Birth of Arthur Adamov (August 23, 1908)

The Theater of the Absurd was one of the avant-garde directions of theater in the 1950s and 1960s, created after the great shock produced by World War II. One of its founders was an ethnic Armenian writer émigré in France, Arthur Adamov.

The son of a wealthy oilman from Karabagh, Suren Adamov (Adamian), Arthur (Haroutioun) Adamov was born on August 23, 1908, in Kislovodsk, a spa city in the northern Caucasus famous for its mineral waters. In one of his autobiographical novels, he would write: “I forgot to say that my family has Armenian origins. At a certain time I even spoke that language…” In 1914 his family left Russia and settled in Germany, where the future writer attended a French lyceum. Because of their Russian documents, the family was forced to leave Germany and move to Switzerland, where they lived until 1922. In the meantime, the October Revolution had a fatal outcome for the Adamovs, who lost almost their entire fortune. Suren Adamov, who was a known gambler, would leave the last remnants of that future on the card table and commit suicide in 1933.

In 1922 the Adamov family moved to France, and the future writer finally settled in Paris two years later, living the rest of his life in the French capital. The bitterness and deprivations of life in exile would be crucial in the formation of his worldview. In the late 1920s he associated with the newly born Surrealist movement and became friends with poet Paul Éluard. He also edited the surrealist journal Discontinuité. His first poems written in surrealist style became the expression of his pessimism.

In the 1930s Adamov actively participated in the fight against the fascist groups that had appeared in France following the wave of nazi-fascism in Germany and Italy. In 1938 he suffered a nervous breakdown. His autobiography The Confession, written in 1938-1943 and published in 1946, revealed his tortured conscience, delving into his sense of alienation and preparing the stage for some of the most powerful Absurdist dramas. After the defeat of France in the war and the German occupation, he spent almost a year in the internment camp of Argelès-sur-Mer, in southern France.

In the postwar period, Adamov, influenced by Swedish playwright August Strindberg and by Franz Kafka, started writing plays, with The Parody (1947) being the first. The title character of one of his best-known works, Professor Taranne (1953), is accused of various things (public nudity, littering, plagiarism). When he strenuously denied them, his denials are turned against him as further evidence of misdemeanors. His best-known play was The Ping-Pong (1955). Adamov’s later plays (Paolo Paoli, 1957; Spring 71, 1961; The Politics of Rubbish, 1963) featured radical political statements, besides his ongoing interest in dramatic experimentation. In the 1960s he become further radicalized. He translated a number of works by German authors and Russian classics into French. During his later years, he began to drink and use drugs.

The other members of the Absurdist leading trio, Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, would go on to great acclaim and recognition. Beckett received the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1969 and Ionesco was inducted into the French Academy in 1970. Forgotten, alone, and impoverished, Arthur Adamov died in Paris on March 16, 1970. His death may have been the result of an accidental suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates.

Death of Rafael Ishkhanyan (February 6, 1995)

Rafael Ishkhanyan was a prominent expert of Armenian language and book history, and also an engaged intellectual in Soviet times and the first years of the second independence.

He was born on March 9, 1922, in Yerevan. His parents, Avetis Kirakosian and Haykanush Ishkhanyan, who had become Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1919, then divorced. Rafael lost his mother at the age of eight, and grew up with his maternal uncle and grandmother, adopting their last name. In 1937 he lost his father, who was shot during the Stalin purges. (He would later marry Burakn Cheraz-Andreasyan, whose parents, Vahan Cheraz, a founder of the Armenian scout movement, and Vartanush were also shot by the Soviet regime in 1928 and 1937.)

 

In 1939 Rafael Ishkhanyan entered the Faculty of Philology in Yerevan State University. However, he interrupted his studies in 1940 when he was drafted by the Soviet army. He was wounded in World War II, fell prisoner to the German army, and after being released, he returned to the battle front. After the end of the war, he was discharged and returned to his studies. After finishing university in 1949, he left for Moscow, where he also graduated from the Institute of Library Studies in 1954.

From 1955-1963, Ishkhanyan worked in the field of library studies. He entered the Public (now National) Library where he worked as a senior librarian, head of subdivision, and head of division, and also worked at the Matenadaran as director of the scientific library. He also taught at the distance course of the Pedagogical Institute of Armenia. In 1962 he defended his first Ph.D. dissertation about Axel Bakunts (1899-1937), one of the prominent writers killed during the purges. The following year, he entered his alma mater, where he would spend the next thirty years (1963-1992) teaching at the chairs of Armenian language and history of the Armenian language. His main subjects were Armenian contemporary language, dialectology, and history of the language of Armenian literature. He would defend his second Ph.D., “History of the language of modern Armenian literature,” in 1973, and earn the title of professor in 1978. In the late 1970s, Ishkhanyan published some of his major works, Bakunts’ Life and Art (1974), History of the Armenian book (vol. 1) (1977), History of the language of Eastern Armenian poetry (1978), and The New Literary Armenian in the Seventeenth-Eighteenth Centuries (1979).

From the 1960s, two controversial subjects attracted Ishkhanyan’s attention, who published his views whenever possible: the origin of the Armenian people, which he considered autochthonous to the Armenian Plateau, and the restoration of traditional orthography (in replacement of the “reformed” orthography imposed in 1922 and 1940). He would ardently defend his views until the end of his life. Not by chance, his first books published on the subject appeared in the Diaspora, because the views expressed did not make it possible to publish in Soviet Armenia: Our Fundamental Orthographic Question (1983) and The Origin and Earliest History of the Armenians (1984).

When the Karabagh movement started in 1988, Ishkhanyan was also at the forefront of the national issues that were attached to the claims for Karabagh, and particularly the status of the Armenian language in Armenia. He also wrote extensively about political issues, including Armenian-Turkish relations ( The Law of Excluding the Third Force, 1991). He became the editor of “Lousavorich,” a newspaper entirely published in traditional orthography. Two books on his views on Armenian origins were finally published in 1988 ( Questions on the Origin and Earliest History of the Armenian People ) and 1989 ( Armenian Native Words and Earliest Loanwords ). In the 1980s he had serialized a history of the Armenian people for children and teenagers, Armenian Illustrated History, of which the first volume appeared in 1990 (two more volumes would be posthumously published in 1997 and 2004). He published a total of forty books in his life and countless articles.

In 1991 Ishkhanyan was elected a deputy to the Supreme Council (the forerunner to the National Assembly) of Armenia and designated director of the National Library of Armenia. He passed away on February 6, 1995, in Yerevan. The school No. 153 of the Armenian capital now bears his name.

Independence Referendum of Karabagh (December 10, 1991)

The Karabagh movement started in 1988 with the goal of reuniting the region of Mountainous Karabagh (an autonomous enclave artificially created in Azerbaijan) to Armenia by legal means. The joint statement of reunification, issued on December 1, 1989, seemed to be the culmination of that process. However, the opposition of Azerbaijan, with the consent of the Soviet central power, became the main obstacle for its realization.  

Another process, the collapse of the Soviet Union, was playing simultaneously. As a result, the Soviet republics prepared to break away, especially after the failed coup d’état in Moscow on August 19-21, 1991.  On August 30, 1991, Azerbaijan adopted the Declaration on the Restoration of the State Independence (a document similar to the Declaration on Independence adopted by Armenia on August 23, 1990), declaring itself the successor of the independent Republic of Azerbaijan of 1918-1920.

The first Azerbaijani Republic did not include Mountainous Karabagh, which was recognized as a disputed territory by the League of Nations. The legislature of Karabagh enjoyed the right to take advantage of existent Soviet legislation, particularly the Soviet law of April 3, 1990 “On the Procedure for Secession of a Soviet Republic from the USSR.” According to this law, in the case of a Soviet republic withdrawing from the Soviet Union, autonomous entities and densely settled minorities in that republic had the right to independently determine their political-administrative status. Azerbaijani repression against the Armenian population, which would take the shape of ethnic cleansing, led to the joint session of the Regional Councils of Mountainous Karabagh and Shahumian, which declared the establishment of the Republic of Mountainous (Nagorno in Russian) Karabagh on September 2, 1991, within the borders of the former Autonomous Region of Mountains Karabagh and the Shahumian region.

The declaration was consolidated with a referendum held on December 10, 1991, days before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union. The question asked to the voters was: “Do you agree that the proclaimed Republic of Mountainous Karabagh becomes an independent state, which will determine the ways of cooperation with other states and unions by its own will?” A total of 132,328 people were eligible to vote. The participation was 82.20% (108,736) of the voters, with the Azeri population of Karabagh boycotting the referendum. The “yes” had a resounding 98.89% (108,615 votes), with 95 votes annulled. 

Azerbaijan, which would not recognize the result of the referendum, did not stop shelling the capital Stepanakert and other towns. Ten people died on the referendum day and another eleven were wounded.

After parliamentary elections held later in the month, the Supreme Council of the new republic was formed. The first session of the Supreme Council in January 1992 ratified the proclamation of the independence and elected its president, Artur Mkrtchyan. The Council of Ministers was also created, with Oleg Yesayan as first prime minister. Soon the republic would have its own flag, coat-of-arms, and anthem. 

The Constitution of the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh, however, was not ready until 2006. The project was also put to referendum on December 10, 2006. Of 90,077 people eligible to vote, 77,279 voted to approve the Constitution (85.79%). There were 554 votes against. After 2006, December 10 became a holiday in Karabagh.

Unification of Armenia and Artsakh (December 1, 1989)

Demonstration in Karabagh, 1988

The movement for the reunification of Karabagh to Soviet Armenia in the 1980s did not start from one day to another. After Mikhail Gorbachev, the last First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, declared the new formula of glasnost (“transparency”) in the plenary session of the party (April 1985), many issues came to the surface. The atmosphere of openness and relative freedom offered the opportunity to look forward to reunification. In August 1987 the Armenians in the Autonomous Region of Mountainous Karabagh, then a part of Azerbaijan, submitted to Moscow a petition signed by more than 80,000 people.
The crucial step was taken in the February 20, 1988 session of the Regional Soviet of Mountainous Karabagh, which voted 110 to 17 to request the transfer of the region to Armenia.  Instead of a conciliatory solution, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party issued a resolution that qualified the Karabagh movement as “extremist” and “nationalist,” as well as contrary to the interest of the workers of Azerbaijan and Armenia. The lack of a solution from the top instilled the need for a solution from the bottom: massive popular demonstrations in Yerevan and Stepanakert followed, to which Azerbaijan reacted with the massacre of Sumgait on February 28, 1988.
The situation became more and more complicated and conflictive during 1988. In an attempt to find a solution, in January 1989 Gorbachev attached the Karabagh region directly to Moscow and designated Arkady Volsky as head of a special committee for administration. The Regional Soviet and the regional committee of the Communist Party were dissolved. However, hopes for a solution of the conflict were dashed and a congress of plenipotentiary representatives of Mountainous Karabagh was held in Stepanakert on August 16, 1989. It elected a National Council, to which it delegated the faculties of executive power. On November 28, 1989, the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union decided to eliminate the special committee and reattach Karabagh to Azerbaijan. It also created an Organizational Committee, led by the second secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, Viktor Polyanichko. In response, on December 1 a joint session of the Supreme Council of Soviet Armenia and the National Council of Mountainous Karabagh adopted a resolution about the unification of Armenia and Karabagh.
The resolution was based “on the universal principles of self-determination nations” and reflected “the legal aspiration of the two sections of the Armenian people separated by force.” The Supreme Council recognized the self-determination of the Autonomous Region, approved by the resolutions of the Regional Council of February 20 and July 12, 1988, as well as the resolutions of the congress of representatives of Artsakh (August 19, 1989) and the National Council (October 19, 1989) (article 1). It also recognized the congress of plenipotentiary representatives and the National Council as only legal authority of Karabagh (article 2). The Supreme Council and the National Council declared the reunification of Soviet Armenia and Mountainous Karabagh, and the citizenship rights of Soviet Armenia were extended over the population of Karabagh (article 3). A joint committee was created by the Supreme Council and the National Council to set up the steps towards reunification (article 4). Both legislative bodies took upon themselves the representation of the districts of Shahumian and Getashen, in the north of Karabagh, which still have their Armenian population (they would be occupied by Azerbaijan and its population expelled in 1991-1992) (article 5). The presidency of both bodies and the Council of Ministers of Armenia were tasked with the execution of measures derived from the resolution “to realize the actual fusion of the political, economic, and cultural structures of the Armenian SSR and Mountainous Karabagh in a unified state and political system.” (article 6). 
Azerbaijan characterized the resolution as an intromission in the internal affairs of the country. The tension between both countries was rising, and the conflict was shaping up towards a military solution. However, the Soviet Union still existed and its police and army, regardless of who they protected, were the last force that prevented the confrontation between Karabagh and Azerbaijan. Once they disappeared, the war became unavoidable.
Although the referenda on independence by Armenia (September 21, 1991) and Mountainous Karabagh (December 10, 1991) declared the independence of both countries, the resolution about the unification was never challenged. As a matter of fact, when Robert Kocharian was proclaimed candidate to the presidency in February 1998, his candidacy was questioned since article 50 of the Constitution of Armenia, sanctioned in 1995, established that the president should have a ten-year citizenship and permanent residency in Armenia. The courts of Armenia, however, determined that the candidacy was legally based on the resolution of December 1, 1989, since article 3 had proclaimed the “reunification of the Armenian SSR and Mountainous Karabagh” and extended the rights of Armenian citizens over the population of Karabagh. The declaration on independence of Armenia (August 23, 1990) had been based on the December 1, 1989 declaration, which was and still is in force. As it is well known, the independence of Karabagh remains unrecognized, even by Armenia.

The Massacre of Maragha (April 10, 1992)

The massacre of Maragha was one of the forgotten and under-reported episodes of the Karabagh war. The village of the Karabagh region was occupied and destroyed by Azerbaijani troops, the remaining inhabitants were massacred, kidnapped, or disappeared, and the village is currently under Azerbaijani control.

Maragha, formerly called Leninavan, was located in the region of Martakert, just across the border from the Azerbaijani town of Terter, in the oil-rich region of Mir-Bashir, and was one of the largest villages of the region. It had a population of 4,660 people, predominantly Armenians, according to the Soviet census of 1989.

The escalation of the conflict in the spring of 1992 led first to the bombing of the village, which resulted in considerable damage. Some residents fled and temporarily settled in other regions of Karabagh. Afterwards, Azerbaijani forces attacked Maragha on April 10, 1992. Artillery fire started early in the morning, followed by a ground assault from neighboring Mir-Bashir. The village was occupied in the afternoon by 20 armored vehicles and a battalion of 1,000 soldiers, reportedly followed by looters. The village had 500 residents at that time, according to the data of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

A preliminary report published in 1992 by HRW noted that the 60 Armenian fighters who defended Maragha did not have adequate weaponry and had been unable to hold their positions. They had retreated to a spot overlooking the village. Previously, they had notified the villagers, who had mostly left, while the remaining civilians, mainly consisting of the elderly and disabled, had gone into hiding in basements and underground shelters. The Azerbaijani forces massacred the civilians. The Armenians retook the village the following day, and came across bodies of forty-three civilians, mostly mutilated.

According to eyewitness accounts, people were decapitated or killed by torture (dragged tied to a tank or burnt alive), while bodies were mutilated, dissected, and burnt. Non-combatants, including women and children, were captured and taken hostage. The Vice-Speaker of the British Parliament’s House of Lords, Caroline Cox, who personally visited the place, gave a harrowing testimony: “I, along with my team from Christian Solidarity Worldwide, arrived within hours to find homes still smoldering, decapitated corpses, charred human remains, and survivors in shock. This was truly like a contemporary Golgotha many times over.”

Maragha was attacked again two weeks later. The remaining population was deported, and thirteen civilians were taken hostage. The houses were pillaged and burnt down afterwards. As a result, most of the village was destroyed, and the bodies were later buried in a mass grave near the village.

Amnesty International reported that a total of over a hundred residents had been slain, their bodies profaned and disfigured, and forty-five residents (including nine children and twenty-nine women) were taken hostage.

The Azerbaijani officers directly involved in the massacre were never held responsible or tried for the crimes committed in Maragha, while the Azerbaijani side has not responded to the accusations of massacre.

The events in Maragha were not covered by the international media. Cox explained that she had not brought journalists together with her to Maragha on those days because it was dangerous, but she took many photographs, which are printed in her book Nagorno Karabagh: Ethnic Cleansing in Progress. Cox also said in her interview that the English newspaper Daily Telegraph had agreed to print her report on the massacre of Maragha, but then they refused to do so.

The village is currently controlled by the Azerbaijani army, and its former residents now live in Russia, Armenia, and other areas of Mountainous Karabagh. The residents who stayed in Karabagh have built a village on the ruins of another village now called Nor Maragha (New Maragha), not far from the destroyed hometown. A monument in the new village commemorates the victims of the massacre.