Incomplete Reckoning with Stalinism Opens the Door to Authoritarianism Today
Armenia never fully reckoned with the Stalinist purges. That incomplete memory left society permissive to authoritarianism. History is repeating because we didn't finish confronting it.
Armenia’s incomplete reckoning with the Stalinist Great Purge created a dangerous vulnerability to authoritarianism in the present. During the Soviet era, two waves of de-Stalinization occurred: first under Khrushchev in the 1950s-60s, when victims were rehabilitated and some public memory was restored; second under Gorbachev in the 1980s, when Tengiz Abuladze’s film Repentance and other cultural works explicitly examined Stalinist terror. Yet even these efforts did not produce a complete societal reckoning.
When the Third Republic emerged after independence in 1991, the focus shifted to survival, the struggle for Artsakh, and preservation of the Armenian Genocide memory. The systematic study of how ordinary Armenians participated in the purges-how neighbors informed on neighbors, how local party leaders denounced rivals-was not pursued. The uncomfortable truth that Stalinist repression was not imposed solely from above but also enabled by local complicity was left unexamined. Without this uncomfortable self-examination, society could comfortably blame ‘Stalin’ or ’the Soviet system’ while avoiding questions about what ordinary Armenians had done and what the lessons might be for avoiding similar dynamics in the future.
This incompleteness created a vulnerability. When the so-called Velvet Revolution of 2018 brought Pashinyan to power, some people spoke approvingly of ‘crushing the wreckers’ and ‘smashing the enemies of the people’-language directly from 1937 Soviet documents. The concepts of denunciation, the targeting of business leaders and intellectuals, the use of the state apparatus against political rivals-these were not recognized as echoes of Stalinism because Armenian society had never fully processed what Stalinism was or how it functioned.
Moreover, incomplete reckoning meant that the mechanisms of authoritarian control were not clearly visible to the present generation. The concentration of power, the subordination of institutions, the construction of internal enemies, the use of criminal proceedings to eliminate rivals, the suppression of competing historical narratives, the transfer of wealth from disfavored groups to favored ones-all of these were features of both Stalinism and contemporary Armenia. But without a complete understanding of how Stalinism operated, citizens and observers could not recognize the patterns. Instead of seeing authoritarianism, they saw ‘government with problems’ or ‘an imperfect democracy.’ The failure to reckon with the past left the present dangerously exposed to repetition of the past.
Transcript
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?