The Great Purge in Armenia: Khanjyan's Assassination and the War on National Identity
Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's enforcer, shot Aghasi Khanjyan on July 9th, 1936. What followed was a full assault on Armenian national identity, targeting intellectuals, clergy, and the church itself.
On July 9th, 1936, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s notorious secret police chief and the man Stalin infamously introduced to Churchill as ‘our Himmler,’ orchestrated the assassination of Aghasi Khanjyan, the First Secretary of Soviet Armenia. Khanjyan had been a loyal communist but also a protector of Armenian national identity and culture. He had surrounded himself with Armenia’s leading intellectuals and writers-Charents, Bakunts, Totovents-who worked to forge a synthesis between Soviet socialism and Armenian national consciousness. This was unbearable to Beria, who sought absolute control over the entire Caucasus.
Beria had consolidated power in Georgia and Azerbaijan through his allies. In Azerbaijan, he had Mir Jafar Bagirov running brutal repressions. But Armenia’s intellectuals and its protection of national culture resisted his dominance. When Khanjyan’s associates, particularly Nersik Stepanyan, publicly opposed Beria’s revisionist history of the Bolshevik movement in the Caucasus (which minimized Armenian Bolsheviks like Stepan Shahumyan), Beria moved to eliminate them. Khanjyan’s assassination marked the opening phase of what became a systematic campaign against Armenian national identity.
What followed was extraordinary in its scope and targeting. Armenia’s greatest writers, officials, clergy, and church leaders were arrested, tortured, and executed. The poet Charents died in an NKVD prison after being beaten to death. The head of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Catholicos Khoren I, was murdered in 1938 on Beria’s orders. The church was nearly destroyed-decapitated by 1938 and nearly wiped out entirely. Unlike the Soviet Union’s general atheism, the assault on the Armenian Church was explicitly tied to eliminating a pillar of Armenian national resistance. The purge was not merely about communist party consolidation; it was an attack on the very possibility of Armenian national expression within the Soviet system.
Archival evidence reveals Stalin’s direct involvement, especially after September 1936, when he intervened personally. A five-person NKVD brigade from Moscow took control of Armenia’s security apparatus. Stalin supervised interrogations, demanded reports, and tested the loyalty of his local surrogates by demanding they purge their own allies. The repression was extraordinary because it targeted not only alleged political enemies but the carriers of Armenian national culture itself. It aimed to break the will of a nation to exist as a distinct cultural entity within the Soviet framework.
Transcript
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