The Church Under Siege: Then and Now
In 1938, Beria murdered the Catholicos Khoren I. Today, Pashinyan is criminalizing the Catholicos Garegin II for exercising Church authority. The patterns are not identical-but they are unmistakable.
The assault on the Armenian Apostolic Church represents one of the most revealing continuities between Stalinist repression and contemporary Pashinyan-era authoritarianism. In 1938, at the height of the Great Purge, an NKVD agent murdered Catholicos Khoren I, the head of the Armenian Church, acting on orders from Lavrentiy Beria. The killing was part of a coordinated campaign to decapitate the Church and eliminate it as an independent source of authority and identity.
Today, Pashinyan has launched a criminal case against Catholicos Garegin II for defrocking a bishop-a legitimate ecclesiastical function entirely within the Church’s domain. More broadly, Pashinyan has made replacing Garegin II a political objective and campaign promise, signaling that he intends to place a pliant Church leadership in position. He has invited excommunicated priests to participate in parliamentary sessions and has excluded the Catholicos from traditional ceremonies, breaking with established protocol. The government’s framing treats the Church not as an autonomous institution but as an entity subject to state control.
What unites these moments across nearly 90 years is the regime’s intolerance of alternative poles of authority. In both cases, the Church’s threat lies not in political activism but in its mere existence as an institution outside state control. The Soviet system, ideologically committed to atheism, sought to eliminate the Church entirely. Pashinyan’s regime, working within a nominally secular but Christian nation-state, seeks to subordinate the Church to executive authority. He has positioned himself as superior to the Catholicos, asserting that he-the Prime Minister-should have a role in appointing the head of the Church. This violates the foundational principle of separation of church and state.
The comparison reveals an important nuance: totalitarian scale differs across eras. The 1938 murder was an assassination. Today’s repression uses prosecution, exclusion from ceremony, and the threat of court action. Yet the underlying logic is identical: eliminate independent institutional authority. In both cases, the target is not a political party but a cultural institution. The Church preserves Armenian identity across centuries and borders. For any regime seeking to redefine Armenian identity on its own terms-as Pashinyan seeks to do by erasing Artsakh from national consciousness-the Church’s independence becomes intolerable.
Transcript
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,