He
was simply known as “Amatuni” when he briefly showed up at the top
echelons of Soviet Armenia in the 1930s, but his name became infamous
for those who are acquainted with the horrors of Stalinism.
As
an irony of history, his actual name was Amatuni Vardapetian, so he
descended from a doctor of the Church. There were several Bolshevik
militants whose last names show a religious connection, and they would
become its greatest persecutors.
Amatuni
was born on October 24, 1900, in Elizavetpol (Gandzak, nowadays Ganja),
in the region of Lower Gharabagh. His biography is relatively sketchy.
He became a member of the Communist Party in 1919, and probably at this
time he adopted his first name as his last name.
After
working in some positions of leadership within the Communist Youth,
Amatuni studied at the Institute of Red Professorship in Moscow
(1926-1928) and then returned to Armenia, where he was head of the
department of propaganda of the Central Committee of the local Communist
Party, then secretary of the provincial committee of Yerevan and of the
Central Committee itself. He later moved on and from 1931-1935 he
worked in Tbilisi and Baku in similar positions.
Meanwhile,
the death of veteran Bolshevik Sergei Kirov, assassinated in Leningrad
(St. Petersburg) in December 1934, was a signal for the repression of
the following years, as it was ascribed to a mythical “right-Trotskyite”
center. The latter supposedly responded to Lev Trotsky, who had been
expelled from the Soviet Union following his defeat in the power
struggle with Stalin. A special committee created during the 20
th
Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956 noted in
its report that from 1935-1940 a total of 1,635,000 people had been
arrested for anti-Soviet activities, of which 688,503 were shot to
death. Almost ninety percent of those arrests happened in the period
1937-1938.
Amatuni,
a henchman of Stalin’s right hand in the Caucasus, Laurenti Beria, was
sent back to Armenia as second secretary of the Central Committee from
1935-1936. The repression started in Armenia with the arrest of Nersik
Stepanian, director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, in May 1936.
Stepanian was charged as the leader of the “right-Trotskyite” center,
which supposedly aimed at ending the Soviet rule in Armenia, separating
the country from the Soviet Union, and declaring independence, and shot
in July 1937. On July 9, Aghasi Khanjian, first secretary of the Central
Committee, was summoned to Tiflis for a meeting with Beria and
committed “suicide” (many decades later, it was found out that he had
been murdered by Beria himself). On the day of his burial, July 12,
there was a meeting of the “party active,” where 23 participants
declared that Khanjian was a traitor, chauvinist, sponsor of
anti-revolutionary elements, and so on and so forth. He was replaced
with Amatuni, who unleashed a series of arrests of party members,
intellectuals, clergymen, members of the military, et cetera, with false
charges orchestrated by Khachik Mughdusi (Astvatzatrian), Commissar
(minister) of Internal Affairs.
This
first wave of repression, which lasted until September 1937, included
many former party leaders in Soviet Armenia and even many veterans of
the sovietization period in 1920-1921. Many famous writers, like
Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts, Gurgen Mahari, Vahan Totoventz, Zabel
Essayan, and others were also among those who were summarily condemned
to death and shot, died in prison, or were sent to exile in Siberia.
The
repressors soon became the repressed. The second wave would start with
the plenary session of the Central Committee on 20-22 September 1937,
with the leading participation of Beria from Tiflis, and Georgi Malenkov
and Anastas Mikoyan from Moscow. Amatuni, who had been hailed on
September 5 in the party newspaper
Khorhrdayin Hayastan
as
the one who had helped disclose the “wreckers,” was accused of having
become the new leader of the “right Trotskyite center” and arrested
during the plenary, together with Stepan Akopov, second secretary of the
Central Committee, and Mughdusi. He was replaced with Beria’s protégé
Grigori Arutiunov, who would last until the death of Stalin and the fall
of Beria in 1953.
Nikolai
Yezhov, head of the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) from 1936-1938,
addressed a letter marked “secret” to Stalin on September 22, 1937. He
wrote: “Comrade Mikoyan asks to allow shooting a supplement of 700
people with the goal of cleaning Armenia from anti-Soviet elements . . .
I suggest to shoot 1,500 people, for a total of 2,000 people including
the previously approved number.”
From
1937-1938, a total of 8,104 people became victim of the repression,
including former members of the three Armenian parties (Armenian
Revolutionary Federation, Hunchakian Party, and Ramgavar Azadagan
Party), and of Socialist parties. The list shows that 3,729 were
indicted for anti-Soviet activities, 1,333 for A.R.F. activities, 508
for anti-revolutionary activities, 109 for being Trotskyites, and 9 for
chauvinist activities. Almost sixty per cent of the victims of
repression (4,530 people) were shot.
Seventy-one
of the 106 participants in the “party active” meeting of July 12, 1936,
were subsequently liquidated, as well as many executors and witnesses
of the crimes committed from 1936-1937. Among them was Amatuni, who was
shot in Moscow on July 28, 1938.
