Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed Bedrossian: Hello everyone, and welcome to this kind of a different Conversations on Groong episode. We almost thought it was a Spotlight on Silence, but maybe you can decide and you can tell us which one it is. Armenia’s present political crisis is not limited to elections, arrests, or struggles between the government and the opposition. It also concerns memory, who may be remembered, which losses may be mourned, and which parts of Armenian history may remain visible in public life.
The removal of memorial images, pressure on expressions of nostalgia or attachments to Artsakh , and official efforts to redefine national loss raise a larger question. Is the Armenian state trying to control not only the political actions, but also the language, symbols, and emotions through which society understands and processes its past? This episode attempts to place those developments in a longer historical frame. On the 90th anniversary of Aghasi Khanjyan’s death, we examined the Great Purge in Soviet Armenia, the destruction of political and cultural figures, and the lasting weakness of public memory surrounding those events.
We then returned to modern Armenia and asked which comparisons are valid, which are not, and what the current concentration and patterns of political and economic force may mean for our country. For this, we are joined by our guest today, Dr. Pietro Shakarian, who is a professor and historian of the Soviet Union and Soviet Armenia. Hello, Pietro.
It’s always great to have you on our show.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Asbed, Hovik, thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure, as always.
Hovik Manucharyan: Welcome, Pietro. Before we turn to The Great Purge, let’s examine what is going on in Armenia now, today.
Hovik Manucharyan: Recently, a 10-year-old girl displaced from Artsakh, from Stepanakert, drew the iconic Grandma and Grandpa monument, a symbol of Artsakh, if not THE symbol of Artsakh. The administrator from the girls’ school in Yerevan removed it from an exhibition, from a school exhibition, and branded it as anti-state. You heard that right. Not a weapon, not a slogan, a child’s memory of home, her longing for her homeland.
Some will call this an act of one overzealous official, but when an official believes that censoring the displaced child will please those in power, and there are a lot of precedents for this type of action in Armenia today, the order does not need to be written, it does not need to be explicitly recited. The regime has already dictated that memory is forbidden. The girl’s teacher restored the painting and then resigned in disgust rather than remain in a school that treated the child this way and her expression. Meanwhile, across Yerevan, authorities are removing murals of fallen soldiers as cleanup.
Meanwhile, graffiti that is 10 feet away remains untouched. So what is being cleaned? The walls? Pashinyan rejects the legacies of the Artsakh Movement.
Now, even a child’s painting of Artsakh is treated as an act of subversion, while images of fallen soldiers are erased from public view. And this is how repression enters society. First, the state punishes the opposition, then it teaches officials to punish memory, and soon even a child’s longing becomes a political offense.
Hovik Manucharyan: So, Pietro, with this setup, I’d like to ask you, before we turn to the Soviet period, how would you describe the current political and social atmosphere in Armenia today?
Pietro A. Shakarian: Oh, it’s extraordinarily tense, Hovik, unfortunately, because of these artificial,
Hovik Manucharyan: you know, divisions in society that Pashinyan is introducing,
Pietro A. Shakarian: because also of the attacks on national identity. So this erasure of, you know, the memory of the soldiers, the memory of the heroes of the Artsakh War, particularly the 2020 war in Artsakh, And also, you know, even this effort to kind of completely blot out of Armenian national consciousness, this idea of Artsakh in any form. That this actually has been going on for quite some time.
It’s part of a campaign against the Armenian national identity that this government is initiating with the overall message being that, you know, forget about what makes you important or what makes Armenia unique and interesting and separate as a national culture, as a national entity. And instead focus on just the material benefits, just focus on getting that money into your pocket and just forget about everything else that’s meaningful to you, you know. So that’s what is really going on right now. But like I said, the pulse of the society right now, there’s a lot of tension with this because people aren’t comfortable with it.
People don’t agree with this at all, in general, and yet it’s being forced on the population. And you have a prime minister, you have a government that is imposing itself on the population at a time when people don’t feel like this. People want to move on. And yet this this government is continues to impose itself and impose its will against the wishes of the people.
And that actually was most vividly expressed. We saw in this most previous election where it was overtly rigged. It was overtly rigged. And the population felt like after in the aftermath of that people felt like as if their voice was taken away.
That any kind of democracy that people have been fighting for since the Artsakh Movement, because the Artsakh Movement, Hovik, as I always stress, was fundamentally about democracy. It was about, first and foremost, the rights of those people in Nagorno-Karabakh, Artsakh, to determine their own future. And when, you know, the Prime Minister recognizes Nagorno-Karabakh as a part of Azerbaijan, he’s basically saying, I don’t care about this right of self-determination. I don’t care about democracy.
All I care about are my profits. All I care about is staying in office. That’s the highest value for me. My power is more important than the principle of democracy, than the philosophical idea of democracy.
People feel as if, number one, their voice is taken away from them. And number two, people feel as if this government is imposing something on them that is alien, like to redefine the entire Armenian national identity on the map of post-Soviet Armenia, to really kind of make that the cornerstone of the identity, as if there is no larger Armenian history that goes back centuries, as if there is no large transnational Armenian diaspora that does not necessarily define its identity on the map of post-Soviet Armenia. And that’s what I think is most disgraceful about this. People are, they don’t, they’re not accepting this.
They’re not accepting this by and large. The tension originates from the fact that the government continues to attempt to impose this on the people. People just feel uncomfortable and they feel tense about it. Then also people’s jobs can be at stake if they work for the government.
There’s all sorts of kind of tension within society, still lingering tension over people who, the minority who support him, the vocal minority who support him versus the majority who really are exhausted with the whole situation. And want to move beyond it. And they want to, you know, their country to have a real future. So that’s where we’re at right now.
Hovik Manucharyan: Yeah. you know, as I passed by some of these murals in Yerevan, I always, you know, took a picture and spent like 30 seconds at least looking at the soldier depicted and it grounded me at least personally in what my life means and these people have given their lives for the values they believe and it is surreal now that we’re talking about democracy but I think this transcends even any definition of democracy but the larger picture is who has the authority to decide whether These images, these murals are vandalism, public art, or sites of memorialization.
We can go to any city and see public art that is not sanctioned, but is still preserved, is still allowed to exist. And this is very important existential imagery, right? Can control over memory become a form of political control? Is that what’s happening in Armenia today?
Pietro A. Shakarian: They’re trying to do that. They’re trying to control the discourse by blotting out inconvenient parts of the Armenian national memory. But it’s not working because people still feel a sense of loss. They still feel a loyalty to this.
This was a major national struggle that people went through. It’s a major national trauma. And not only that, it’s also To experience a loss to a force as disgusting and as, I guess you could say, authoritarian and disgraceful as the government of Mr. Aliyev in Baku.
We’re talking about a fascist government. And really to kind of impose that outcome of that conflict on the Armenian society, it’s not easy for people to take, right? Now the government is trying to distract away from this by trying to create artificial divisions between Hayastantsis and Artsakh seas and all this and that. Even, like I said, to try and define, redefine the entire Armenian national identity.
We’re talking about thousands of years of Armenian national identity to redefine it based on the map of post-Soviet Armenian without Artsakh. That’s actually the key part.
Hovik Manucharyan: We don’t even know what that map looks like in its final form. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s a work in progress.
It’s a work in progress.
Pietro A. Shakarian: It’s shrinking. It’s shrinking. Absolutely. I mean, what can you say, though, about this?
That this is an effort to re-engineer the Armenian identity to suit kind of a political interest and to suit, to really kind of, I guess you could say, appease a very, you know, disgraceful, distasteful, you know, regime in Baku. I mean, this is kind of classic appeasement on the order of what we saw in the lead-up to the Second World War, on the level of the Munich Pact. I mean, we’re talking about that kind of thing. I mean, Pashinyan, he’s on par with Neville Chamberlain in that respect.
So that’s how this is. That’s really what it feels.
Asbed Bedrossian: What are the implications of Pashinyan’s rejection of the Artsakh Movement and its legacy? Because he has expressly said that the Artsakh Movement was a mistake. He rejects it and he wants it forgotten by everyone.
Pietro A. Shakarian: The Artsakh Movement, Asbed, is the fundamental cornerstone for the Third Republic of Armenia, which is the post-Soviet Armenia, the independent Armenia that we have today. That all began, that all emerged, the Third Republic and its independence. Of course, there’s also the larger context of the dissolution of the USSR. But in the Armenian context, it was driven by the movement To give the Artsakh Armenians the right to determine their own future, right?
Gorbachev was coming in saying, we’re talking about glasnost, Perestroika, democratization, right? And the people in Artsakh, Nagorno-Karabakh were saying, well, if you’re talking about democracy, then why can’t we make our own decision? And then eventually that movement that began in Stepanakert, that began in Artsakh, came to Armenia. It didn’t begin in Armenia.
It didn’t begin in Yerevan. It began in Stepanakert and came to Yerevan. And the Armenians in Yerevan, the people of Yerevan, the people of the Armenian Republic, you know, began to express solidarity with Artsakh. And sooner, and over time, this movement, you know, to support the self-determination of Artsakhtsis became a larger movement, really, by, we’re talking 1990, 1991, advocating for the self-determination of Armenians from the USSR in general, for the independence of Armenians.
So when he’s questioning the Artsakh Movement, when he’s questioning that, what he is doing, Asbed, is he’s questioning the foundations of the Third Republic of Armenia. That’s really what he’s doing. And that’s why every Armenian, every decent Armenian, should be outraged by what he’s doing, because it’s an attack. On the Armenian independence.
He’s attacking Armenian independence in many ways, we can say. I mean, the attacks on the national identity, the idea of trying to force territorial concessions to Aliyev against the will of the Armenian people by trying to redefine the Armenian national identity, remove Mount Ararat from passport stamps, blot out murals of Artsakh heroes, all this and that. But by saying the Artsakh Movement was a mistake, what he’s really saying is that the independence of Armenia in 1991 was a mistake. That the Third Republic was a mistake.
That’s really what he’s saying. That’s right.
Hovik Manucharyan: Genocide, we’re not talking about the genocide today primarily, but also we should not forget that also memories of the Armenian Genocide are also being somehow de-emphasized or erased. And this is all part and parcel of that package.
Pietro A. Shakarian: And you know that too is connected with the whole Artsakh movement, because the memory of the genocide, especially after the Sumgait pogrom in 1988, that memory of the genocide became part of what fueled the Artsakh Movement. And even before that, we can go back to 1965, to the precursor of the Artsakh Movement, which was the 1965 demonstrations in Yerevan, advocating for the recognition of the Genocide on the 50th anniversary, which eventually led to Tsitsernakaberd and the memorial of the genocide being built in Yerevan. So all of this is being attacked by Pashinyan when he says the Artsakh Movement was a mistake.
What he’s really saying, again, is he’s basically saying that the entire Third Republic is illegitimate when he says this. So it’s utterly disgraceful in my point of view. And I say that, by the way, as an academic. As a scholar, I say that with somebody who has the authority of a researcher, somebody who has worked in the archives in Yerevan and in Moscow, who has studied these issues backwards and forwards.
And it is utterly appalling to me to hear someone like Pashinyan say, That, you know, really, this 1965 demonstrations in Yerevan, maybe that was a KGB plot or something like that. We have documents from the Russian archives in Moscow where, you know, the KGB, they’re expressing concerns about the rise of Armenian nationalism. They’re expressing concerns about, you know, Armenians making, you know, territorial claims and so on and so forth. We have internal documents from the KGB from that time.
So for him to say that really contradicts the factual history.
Asbed Bedrossian: You have a lot to teach to this government. They are absolutely illiterate and there’s no way to forget our history simply because it keeps repeating itself. But look,
Asbed Bedrossian: today’s situation in Yerevan may not compare exactly to the events in other countries or in history, but does raise an older question. What happens when political power begins to decide which histories, which identities and memories are acceptable? To understand why that question carries so much weight in Armenia, we need to return to one of the darkest periods in its modern history, a period that you are an expert on, the Great Purge, the campaign of mass political repression carried out across the Soviet Union in the late 1930s, precisely from 1936 to 1938.
Hovik Manucharyan: During that time, under Stalin, party officials, intellectuals, clergy, military officers, former political figures, and ordinary citizens were arrested, exiled, and executed as alleged enemies of the state. Although the purge, of course, was directed from Moscow, it did not Although the purge was directed from Moscow, it did not unfold in the same way everywhere. In Soviet Armenia, it was shaped by local struggles over power, culture, history, and national identity within the Soviet system.
So Pietro, can you tell us what was distinct about the Great Purge as it unfolded in Soviet Armenia and how exactly did local political conditions shape who was targeted and why?
Pietro A. Shakarian: I think this is an extraordinarily important question, Hovik, because at the core of it was the ability of Armenians to express themselves nationally within the framework of the Soviet system. Because Aghasi Khanjyan, who was shot by Lavrentiy Beria, to give our listeners an idea, he was the first secretary of Armenia at the time, the first secretary of the Communist Party. In a republic like Armenia, right, was the equivalent of like governor. So Khanjyan was basically kind of like the governor of Armenia.
And in that position, he was very generous toward the Armenian national identity. He was a loyal communist. He was loyal to the Soviet Many writers and intellectuals And why this is so important is that the Armenians could understand what was going on in the Caucasus at the time was that Lavrentiy Beria, who Stalin, as we know from the history, later became the head of the secret police of the entire Soviet Union. Stalin infamously introduced him to Churchill as our Himmler, that this is the Soviet Himmler.
This is a very sinister character. Lavrentiy Beria was from Georgia. He was the first secretary of Georgia, so he was the governor of Georgia. And really, what he wanted to do was to establish a complete control over the whole Caucasus.
In Azerbaijan, he had his buddy, his political ally, Mir Jafar Bagirov, running the show there, doing repressions there, right? So that was taken care of. But Armenia was giving him a hard time. The Armenian national intellectual figures who were surrounding Aghasi Khanjyan, people like Charents and Bakunts and many others, they were opposed to Beria dominating the Caucasus and to establish kind of a complete dictatorship over the Caucasus region .
The most vocal individual associated with Khanjyan at this time is a gentleman who is obscure to us today, but his name was Nersik Stepanyan. If you go in Yerevan and you are by the Charents Memorial Museum or the Charents House Museum, and this is by around on Mashtots Avenue, right, if you’re familiar with this building, right next to the Charents Memorial Museum is a placard indicating this is the place where Nersik Stepanyan lived. Nersik Stepanyan was somebody who was vocally opposed to Beria. He compared him to Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
Beria had written a book A revisionistic history of the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus that emphasized his role in Stalin’s and de-emphasized the role of Armenian Bolshevik revolutionaries, people like Stepan Shahumyan. And the Armenians were saying, well, you’re rewriting history here. That you’re completely, you’re trying to impose a version of history on us that has nothing to do with the reality. And they began to protest.
They began to push back against Beria. What Beria did was he had, he ended up having Nersik Stepanyan arrested. And then, infamously, on July 9th, 1936, Beria shot Aghasi Khanjyan. And this is really seen as the starting point for the Great Purge in Armenia, right?
One of three major phases of the Great Purge in Armenia, but I can get to that in a moment.
Hovik Manucharyan: And to what extent was the purge directed not only against political dissent, but also against the Armenian national identity? You mentioned some of this, but also was there a lot of expression about cultural distinctiveness at the time? And of course the memory of the genocide was still fresh. We had a lot of refugees in Yerevan still now trying to build a new life in Soviet Armenia.
Can you tell us some more about some of these expressions that were perhaps found to be offensive by Beria and Stalin?
Pietro A. Shakarian: Beria wanted complete control
Hovik Manucharyan: over the entire
Pietro A. Shakarian: Caucasus, and he also did not want the Armenians to think too independently, which also meant to put restrictions even on cultural independence. Beria installed an office in Yerevan His two cronies, Amatuni as the new First Secretary, replacing Aghasi Khanjyan, and Khachik Mugdusi, who is the head of the NKVD, or the head of the secret police chief, local secret police chief of Armenia. And what did they do to attack Armenian national identity?
They went exactly against all these figures who were so loyal to Khanjyan, who were really kind of, I guess you could say, you know, the carriers of Armenian national literature and Armenian national culture at the time, people like Charents and Bakunts and Totovents and Yesayan and many others, they were all arrested during this period. Armenia’s top intellectuals were arrested during this period. In some cases, they were killed, they were murdered. They were shot immediately after arrest.
In some cases, they were exiled. In the case of Charents, he died in an NKVD prison after being beaten to death, effectively. I mean, or at least this is what many people say. So this is the period that we’re dealing with, and also the assault on the Armenian Apostolic Church .
This was a major thing. The Armenian Church, I mean, you have to, again, consider the fact that in the Soviet Union, The Soviet Union was officially an atheistic state. There was a hostility built into the Soviet approach to things that was opposed to But at the same time, in the Armenian context, in the period of the 1920s, the NEP period that preceded the Stalin era, now NEP, New Economic Policy, for our listeners to understand, under Lenin in the 20s, there was a kind of a mixed system where there was kind of a market socialism. There was elements of capitalism and socialism in the same system.
And this time, Armenia actually did pretty well in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. And the Armenian government under Myasnikyan and other leaders at that time, actually, they were more lenient toward the Armenian Church. Why? Because the Armenian Church was recognized as a pillar of the Armenian national identity.
I mean, you could, you know, maybe there were some, you know, ways to attack it in the press or this and that. But at the end of the day, they didn’t, they were not going after the institution completely aggressively. They understood that this is a major, this is almost a bridge too far, this is a major cornerstone of Armenian national identity. As the purge heated up, and you had Mugdusi in office as the head of the NKVD in Armenia, there was a full frontal assault on the church, to the point that the church was nearly wiped out, nearly completely made extinct.
Hovik Manucharyan: It was certainly decapitated.
Pietro A. Shakarian: It was decapitated by 1938, right? So I mentioned that the Khanjyan phase, where really Beria’s cronies, Amatuni and Mugdusi, are going after everybody. There was a second phase, and this is about from July 1936 to… From September 1937 to October 1937 there was a direct intervention from Moscow and then from October 1937 To maybe February 1939, there was like a final phase.
In that final phase, that’s when the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Khoren I, was murdered by an agent of the NKVD on what many people believe to be the orders, the direct orders of Lavrentiy Beria. So this was a full frontal assault on the Armenian national identity, on those figures, like I mentioned, like Charents and Bakunts, who were working on ways to you know, kind of, you know, have a compromise between the Soviet socialist identity and the Armenian identity within the same system.
Because you have to think the Armenian nationalism is so incredibly powerful that in that context, in that society, in that system, you have to make compromises. It’s almost inevitable.
Asbed Bedrossian: Can I ask a quick question on that? Because I’ve been waiting.
Asbed Bedrossian: I wanted to know if in the South Caucasus, I wanted to know in the South Caucasus, were the repressions and the purges much harsher and more vicious in Armenia than, for example, in Georgia and Azerbaijan, and why? Maybe you may have answered that by saying that our identity was so strong, our nationalism was so strong that maybe those were the causes, but I want to hear what you think about this.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Well, actually, it’s quite interesting because Beria, as often, actually, the repressions in Georgia, even though Beria was a Georgian, the repressions in Georgia were exceptionally harsh. That’s actually one of the twisted things. Against his own people, he was especially cruel.
And even by the time we get to the 80s, there’s a first wave of de-Stalinization, which I love to always talk about under Khrushchev, but then there was a second wave that began under Gorbachev, And it really commenced with this release of this Georgian film by Tengiz Abuladze called Repentance, which dealt directly with Beria’s role in the repressions in Georgia in the 1930s. So this is something that this memory of the Stalinism in Georgia, I mean, it was in many ways in Georgia itself. It was actually worse than even in Armenia.
And in Azerbaijan, it was really a living hell that Beria’s man, Bagirov, was completely destroying the old elite. And you also have to think, what did the old elite mean in the context of Soviet Azerbaijan? Soviet Azerbaijan, in those earlier years of the Soviet Union, was a multi-ethnic republic. And the idea, the approach to identity was similar to kind of the approach toward nationality, I guess you could say, in the Baku Commune.
It was a multi-ethnic republic. You even had an Armenian, Mirzoyan, as the first secretary of Azerbaijan at one point, Kirov, the famous Russian Bolshevik revolutionary who was assassinated in 1934, was also the first secretary of Azerbaijan. And so along with the Turkic Muslim Azeris, you had Armenians, Georgians, Russians, Jews in the leadership positions in Soviet Azerbaijan at the time. And what happened under Bagirov is the entire orientation of the Republic was more geared toward the Turkic, Azerbaijani element.
So Azerbaijan under Bagirov took on a much more Turkic national identity. And as part of that, by the way, I should also mention, national minorities were also attacked under Bagirov’s reign in Azerbaijan. In Nagorno-Karabakh, the repressions were exceptionally harsh. against the leadership of Nagorno-Karabakh, actually, by the way. So that’s another whole thing that when we talk about the repressions in the Armenian context in the Soviet Union, we should also not forget about Artsakh being part of that element, right?
Soren Badamiyan, you know, one of the leaders the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast later met with Anastas Mikoyan along with a group of rehabilitated old Bolsheviks from, you know, Baku in 1964, as a matter of fact, and to express to Mikoyan and Khrushchev, you know, oh, yes, we need you to keep on with this de-Stalinization, rehabilitations and all that.
Asbed Bedrossian: Pietro, you’ve ascribed a lot of these atrocities and purges to Beria himself. How direct was Stalin’s and Moscow’s role in the Armenian purges, especially during the intervention of 1937 and on?
Pietro A. Shakarian: During the intervention of 1937, Stalin gets directly involved. Now, a lot of people in the post-Soviet space today, I mean, not just in Armenia, but in Russia, in Georgia, among some people, there is this idea that, well, maybe Stalin, maybe he didn’t really know everything that was going on. Well, actually, if you look in the so when you look in the archives and you do the research in the archives, you see that Stalin’s fingerprints were all over the repressions in the 1930s, in particular this direct intervention.
So Amatuni and Mugdusi, and the interesting thing is cronies of Beria, they killed Sahak Ter-Gabrielyan, a famous Armenian old Bolshevik, right? They basically what happened was he killed or they either they killed him or he jumped out the window. What happened was he was arrested in Moscow. He was transferred to Yerevan.
They were interrogating him. And he either jumped or was thrown from the third floor window of the NKVD building in Yerevan, which is today the building of the National Security Service in Yerevan, and he fell to his death. And they failed, Amatuni and Mugdusi failed to tell Stalin about that. Stalin was enraged, and he sent an entire delegation from Moscow to Yerevan to deal with the issue directly.
Right. And this also included, by the way, a five man NKVD brigade. So for a period from about September 14th, 1937 to about, I want to say, October 20th, 1937, the Internal Affairs Commissariat of Soviet Armenia was run directly by Moscow itself. The leadership of Armenia was purged.
This is when Stalin sends Malenkov and Mikhail Litvin of the NKVD to Yerevan. Also, he later sends Mikoyan, as we know, to Yerevan on the anniversary of the execution of the 26 Baku Commissars, right? So that’s the period, the direct intervention, and Stalin literally is supervising everything, every step of the way. I think I mentioned this in one of the earlier podcasts I did with you, maybe the first one, I think it was on Mikoyan, how Stalin was writing to Malenkov all the time.
Trying to keep up with what was going on, you know, trying to get the information from Malenkov, what’s going on. It even was to the point that Stalin sent this journalist Kotlyarov to Yerevan from Pravda to cover the events. And why did he pick Kotlyarov? Because he knew that that was the one reporter that Amatuni hated, right?
Now, it’s interesting because it was almost like a loyalty test. We talk about, of course, Stalin sends Mikoyan there as a loyalty test. But there was also a loyalty test in the sense of Beria, too, because in the case of Beria, his cronies are being thrown under the bus. So in advance of Beria’s promotion to the All-Union, there was this kind of test of his loyalty to see if he would accept the purging of his cronies or if he would try and defend them, but he had no compunction.
He even attended the interrogation of Amatuni. He was there as Amatuni was tortured and was screaming.
Hovik Manucharyan: So Pietro,
Hovik Manucharyan: we covered how this all began with Khanjyan’s apparent assassination and murder. We talked about the different phases of the purge, but now I want to focus on the memory and public understanding of the purges, starting with what was the ordinary citizen going through at that time and ending with years later, how did society deal with it? The history of the purges did not end with the release and rehabilitation of the victims.
Each later period revisited the crimes of the Stalin era in a different way, revealing as much about contemporary Armenia tell us, how did Soviet Armenia begin to confront the legacy of the purges during the Khrushchev period? We’ve talked about this in the past, but what can you say that is relevant to this topic of memory?
Pietro A. Shakarian: Well, I mean, I’ve talked about it extensively. I mean, I’ve written a book on it. And really, it begins when Mikoyan comes to Yerevan two years before Khrushchev’s secret speech and calls for the rehabilitation of Charents, the republication of Patkanian and Raffi, the revival of Myasnikyan’s memory, and so on and so forth. And that really begins the process of the Thaw in Armenia, already two years before Khrushchev’s secret speech, or so-called secret speech.
And already in 1954, you have the first victims of the purge being rehabilitated. There is a famous, famous line by the great Russian poetess Anna Akhmatova, who basically talks about this idea that you know, in the period of Khrushchev’s Thaw, in the period of de-Stalinization, that two Russias came to meet, eyeball to eyeball. That is to say, the Russia of the victim of the Stalinist repressions, right, the gulag returnee. you know, his former oppressor, right, the Russia of the NKVD guards, right, or the NKVD interrogators. And they came, you know, in her words, to meet eyeball to eyeball.
No story better illustrates that, in my point of view, than a story in Armenia, where you had this gulag returnee, Liparit Barseghyan, who came to Yerevan, He came back. He just was released from the Gulag. This is 1954, I believe. And he is on the tram in Yerevan.
And he sees this man. He sees this man’s face. He recognizes him from somewhere. He doesn’t understand where is this guy from.
And he makes the association that Barseghyan, many, many years ago, right? I mean, we talk about always the big thing is 17 years. From the period of 1937 to 1954, it’s about a 17-year period of distance. When he was in the NKVD jail cell, Barseghyan, he was imprisoned with Charents.
This guard came in one day and beat Charents viciously and beat him and beat him and beat him to the point that Charents, by the end, wasn’t moving. So you know that probably this was the moment where, you know, he died. He was killed, effectively. And Barseghyan, many years later, in 1954, is in Yerevan on the tram.
He sees this man. He tries to figure out who is this. And he recognizes that’s the guard that beat Charents to death. And Barseghyan is so angry, he’s about to kill the guy.
But then the guy gets off at a stop, moves on, and then,
Hovik Manucharyan: you know, that’s it.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Barseghyan is killed. So that’s the idea. Two Russians, or two Soviet Unions, because Armenia, I mean, this is more than just Russia, it’s also Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, all these other places, two Soviet Unions coming eyeball to eyeball. That’s what we’re dealing with in this period of time.
And the height of this, the height of this de-Stalinization was actually in 1961. So everybody talks about the 20th Party Congress, where Khrushchev denounces Stalin.
Hovik Manucharyan: That’s almost like a go-to when you talk about the history.
Pietro A. Shakarian: But the big de-Stalinization Congress was in 1961, October 1961, the 22nd Party Congress. And this was the Party Congress, gentlemen, where all of a sudden Stalin’s statue goes down. you know, the city of Stalingrad is renamed Volgograd right at this point. So this is when there was the deep de-Stalinization of the USSR. And this is the moment where, in Victory Park, Stalin’s statue is removed.
Mikoyan actually when he came to Yerevan to give a speech a day before when he first arrived in Yerevan he actually went to the Stalin statue and the irony was that the speech he gave the next day on March 11, 1954 would set in motion the process that would eventually result in that statue coming down. So that was the first wave of the de-Stalinization and it could have gotten even more intense. Armenia was a republic that was exceptionally Oriented toward de-Stalinization. The society really was strongly, strongly in favor of it.
There was not only resentment about Stalin and
Hovik Manucharyan: repressions and the repressions against the Armenian national identity,
Pietro A. Shakarian: but also there was a resentment there about the national territorial issues. People were raising the issue of Stalin supporting the incorporation of Nagorno-Karabakh into Soviet Azerbaijan. And people are raising this issue. Already we’re talking about the first time that that’s raised is in this context of de-Stalinization, actually, even before Perestroika.
Hovik Manucharyan: Pietro, how did Glasnost and Perestroika itself change the public discussion of Stalinism, national history and repression in Armenia? You did a good job of explaining what happened in the 1950s and 1960s, but let’s come to 1980s.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Well, it goes a little bit deeper because by the time we have the second wave of de-Stalinization, and really this begins, as I mentioned, the flagship of this is Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance, right? This film was a film that Abuladze made in 1984. It was banned in the Soviet Union. Now imagine that, a film banned in 1984.
It’s great, great, great set up right there. And what happened was when Gorbachev came in, you know, Abuladze, he’s Georgian, he was best buddies with Eduard Shevardnadze, right? you know, kind of came up under Gorbachev’s influence. And Abuladze persuaded Shevardnadze to screen the film for Gorbachev. And Gorbachev, when he watched the movie, he cried because his own family had been victims of the Stalinist repressions.
And so the film was released in 1987, and it was a flagship of a new wave of de-Stalinization that included, by the way, the rehabilitation of Nikolai Bukharin, who had, you know, he was one of the people jockeying for the post-Lenin leadership in the 1920s alongside Stalin and Trotsky. So in any case, what you ended up having was a situation where in Armenia, suddenly you had a second wave of de-Stalinization, you know, coming to terms with the Stalinist past, right? There was a joke in the Soviet Union at the time because there was also a period of greater, you know, kind of, I guess you could say sexual liberation.
So people would joke that when you turn on the TV during the Gorbachev time, you either saw one of two things, either a naked woman or Stalin. And so suddenly now it was becoming more and more people were talking about, you know, the Stalinist period much more. And in addition to that, people were beginning to go beyond looking just at Soviet repressions in the Stalinist period. People were also looking at repressions in the early Soviet era.
We talk about kind of the fighting between, you know, Bolsheviks and Dashnaks in those very early years, the repression. Against, you know, leaders of the First Republic, that kind of a thing. That suddenly began to be investigated, right? And then also you had exploration into investigation of those Armenians who were deported, let’s say, to the Altai Krai.
So even today, when we talk about the day of the memory of victims of political repressions in Armenia, it’s actually June 14th, which is actually the day which is actually associated with the deportation of these Armenians, many of whom were coming in from the diaspora as repatriates at the end of the war. It’s associated with their exile to the Altai region in 1949, which became a new topic of investigation. Also films like Karot, yearning, that is for our English language viewers, they began to deal also more explicitly with the Stalinist past in the Soviet Armenian context. So that’s really what we’re talking about.
There was a second wave of this de-Stalinization under Gorbachev. And actually, it looked like, well, now people are talking about it much more openly during Perestroika. Will it actually translate into more open study of these issues in the Third Republic? And that’s actually where it’s most interesting, because in the Third Republic, Hovik, the focus on the memory of Stalinism actually becomes less.
People are less interested in this question. They’re not so much focused on it, because the main focus becomes the struggle for the survival of Artsakh, for the right of those people to, like I always say, determine their own future and fight for their own future.
Hovik Manucharyan: And also the preservation, the memory of the genocide.
Pietro A. Shakarian: you know, that’s another major issue. So that’s kind of in a nutshell what we might be getting at here.
Hovik Manucharyan: Yeah, it’s very interesting, right? Because I also have memories of my family members being taken away to Siberia, but we don’t know the details. Those were not even discussed even during the 90s and after the falling apart of the USSR. So this incomplete reckoning in Armenia of the Stalinist repression, how did that leave society less prepared to recognize authoritarian practices in new forms?
What do you think about that?
Pietro A. Shakarian: I think that it made people in some ways, I mean, without a complete reckoning of it, I think it made people more permissive to this. And in some ways, the discourses, I was actually quite alarmed, of Stalinism even kind of came back to Armenia because I remember I was in Armenia during the events of, or actually just after the so-called Velvet Revolution of 2018, and I encountered people who were even saying that we need to crush, we need to smash, you know, the wreckers, we need to smash the “vragi naroda”, we need to smash the enemies of the people.
And I couldn’t believe the kind of language I was hearing because it sounded just like the same kind of things that people would say in 1937 from the documents I was reading, from the research I was doing. So there has not been a complete reckoning with this past. And also, it’s not only just a matter of, oh, yes, those were such terrible repressions and, you know, it wasn’t it awful in those times. It’s also there are many different facets of what do the Stalinist repressions mean?
There is the uncomfortable fact of Armenian participation in this. The participation of the Armenian society in these repressions. I’ve seen documents in the Armenian archives where you have local party leaders or local, yeah, I mean, local party leaders who are basically kind of, you know, condemning their neighbors or their rivals, like that, oh, so-and-so’s wife gave a toast to Khanjyan, and therefore, you know what, you should look at him, maybe he’s a Trotskyite or a “Dashnak Trotskyite” or something like that. People were informing on each other.
And the idea, when you take the Stalinist repressions, or you take the repressions in the Soviet Union and say, well, that’s on Stalin, or that’s on the Soviet government, it has nothing to do with us, that, you know, how can we be capable of such things, then you erase from that also uncomfortable questions. That’s not to, by the way, downplay the agency of Stalin’s government and Stalinism, you know, because that’s certainly at the forefront of all this.
The incomplete reckoning is when people are, I mean, we talk about incomplete reckoning, it’s that people do not make that connection with how the society itself might be complicit in this, how they might play along with something like this, for whatever personal reasons, for maybe some personal advancement, maybe because it’s most comfortable, maybe because they don’t want to
Hovik Manucharyan: make waves.
Pietro A. Shakarian: And there are important lessons to learn from that historical experience that people, you know, don’t take because they either think it’s too distant or they think they blame it on, you know, the Soviet government and that was then, this is now, how can we in post-Soviet Armenia, how can that be the case and whatnot. But we’re seeing, you know, the history. I mean, it sounds incredibly cliche for me to say this, but we’re seeing the history repeat itself.
Hovik Manucharyan: Yeah, in fact, I was thinking about that meeting between Barseghyan and his tormentors or Charents’ tormentor on the tram. And I just thought to myself, okay, years from now, when all this, hopefully, God willing, is behind us, what will happen? When there is a meeting between some of these loyal servants of Pashinyan in National Security Services and all the victims of that, which is sizable today already.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Absolutely.
Asbed Bedrossian: okay, so the institutions, the methods, and the scale may have changed, but we can still recognize from history that these patterns are repeating themselves. The concentration of authority, the subordination of institutions, attacks on the Church, the construction of internal and external enemies, and then there’s the use of criminal proceedings against rivals, the suppression of competing historical narratives, and the transfer of wealth and property from disfavored groups to a new governing elite. And this is going on today. And I mean today, July 31st, 2026.
If you read the news, you will see a number of properties of Tsarukyan, who was not even allowed to become an MP in the new parliament. They were confiscated by the Yerevan Municipality. So we have to ask ourselves, is Armenia a competitive political system with just major failings and these things are going to take time to be fixed? Or is it an autocracy which is moving with a show as elections and the ruling party just continues controlling institutions, resources, permissible narratives that shape political and social life just so that the show can go on for the people?
Hovik Manucharyan: And you know, authoritarian systems do not need to use identical methods to pursue political ends. Of course, power can be consolidated through courts, detention, criminal investigations, regulatory pressure, asset seizures, as we said, public vilification. We’ve seen all the attacks against the Vehapar. The replacement of independent political, religious, and cultural elites with figures dependent on the ruling order.
And Asbed covered the redistribution of wealth that is going on. So tell us,
Hovik Manucharyan: we started in 2018 from this euphoria that okay, now we’re going to get rid of corruption. Now we’re really going to get Artsakh back. Pashinyan was the most nationalistic leader, and now we have repressions. What happened?
Which comparisons between the Great Purge and present-day Armenia are historically useful, and where does this comparison break down?
Pietro A. Shakarian: Well, first of all, I have to say this, I mean, even though I’m no fan, I say this as somebody who is, as you know, a vocal critic of Pashinyan, that still, Stalinism, nothing can come close to that in terms of the sheer weight of that. I mean, if there was ever an example in human history that came close to totalitarianism, that would be the regime of Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, the dictatorship of Stalin in the Soviet Union.
And I think that with Pashinyan, you don’t have a few repression going to that level, although, you know, I’m concerned of certainly where things going, because whenever you have already the elimination, you have people being arrested for political reasons. That’s a slippery slope to something like people, you know, eventually being executed for political reasons. So I think that it maybe we can say right now, it’s certainly not as extreme as what we had in the 1930s. But there are extraordinarily troubling signs.
Is Armenia just an imperfect democratic republic with all sorts of shortcomings and imperfections? Problems like And I think that that was really the Armenia that we knew for most of the Third Republic period, right? Occasionally you would have sometimes authoritarian tendencies expressed here and there. But overall, it never was like this.
It never got this. This politically repressive, or this controlled, or this really authoritarian. This is the most authoritarian. That’s why I scoff at those apologists for the government who say things like, well, you know what, the longer Nikol Pashinyan stays in power, maybe forever, then the more democratic Armenia is, that we need this man to be in power forever in order to guarantee democracy in Armenia, right?
Hovik Manucharyan: We actually have people, Hovik, who actually say this,
Pietro A. Shakarian: and I’m not even joking. I mean, you know, actually, I don’t even need to tell you, you know about that.
Hovik Manucharyan: And they say, of course, also the loss of Artsakh is Kocharyan’s fault, all the detentions today. you know, the fact that Pashinyan is abusing the Constitution to have essentially a super prime ministership in Armenia is Serzh Sargsyan’s fault and not Pashinyan’s fault. Those are the, you know, logical arguments. And losing the fish markets
Asbed Bedrossian: is Kocharyan’s fault.
Pietro A. Shakarian: And also, you know,
Hovik Manucharyan: it’s also something else really
Pietro A. Shakarian: ridiculous to me, gentlemen, is the fact that, you know, even the abolition of the death penalty in Armenia was under Kocharyan.
Hovik Manucharyan: People forget about this, you know. So it shows you, though, but I mean, today,
Pietro A. Shakarian: but there was never
Hovik Manucharyan: anything.
Pietro A. Shakarian: like this under the previous presidents in terms of political repressions in terms of the stifling of freedom of speech in terms of you know basically kind of you had these Armenian also with restriction on the right to vote so the the government was more than happy to allow people to vote from who came from Russia Armenians who came from Russia they were more than happy to allow them to vote when it favored them but when it yeah soon as it didn’t favor them then they were like well we’re gonna send you to we’re gonna send you to a military you know We’re going to restrict your ability to come to Armenia in some way or whatever, and now passing laws prohibiting people from taking part in Armenian elections for a certain amount of time, that kind of a thing.
All of this, I think, speaks to that where we are right now is not a good place. It’s not a democratic government. It’s also not a government that we can say in any way, shape, or form is socially progressive. And what do I mean by that?
That we talk about the redistribution of resources. Well, he’s not redistributing those resources to help the narod, to help the people. you know, he’s basically taking those resources of Gagik Tsarukyan and the others to his cronies, right? So people don’t mention this, but Gerzo is doing incredibly well. Under Pashinyan’s government.
The oligarchs who chose to play ball with Pashinyan are doing really quite well. So it’s not in any way you can say a progressive government, and it’s not a democratic government. It’s a government that is increasingly, increasingly authoritarian. There’s very serious questions about academic freedom.
As we saw with the Armenian Genocide Museum, you know, question or incident that actually occurred at the beginning of this year. There are actually concerns about being able to freely investigate the Soviet past because now the government is trying to impose new narratives that say, well, the KGB was behind everything, whatever, even though all the vast, the vast bulk of documentary evidence refutes that. So this is…
Hovik Manucharyan: You talked about the redistribution of wealth and in one of his speeches Pashinyan said we’re going to actually nationalize Tsarukyan’s businesses and he used them In the United States or in English, I think those two words are very synonymous. But I think that was not accidental. And he tried to paint it as a change of ownership to the people. But in reality, what is happening is, you know, transfer wealth to his cronies.
But I think that we’re understating the impact of these measures by Pashinyan. And one of the critical things that I keep coming back to is that he uses these permissible methods of detention, right? Pre-trial detention. And he gets people in jail two, three years or, you know, one year or nine months and then releases them.
And by cycling people and then he might re-arrest them. It is having a net effect of jailing someone for multiple years, preventing them from participating in public life. And this is the most understated aspect. Whenever a foreigner looks at Armenia, he goes, well, you know, the court proceedings are still going on.
Let’s, you know, withhold judgment. But in reality, these people are already serving their sentence. Now what’s even worse is that Pashinyan is now turning to labeling people as enemies, as enemies of the state. He calls them traitors.
Are being labeled as traitors, criminals and obstacles to peace . Is this similar to what Stalin did in terms of labeling his opponents as enemies of the state? Absolutely, absolutely. And actually, that’s what that’s what’s so troubling about this,
Pietro A. Shakarian: that there are very, very dark echoes of 1937 here when you have people all of a sudden, you know, you have the government condemning, you know, really, the only litmus test is your personal loyalty to the government. If you’re not, I mean, if you if you’re somebody who is opposed to the government, then they call you an enemy of the people or an enemy of the state or a traitor or whatever.
I mean, that’s exactly what we saw, like in the Soviet Union, for example, like, I mean, the term that Stalin used during collectivization or that was used during collectivization against the well-to-do peasants was the term gulag, which is like fist in Russian. And over time, this term gulag took on a more kind of, you know, open meaning. It could basically mean almost anybody who is opposed to the government. And so we’re seeing very, very dark hints of that.
And as for Pashinyan’s privat…, I mean, as for his, you know, his nationalization, you know, of the resources, I mean, we have to think Pashinyan is a man who is of He’s a thoroughly neoliberal persuasion. He’s a free marketeer through and through. He is somebody who is attempting to really, I guess you could say, push through this AI data center, which is going to cause enormous, you know, immensely deleterious effects on Armenia. in terms of pollution, in terms of economic exploitation, in just so many ways. So, this is not somebody who is in any way standing for any kind of progressive cause, just so our viewers know.
Hovik Manucharyan: So, as we talked, the Armenian Church presents another important point of comparison. In 1938, as we discussed already, Catholicos Khoren I was assassinated during the Soviet campaign. by an NKVD agent acting on the orders of Beria. Today, Pashinyan has made replacing the Catholicos Garegin II as a political objective, as a campaign promise, and has continued that campaign even after the election. For instance, tomorrow or on August 2nd, probably when this podcast interview is published, will be the first session The government has not invited the Catholicos to be present, which is traditional practice.
In fact, they invited one of the excommunicated priests to participate. And also, more worrisome, the government has launched a criminal case against him for defrocking one of the bishops, which is a legitimate authority of the Church. So whatever one thinks of Church leadership, this has become a struggle over major Armenian institutions and whether they can retain authority independent of the government. How can you compare, Pietro, the Soviet assault on the Armenian Church, the murder of the Catholicos during the Great Purge, and the pressure now being placed on the Catholicos Garegin II.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Well, the first most immediate parallel is the fact that the church is more than just a religious institution in the Armenian context. It’s kind of the, I guess you could say, a vahan. It’s something that helps preserve and save the Armenian identity over the centuries. The church was always playing that role as a protector of Armenian identity.
And also, even when we talk about the Soviet government, it always had this kind of off and on relationship with it. I mean, during the period of when the church was being repressed, there was also an effort. And this is quite interesting because it reminds me of today when Pashinyan is trying to create his own new church that’s loyal to him with his own leaders. It’s very similar to the Soviet effort to create what they call the Living Church.
They tried to create a Soviet church that would be a counterpoint to the Armenian church. And also the same thing was with the Russian Orthodox Church, by the way. And so that’s what there was this idea. And also the other similarity here is that one of the reasons is particularly when we talk about the Stalinist period.
One of the reasons why they were after the church was because it was an institution that was outside the confines of the state. And when something is outside your control, it’s kind of hard for you to deal with it. Eventually, the Soviet government comes to an understanding with the church. But in the period of Stalinism, there was an effort just simply to wipe out any alternative institutions to the Soviet government.
And that’s something similar to what we see now under Mr. Pashinyan, under the Armenian government, an effort really to eliminate an alternative pole of authority, an alternative pole of political power. Not even political power, even just cultural power, you know, I mean, because really the church is above politics. It only intervenes in these cases where it feels it’s an extraordinary situation, right?
A lot of people, you know, who are you who are siding more with passion when this controversy began. We’d like to say things like, well, you know, well, the church interfered in the politics and all this and that. Well, the church, you know, it only interferes in an issue like this if it sees, if it feels it’s so extraordinary to do so. It’s usually above the politics.
What’s more egregious in my point of view, and this is also something that throws into question Pashinyan on so-called progressive credentials, is this idea that the state should have a role in governing the church or should you know, that the boundary between the church and the state should be completely eliminated. So when he says, I want to appoint the Catholicos, right, as if he himself is somehow higher than the Catholicos, that he’s higher, you know, than the head of the church, then you begin to have a problem.
Then it begins to, you know, question kind of the secular, the principle, the secular principle of the separation of church and state. That’s exactly what he’s doing. And that’s another point I would raise when I discuss this. This is not somebody who is for basic progressive values that we have today that have been handed down to us from the Enlightenment.
This is somebody who is just against all that in everything he does.
Hovik Manucharyan: Okay.
Hovik Manucharyan: Pietro, I want to pivot to looking forward a little bit. The June 7 parliamentary election resulted in Pashinyan and Civil Contract claiming power with a three-fifths parliamentary majority, despite all the irregularities, all the state pressure, and obvious falsification. But the election also changed the structure of the opposition itself. Strong Armenia emerged as the largest parliamentary bloc, while Armenia Alliance entered the parliament as a smaller force.
This may mark a shift from an opposition identified mainly in the Karabakh-era or Artsakh-era political and security leadership toward one organized around business leadership, economic management, state capacity, and development. Now, both blocs have accepted their mandates while rejecting the official result. They also argue that parliamentary participation and street politics are not mutually exclusive. So I have a few concerns about this.
First, in terms of memory of Artsakh, having the Artsakh leadership have less of a role in Armenian politics, is it in effect shaping public memory as well? because now we’re focusing on business. There’s no bigger supporter of Artsakh, I think, than Samvel Karapetyan. Just general, what do you think will happen in Armenian politics today? Can the opposition blocs cooperate and reach voters who reject both Pashinyan and a return to the former political order?
Pietro A. Shakarian: I think the main thing we have to think about when we talk about today’s Armenian opposition is the need to consolidate. That I think going into the election now, of course, there’s going to be, you know, some counterpoints to this raise, but going into the election as kind of a, you know, disassociated group of separate opposition parties that might not have been the best strategy. And actually, this has been one of the points that that many people in the opposition have been reflecting on in the aftermath of the election, that one thing we could have done better would have been to, you know, consolidate the opposition.
The other thing would be to if the opposition is you know if they’re thinking about what strategies to pursue there was a kind of an either or choice after the election this idea that should we do street protests you were kind of alluding to this street protests or should we you know take our mandates in Parliament and I think that the most reasonable position is that you know they should do both because there was this idea that we should refuse mandates in Parliament and all this and that but I think that it’s important for them to do both. But also to seize opportunities, if there’s going to be mass mobilization, you know, to do that.
Because one thing that also struck me about the aftermath of the June election was that, or so-called election, because it was thoroughly rigged, was that there was evidently no plan B. There were some oppositionists who were saying, let’s go to the streets. Some who were saying, let’s challenge this, you know, legally, through legal avenues. I don’t even see the There’s no sensibility of doing that when the legal structures, like the Central Election Commission, are all controlled by Pashinyan.
It doesn’t make any sense. So there has to be a change of strategy. There has to be a greater consolidation. Just because Robert Kocharyan got less in the parliament, I don’t think it means that the role of Artsakh or the role of Artsakhtsis is going to be less in the movement.
I think also it’s important for the opposition to continue addressing this, the social question, because that is something that I think is intimately intertwined with the national security issue as well. So I think that if you combine national security with the social question, with also the question of democracy, because this government has proven itself to be an opponent of democracy, then you can’t go wrong with such a mix as that. So I think the opposition will learn these lessons. They’re learning as they’re going along.
Each time they seem to be getting closer and closer and closer and closer to the result that they get. But it’s like anything else. When we talk about revolutions in history, revolutions don’t succeed. They don’t become a huge success on the first try.
So you remember very well from the history of Cuba, right? Now, Cuba’s in the news. It’s under siege, as we know. But Fidel Castro had the attack on the Moncada barracks in 1953.
It was a failed revolt. What did he do? He went into exile, right? He was in Mexico for a while.
Then he and his comrades, including Che Guevara, they went on the Granma boat and then they came to Cuba and they launched a guerrilla war in the mountains in Cuba. and so eventually, that revolution turned out to be a success, but it shows you, Hovik, that it’s never a success all in one go. It’s a trial and error process. Now, that being said, the opposition has to think about the immediacy of the situation, because Armenia is facing existential threats on many, many different fronts.
Threats to its national identity, threats to its national security, threats to the social security of its citizens, threats on so many levels that you can’t believe. Just look at the city of Kapan. Look at now, literally, Azerbaijan is literally right there, right on the city limits of Kapan. That wasn’t the situation before 2020.
So now there’s so much to contend with and so much of an immediacy to act that the opposition has to be forced to consolidate. They should understand that this is not the typical post-Soviet Armenian politics as usual. This is an extraordinary situation. That’s the other critique I have.
The opposition needs to be aware that this is an extraordinary situation. It’s not a usual business as usual, politics as usual situation. This is an extraordinary situation. That your national identity, your statehood is at stake.
The existence of your people is at stake. And like, for instance, the new front now, I mean, Artsakh, this is, of course, an issue that should always be on the minds of Armenians. And, of course, the Artsakh leadership as well, the captives in Baku. At the same time, also the security of Syunik, because now Syunik is suddenly the front line.
The people of Syunik are under threat with not only from this government in Armenia or from Aliyev ’s threats, but even with this TRIPP corridor. To sell the southernmost part of Syunik to an American company for, I guess it was, I think, 70 years? I think that was the limit. I mean, this is all threats.
And also the fact that it exposes Armenia to major threats vis-a-vis its two most important allies and security providers, Russia and Iran, in a world that is fast changing. So yeah.
Hovik Manucharyan: Pietro, thanks for this discussion. I want to underscore that the history of the purges reminds us that authoritarian power does not stop at elections, prisons, or political parties. It reaches into institutions like we discussed, it reaches into property, public memory, and private grief. All of those are being attacked today.
It defines enemies, rewards loyalty, weakens independent authority, and narrows the range of ideas and identities that society may express or is allowed to express. So I’d like to end today’s discussion with a quote from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. It says, the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. Quite powerful words.
I remember reading this in college. I have to reread it again, and I would strongly recommend this book as well as The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I know some people may not like Kundera, but if you don’t know this author, I would strongly urge you to give those books a try. Thank you, Pietro, for this discussion.
I think it was fascinating.
Pietro A. Shakarian: One more thing, Hovik, I just want to say this. When we talk about the history of mobilization, I mean, when we talk about mobilizations in history against autocratic governments, authoritarian governments, people should always remember, and this is something also that even Czechoslovak dissidents would you know, remind you about that the people are the ones who ultimately hold the power. They are the majority. People should never think that this government is so onerous and so oppressive on us that we can’t do anything.
They have the numbers. The people have the numbers. They have the power to change the situation if they so want. And I think the people in Armenia do.
They do want to change the situation. And I think eventually, you know what, I’ll even go so far as to say this, they will change the situation. Because a government like this will not last for long and it will be hopefully remembered, I mean it will be remembered in our history, I believe, as a terrible nightmare that we can only be glad that we woke out of. So on that note, I think that one day we will come to our Barseghyan, you know, Charents
Hovik Manucharyan: tormentor, you know, moment.
Pietro A. Shakarian: And I also hope that people will… Well, I hope we’re ready for that because we have to have
Hovik Manucharyan: a reckoning as powerful. And I don’t know what shape that will take. Thank you, Pietro again for this discussion. This was fascinating and I hope our listeners and viewers enjoyed it.
And I can’t wait until we have our next discussion, Pietro.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Thank you, Hovik. Thank you, Asbed.
Pietro A. Shakarian: Thank you.
Asbed Bedrossian: What an interesting show. We recorded this episode on July 31st, 2026. And we’ve been talking to Dr. Pietro Shakarian, who is a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union.
He’s the author of the book Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin. And you should read that book because there’s a lot of interesting detail that Pietro would have probably told us on the show, but he didn’t have time. Dr. Shakarian’s analysis on Russian and post-Soviet affairs have appeared in various national and international publications.
He currently lectures in history at the American University of Armenia, the AUA in Yerevan. For more information, go to podcasts.groong.org slash episode number. Make sure you click on his bio. Check out the link to his book.
It’s very interesting.
Hovik Manucharyan: Yeah. I don’t know about you personally, Asbed, but I really enjoyed the merging of contemporary issues with history today. I hope the parallels worked. What did you think about it?
Asbed Bedrossian: I’m not sure enjoying is the right word. I was alarmed at the parallels between history about 80 years ago, 90 years ago and today. I think it’s just like I said, it’s kind of hard to believe that we can forget any part of history because it keeps repeating and repeating and repeating.
Hovik Manucharyan: So, to our listeners, let us know how we did. Let us know if you like this type of content.
Asbed Bedrossian: Say that again in a moment. Because, Hovik, this past week, we saw a suit on Kocharyan, suits on Tsarukyan. Today, we have had… You mean lawsuits,
Hovik Manucharyan: not actual suits. That’s right, lawsuits. I’m sorry. I think you should say, yeah.
Asbed Bedrossian: They’ve been indicted, I should say. They’ve been indicted. Start over. Hovik, what makes this doubly worrying for us is that just this past week, lawsuits have been filed, indictments have been filed against Kocharyan, against Samvel Karapetyan.
These are post-election suits. Deputy of Tsarukyan, Tsarukyan himself, his properties are being confiscated today. Yerevan municipality is confiscated.
Hovik Manucharyan: That’s right. I used to go to that gym. I used to go to that. That’s my gym.
Asbed Bedrossian: And, you know, the sentence basically says that the Yerevan municipality has simply confiscated the property according to their own terms. It’s like, we don’t even know. They just come, they close the place, and on Armenpress, if you read the article, it says basically they have rebranded the gym, because most of Tsarukyan’s properties are basically like multi, I think, or something like that, right? Anyway, and that’s not the end of it.
Of course, this past week, we also saw charges, indictments brought against the Catholicos, Garegin II, and he’s supposed he’s due to appear in court. And you know what I think would be appropriate? That 200,000 citizens of the Republic of Armenia show up at court and make sure that they can’t even take him in court. To do what?
To read some bullshit charges against the Catholicos. I hope 200,000 Armenians will show up.
Hovik Manucharyan: We are in solidarity with all of the oppressed opposition, all of the people that are victims of this Pashinyan purge. And we promise not to let down.
Hovik Manucharyan: And in order to do that, we’d also like your support. Go to podcasts.groong.org/donate and show us that you really care if you can, of course, and also provide us a monetary donation so we can streamline our We will talk to you soon. Bye-bye.