagh from becoming part of Armenia. (The only argument of any substance for maintaining the status quo is that the mountainous region is used as summer pasture for the transhumant Azeri shepherds, but this is not an objection which can be seriously sustained, since there is no reason why Soviet Armenian authorities in Karabagh would not continue to grant them their traditional summer grazing rights.) Armenians also feel that they have had a raw deal over the Nakhichevan enclave, which became an 'autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic' administered as part of Azerbaijan, virtually at the dictation of the Turks in the discussions leading to the treaty of Moscow in 1921. (Turkey's continuing interest in Nakhichevan is signalled by the fact that in the 1930s she altered her frontier with Iran, exchanging small areas of territory, so that she would have a directly contiguous frontier with Nakhichevan, even though it was only a few kilometres wide.) There is not an Armenian majority in Nakhichevan today, or anything like one: but the region was taken from Armenia after the local Azeris had killed off, under the direction of Turkish officers, hundreds of Armenians in the summer of 1919 and the spring of 1920; the region was thereupon assigned to Azerbaijan for little other reason than appeasement of the Turks.

            Periodically hopes have been raised among Armenians that the status of Karabagh and Nakhichevan would 'shortly' be altered in their favour, but these hopes have always been disappointed.

            Yet despite its internal and external problems Soviet Armenia contrives to be a flourishing and relatively prosperous society, with a quality of openness to confound those who think of the USSR as a huge prison camp. Without doubt this is largely due to a universal Armenian determination to snatch a human victory out of the catastrophe of the beginning of the century, and to heal the wounds with a tangible success; to see smiles on the faces of the new generation, instead of just hearing of the tortured anguish of the old. It is also due to the fact that Armenians in Soviet Armenia have plentiful contacts with their kinsmen outside Hayots Ashkharh – the land of Armenia. A number of those who immigrated to Armenia in 1946–9 left behind relatives, especially in the Arab countries of the East Mediterranean. Visits from Armenians of the ëspiurk (dispersion) are a commonplace, and mean that Armenia is very far from a hermetic Soviet republic. The flow of ideas is two-way, and life-styles in Armenia – at least in Yerevan – show considerable similarity to urban manners in Europe or North America. (Every Armenian male who can get into them wears a pair of blue jeans.)

            Since the flow of ideas is two-way, the direction of criticism extends both in and out of Armenia. Soviet Armenians can look at those of the world-wide communities and say, 'We have survived on the soil of Armenia; are you going to sell out your identity, language and culture to the inert capitalist conformism of "the West"?' The criticism of Armenians from the Middle East, Europe and America of Armenia are even more valuable, and have undoubtedly also led to

 

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the comparatively free and relaxed society enjoyed in Soviet Armenia, where the grimmer aspects of totalitarianism are for the most part absent. (There seems little doubt that of the critics of Soviet Armenia Dashnaktsutiun is taken seriously – where its criticism is constructive, which for the past ten years or so it has been.) The support of Armenians across the globe is felt to be important in Yerevan, not with the intention of turning every Armenian into a Soviet agent, but merely so that Armenians abroad will take a balanced view of the USSR and of Soviet Armenia in particular. And he would be a cynical and embittered Armenian today who did not feel a measure of pride in the society which has been established in Soviet Armenia.

 

 

Ëspiurk

 

Although the subject of the growth and development of the Armenian communities outside Armenia is one of great interest, it is one which I have deliberately avoided. The central issue for Armenia is the land itself. The world-wide communities have only been discussed where they directly reflected the political problems of the land. Nevertheless, Armenians far from their homeland have an ability to prosper, and to remain Armenian, which adds up to a national characteristic, if such a thing exists.

            Whether they have emigrated freely or under duress, a pattern of expatriate activity is noticeable among them. First, they build a church (or two churches), then a school, and then a community centre. They seldom just disappear into the hinterland of their adopted countries, and then only in pursuit of the glamorous false gods of acceptability and stifling middle-class 'respectability'. (The first sign is the abandonment of a robust Armenian name for an anaemic local one.) More often they celebrate the fact of being Armenian, whether in poetry, drama, dance, music, or even in making interminable speeches. One cannot fail to be struck by the fact that, although to born Armenian is not to have the blessings of life automatically bestowed upon one, Armenians themselves treat it as a cause for joy, and something that is in a most profound manner worth preserving.

            Only advocates of sterile conformity and heavy-fisted rulers who have disfigured the history of the world would dispute that ethnic diversity is something in itself worth preserving, which enhances the civilisation in which it occurs. But nevertheless in the societies of Europe and America, with their subtle and insidious pressures to conform, it is not easy to remain Armenian, and to bequeath such a legacy to the next generation. Amongst other qualities, it requires a vivid historical imagination to recreate the life in the 'old country', and to perceive its validity; to discover the constant thread of existence amid the fire and wreckage of history. Luckily there is a network of Armenian societies and cultural foundations throughout the world dedicated both to caring for dispersed sons and daughters of Armenia, and to preserving their

 

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image. The most important of them are Dashnaktsutiun, a political, social and cultural organisation of immense vitality, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union, with headquarters in New York.

            Another quality about the Armenian dispersion is that, given a reasonable opportunity, they make good, and emerge from tin-shack poverty to professional status in a remarkably short time. A study of the 25,000-strong community in Montreal (to take just one example), almost all of whom arrived after the second world war, largely from the Middle Eat and Greece, would show that very few indeed are without a responsible and significant profession. Even where opportunities are far fewer, such as in a Third World country like Syria, the qualities of industry, thrift and preparedness to learn new techniques, mean that here too a man, even if he only mends kerosene stoves, will not go without the essentials of life, and will be able to provide a start which he did not have for the new generation.

            'New generation' (nor serount) are the key words in any Armenian community of the dispersion. There is ambivalence towards the young ones: on the one hand there is delight at seeing smiles and laughter, instead of misery and hollow-eyed starvation, and at witnessing achievement and self-reliance after destitution and dependence on charity; but there is also the doubt, that the new generation away from Armenia will not grow up Armenian, or disappear as completely as those Polish Armenians who, having fled there after the fall of Ani and maintained their identity for five centuries, converted to Roman Catholicism in the sixteenth century and vanished from history. Perhaps only in Armenia itself can Armenians be sure of continuing to exist as an identifiable people; but even amid the pressures of Europe and America it is possible for the new generation to remain Armenian, if they retain their language and an understanding of their own history, and if above all they are bold enough to confront the majority – at best indifferent, at worst chauvinistically hostile – with the conviction that to be Armenian is something to be proud of. Survival of any minority depends first and foremost on an attitude of mind; even language and cultural awareness are secondary. Thus the communities have it in their power to keep the new generation Armenian, as long as they are not seduced by the materialist aspects of Western society, which have the power to stifle any vivid and interesting distinctions among citizens; as long as they themselves resolve not to disappear.

 

 

Towards Restitution

 

During the last thousand years – between a half and a third of the period of their residence in their highlands – the suffering and dislocation of the Armenians has only been matched by their persistence in sticking to their land. Much of this dislocation has been part of the ebb and flow of historical events – the rise and collapse of empires, the fury and vanity of power – for

 

[Page 376]

 

which no blame can be apportioned today. But in this century, especially since the first world war, a new type of discourse has developed; ideas have gained currency that not brute force alone, but that the rights of the ordinary people, too, should be taken into account. At the time when these ideas were being enthusiastically formulated, the Armenians were enduring some of their worst onslaughts. It does not take much insight to realise that Armenians have had very little of the justice and rights that have been talked about in our century.

            So, what can be done? Very little, it would seem. The Soviet Union has given repeated assurances to Turkey that she has no territorial claims against her. The dream of Kars, Van and Moush becoming Armenian again in the near future would seem to be unrealistic, let alone the whole of 'Wilson Armenia' of the treaty of Sèvres. Naturally these are things that Armenians continue to strive for in the long term: what, after all, is it to be kicked out of your land for 60 years, when you have lived there, in many cases as a majority, for two and half millennia? But even the most ardent nationalist is aware that international considerations mean that no solution is possible in the foreseeable future.

            Nevertheless, there are, I believe, two things which could be done without any embarrassment to the respective parties, yet which would constitute a small but significant restitution for the tragic events which the Armenian nation suffered in the early part of this century. In the first place, Turkey should acknowledge what the former regime did to Armenians. At the moment both the Turkish government and Turkish universities, together with their Turkist supporters in other parts of the world, maintain a stony attitude of non-recognition towards the subject, and resort to strange sophistries to explain away uncomfortable facts. It would be good if they could display a little moral courage, and recognise what happened.

            In the second place, the frontier between Turkey and the USSR could be shifted slightly but very significantly. The uninhabited medieval city of Ani, at present situated exactly on the Turkish–Soviet border, could be restored to Armenia. The government of Soviet Armenia did hold talks with Turkish officials in 1968 concerning an exchange of Ani for one or two Azeri villages in the region of Mount Akbaba (in the north), but to my knowledge nothing came of the discussions. With a little international help, and an assurance that none of the parties involved would be losing any 'face', there is a chance that they might succeed. Ani is of no political or military significance to Turkey or to the NATO alliance (despite a set of meretricious articles which appeared in British national newspapers in October 1977 – another example of Turkism in action⁹⁰). It is, however, of profound historical significance to Armenians, and its restoration would go a tiny way to making amends for the vast sufferings of their people during the last hundred years.

 

Notes

 

1. Mary Kilbourne Matossian. The Imapct of Soviet Policies in Armenia (Leiden, 1962), p. 40.

2. Ibid., p. 115

 

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3. FO 371/7728.624.

4. Harold Buxton, Transcaucasia (London, 1926), p. 55.

5. Matossian, Soviet Policies, p. 50.

6. Ibid., p. 37.

7. Ibid., pp. 90–5; Buxton Transcaucasia, p. 57.

8. See Ararat (New York), vol. XX, no. 1 (Winter 1979), passim.

9. Matossian, Soviet Policies, pp. 102–8.

10. Ibid., pp. 113–14, 135–6.

11. Ibid., pp. 120–8.

12. Ibid., p. 161.

13. Ibid., p. 164.

14. FO 371/4174.88761.

15. Richard G. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, vol. I, The First Year, 1918–1919 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p. 420n; Oliver Baldwin, The Questing Beast (London, 1932), pp. 201–4.

16. Arshavir Shiragian, The Legacy: Memoirs of an Armenian Patriot (Boston, 1972), pp. 103–17.

17. Ibid., pp. 169–81.

18. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, loc. cit.; V. Minorsky, 'Turan', Encyclopedia of Islam, 1st edn (Leiden, 1934).

19. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, loc. cit.

20. The Times, 5 May 1922, p. 10.

21. Marjorie Housepian, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City (London, 1972).

22. Ibid., p. 51.

23. Turkey no. 1 (1923), pp. 178–308, especially 199 and 206–12.

24. Joseph C. Grew, Turbulent Era (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1953), vol. I, p. 531.

25. Treaty Series, no. 16 (1923), pp. 28–33.

26. Massis (London), vol. I, no. 2 (December 1928), p. 29.

27. FO 371/13827.6419.

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., enc.

30. A. Hourani, Syria and Lebanon: A Political Essay (London, 1946), p. 172.

31. Jean Mécérian, Le génocide du peuple arménien (Beirut, 1965), pp. 107–8; Christopher Walker, 'Lessons of Turkey's subtle land-grab'. The Times, 5 September 1974, p. 14.

32. J. Burtt, The People of Ararat (London, 1926), p. 119; Alexander Khatisian, Hayastani Hanrapetutian dsagumn ou zargatsumë (Beirut, 1968), p.. 369–70.

33. FO 371/12324.4934.

34. Fridtjof Nansen, Armenia and the Near East (London, 1928), p. 5.

35. Text in Burtt, The People of Ararat, pp. 172–8.

36. FO 371/12324.4934.

37. Burtt, The People of Ararat, p. 163.

38. FO 371/12324.4934.

39. Hansard, 5th series, Commons, vol. 213, col. 1423.

40. FO 371/13827.4911.

41. S. R. Harutiunian, Hai Zhoghovrdi Patmutiun (Yerevan, 1970), vol. 4, pp. 158–62.

42. Khatisian, Hayastani Hanrapetutian dsagumn ou zargatsumë, pp. 345–6.

43. Harutiunian, Hai Zhoghovrdi Patmutiun, loc. cit.

44. G. Aharonian, Meds Yerazi Jamboun vra (Beirut, 1964), p. 173.

45. See Gabriel Lazarian, Hayastan yev Hai date Hai-yev-Rus haraberutiunneru luisin tak (Cairo, 1957), p. 328; Aharonian, Meds Yerazi Jamboun vra, p. 182; Z. Avalishvili, 'From San Stefano to Batoum (1878–1921)', Caucasian Quarterly [issue 2, undated], p. 75, diary entry for 20 March 1921; personal interview with Shahan Natali, Boston, November 1971.

46. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Kurdistan and the Kurds (Prague and London, 1965), pp. 53–5.

47. The Times, 27 December 1933, p. 9.

48. Eugene Papazian, Inknakensagrutiun yev husher (Cairo, 1960), pp. 55–9.

49. Sarkis Atamian, The Armenian Community (New York, 1955), pp. 388–94.

50. Llewellyn Woodward, British Foreign Policy in the Second World War, vol. I (London, 1970), pp. 104, 110–12.

 

[Page 378]

 

51. FO 371/59246.2094; FO 371/48795.

52. Edjmiatsin, vol. I no. 1 (January 1944), pp. 4–5; personal information from Zaven M. Messerlian.

53. FO 371/27056.4328.

54. The Times, 19 July 1941, p. 5.

55. Personal information from various sources.

56. Woodward, British Foreign Policy, vol. I, pp. 25–7.

57. Alexander Henderson, 'The Pan-Turanian Myth in Turkey Today', Asiatic Review, vol. XLI, no. 145 (January 1945), pp. 88–92.

58. C. W. Hostler, Turkism and the Soviets (New York, 1957), p. 172.

59. FO 371/33376.5472.

60. See Lewis V. Thomas and R. N. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 96–7; FO 371/33389, FO 371/37399; FO 371/37404.

61. FO 371/33389.8681.

62. Thomas and Frye, United States and Turkey and Iran, p. 97.

63. FO 371/37404.5055.

64. Woodward, British Foreign Policy, vol. IV (1975), p. 207.

65. FO 371/59246.1320.

66. FO 371/59247.5532.

67. Woodward, British Foreign Policy, vol. IV (1975), p. 209.

68. Quoted in Zaven Messerlian, 'The Question of Kars and Ardahan', Armenian Studies (Beirut) (1973), p. 86.

69. FO 371/59246.2299, 3219.

70. Hansard, 5th series, Commons, vol. 419, col. 1355.

71. FO 371/59247.4551.

72. Messerlian, 'The Question of Kars and Ardahan', p. 88.

73. Personal communication with Zaven Messerlian, Beirut; also FO 371/59246.17662.

74. Aharonian, Meds Yerazi Jamboun vra, p. 273.

75. V. Melkonian, An Historical Glimpse of the Armenians in Iraq (Basra, 1957), p. 16.

76. FO 371/13096.5631.

77. See Zaven M. Messerlian, 'Armenian Representation in the Lebanese Parliament' (unpublished MA thesis, American University of Beirut, 1963), passim.

78. Quoted in ibid., p. 159.

79. Ibid., pp. 230ff.

80. Ibid., p. 262.

81. Avedis K. Sanjian, The Armenian Communities in Syria under Ottoman Dominion (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), pp. 226ff.

82. Atamian, The Armenian Community, p. 434.

83. On the crisis see Dickran Kouymdjian, 'The Recent Crisis in the Armenian Church' (unpublished MA thesis, American University of Beirut, 1961).

84. The Time, 4 October 1957, p. 9.

85. Armenian Mirror-Spectator (Watertown), 30 March 1957.

86. Ibid., 23 April 1960.

87. Ibid., 26 March 1960, 30 April 1960, 25 June 1960.

88. Matossian, Soviet Policies, p. 201.

89. Armenian Mirror-Spectator, 10 June 1978.

90. Financial Times, 11 October 1977; Daily Telegraph, 11 October 1977; The Times, 13 October 1977; The Guardian, 18 October 1977.

 

 

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