Birth of Hovhannes Kajaznuni (February 1, 1868)

Hovhannes Kajaznuni was an important political figure, particularly in the crucial years of 1917-1920, and became one of the founding fathers of the Republic of Armenia as its first prime minister. He also was an accomplished architect, with important work done in Baku before the Russian Revolution and Armenia after the sovietization.

He was born on February 1, 1868, in Akhaltskha (now Akhaltsikhe in the region of Javakhk, Georgia). His family was originally from Erzerum. Their original surname was Igitkhanian, and his great-grandfather, a priest called Ter Hovhannes, had received permission from the Catholicos of All Armenians to change the surname to Ter-Hovhannisian. At his turn, his great-grandson translated the family name into Armenian, turning Igitkhanian into Kajaznuni; igit means “brave” in Turkish (kaj in Eastern Armenian, kach in Western).

Kajaznuni studied in Tiflis from 1877-1886, first in a private school and then in the royal school. In 1887 he entered the Institute of Civil Engineering in St. Petersburg. Two years later, he married Satenik Mirimanian, despite her father’s opposition. They would have six children (four boys and two girls), and they would lose three of them to the service of the homeland. Ashot would die in the aftermath of his participation in the battle of Gharakilise (1918); Aram would die in the summer of 1920 fighting Tatar rebels in the region of Zangibasar (Masis); Ashot’s twin brother, Ruben, would be taken prisoner and killed by the Turks after the occupation of Kars (1920).

In his last years of studies, Kajaznuni joined the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. He graduated in 1893 with the title of architect. He moved to Baku, where he worked as engineer-architect in the regional architecture department from 1893-1895. After working for two years as an architect in Batum, from 1897-1899 he was a district architect for the municipal administration of Tiflis. He returned to Baku in 1899 and worked for the next seven years in the Oilmen’s Council as chief architect. He designed a hospital, residential buildings, and hotels in the area of Balakhan. He was also the designer and builder of the Cathedral of St. Thaddeus and Bartholomew in downtown Baku from 1907-1911, which would be destroyed by the Soviet Azerbaijani regime in the early 1930s.

Meanwhile, Kajaznuni had actively entered political life in 1906, becoming a member of the committee to end the Armeno-Tatar conflict in Baku. In 1909 he was arrested by the Russian police within the case that had been opened against the A.R.F. and left the empire in 1911 to avoid testifying in the trial. He lived in France, Belgium, and in the city of Van, in Western Armenia, where he wrote various articles in Russian on Shakespeare.

Returning to the Caucasus in 1914, he was elected a member of the Armenian National Council in 1917 and, after the Russian Revolution, he was elected to the Transcaucasian Parliament (Seim) in February 1918.

In the critical days of May 1918, Kajaznuni was a member of the Armenian delegation that participated in the conferences of peace in Trabizond and Batum. He was among the signatories of the Treaty of Batum on June 4, 1918, a few days after Armenia had declared its independence.

After the foundation of the Republic, Kajaznuni was designated first Prime Minister. The cabinet moved to Yerevan from Tiflis on July 19, 1918. In October, under pressure from the Council (Parliament) of Armenia, Kajaznuni resigned, but was charged by the Council with the formation of a new coalition government. The coalition was formed by the A.R.F. and the Armenian Populist Party, and would last until June 1919. Meanwhile, in April 1919 Kajaznuni traveled to the United States as part of a delegation to negotiate political and economic help to Armenia, and left the position of prime minister to Alexander Khadisian.

He returned to Armenia in September 1920 and was named vice-president of the Parliament, becoming president in the last days of the Republic, on November 25. After the sovietization, Kajaznuni was arrested and spent a month and a half in prison, until he was liberated by the February rebellion. In April 1921, after the failure of the rebellion, he left Armenia and lived in Iran, India, Egypt, and Romania. He wrote a report on the party’s situation, The Armenian Revolutionary Federation Has Nothing to Do Any Longer, which was published in 1923 and generated a big controversy. In 1924 he returned to Soviet Armenia.

He taught architectural planning at Yerevan Statue University and was a member of the technical council of the Institute of State Planning. He designed and directed the construction of cotton factories in Yerevan and Sardarabad, oil and soap factories in Yerevan, and housing for workers. He also built various buildings in Leninakan (nowadays Gyumri) after the earthquake of 1926. 

Kajaznuni was a victim of the Stalinist purges. His past condemned him. He was arrested in 1937 and died on January 15, 1938 from pneumonia in the prison of Yerevan. Otherwise, he had been condemned to be shot on December 5, 1937, but the prison doctor had temporarily postponed the sentence. His archives were confiscated and disappeared. Kajaznuni was rehabilitated in 1955, but his name remained in the shadows until the end of the Soviet period.

According to certain data, the first primer minister of the Republic of Armenia was buried in the cemetery of Kozern, in Yerevan. However, the cemetery was later destroyed and his tomb was lost. Thanks to the efforts of Kajaznuni’s daughter Margarit, a symbolic tombstone was erected in the city cemetery of Tokhmakh Lake.

Death of A. Amatuni (July 28, 1938)

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.

Death of Mekertich Armen (December 22, 1972)

Mekertich Armen was a less known, even though well-regarded member of the generation of Armenian intellectuals that became victim of Stalinism.

He was born Mekertich Harutiunian on December 27, 1906, in Alexandropol (nowadays Gumri), in a family of artisans. He studied in a local school and then in the gymnasium for boys and in one of the schools opened by the Near East Relief in the city. Years later, he would graduate from the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, where he studied at the section of script writing for two years.

In 1922-1923 he was a boy scout (scoutism was still tolerated in Soviet Armenia in the early 1920s), and in 1923 published his first poem in the local newspaper Panvor . In 1925 Mekertich Armen was one of the founding members of the short-lived “October” union of writers of Leninakan (Gumri’s name in Soviet times), started by Gurgen Mahari (1903-1969) along with Soghomon Tarontsi (1904-1971), Gegham Sarian (1902-1976), Sarmen (1902-1980), and others. In 1925 he moved to Yerevan and entered another short-lived union of writers, called “November” and founded by Yeghishe Charents (1897-1937). He worked for a few years in the editorial offices of the journals Grakan Dirkerum and Yeritasard Bolshevik . He would also be the secretary of the artistic council of Haykino (the Armenian film studios, later known as Armenfilm).

By 1934, when he became a member of the newly founded Writers Union of Armenia, Mekertich Armen had already published several books of prose, among them the novels Yerevan (1931) and Scout 89 (1933).  His remarkable novel The Fountain of Heghnar (1935), set in pre-Soviet times, put him among the best writers of his generation.

However, the political purges that swept the Soviet Union in 1936-1938 did not spare the political and intellectual class of Armenia. Along with many members of his generation (Charents, Axel Bakunts, Gurgen Mahari, Vagharshag Norents, Soghomon Tarontsi, among many others), Mekertich Armen was arrested in 1937 as an “enemy of the people” (the usual slogan of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to tarnish its potential and real opponents) and exiled to a labor camp, where he remained until 1945.

Upon surviving the hardships of exile, he returned to Yerevan and continued his literary activities. He published new novels and collections of short stories, but none repeated the success of The Fountain of Heghnar, which had been printed twice before his arrest and had three more editions from 1955 to 1961. In the short interlude of Nikita Khruschev’s period of the “thaw,” when the crimes of Stalin were denounced and some works reflecting the Siberian labor camps were allowed to be published, Armen published a collection of short stories, They Asked Me to Deliver to You (1964), that brought some recognition once again. In the last years of his life, he was named Emeritus Worker of Culture of Soviet Armenia (1967) and his collected works were published in five volumes (1967-1971). The Fountain of Heghnar was the subject of two films (“The Fountain of Heghnar,” Arman Manarian, 1971, Yerevan, and “The Spring,” Arby Ovanessian, 1972, Iran).

Mekertich Armen passed away on December 22, 1972, in Yerevan.