History

Ambassador Matlock recalls witnessing the removal of Stalin’s statue from Victory Park in Yerevan during Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in the early 1960s.

Ambassador Matlock argues that internal Soviet weaknesses, not Western military or economic pressure, caused the USSR’s collapse, and that the Cold War had already ended before the Union broke apart.

Without a complete public reckoning with Stalinist repression, Armenian society became permissive to authoritarian practices. Incomplete historical memory leaves a nation vulnerable to repeating its past.

Historian Pietro Shakarian explains why Pashinyan’s rejection of the Artsakh Movement is an attack on the very foundations of Armenia’s independence and statehood.

Pietro Shakarian compares the Soviet assassination of Catholicos Khoren I in 1938 to Pashinyan’s criminal prosecution of Catholicos Garegin II, revealing continuities in how authoritarian regimes attack independent institutions.

Pietro Shakarian traces the origins and mechanics of the Great Purge in Soviet Armenia, explaining how Stalin and Beria systematically destroyed the Armenian intellectual and ecclesiastical elite.