Armenian upsurge in Soviet Union: National minorities are & justice seeking autonomy
1988Hayden Perry 1988-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 8 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 8
8 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1988 Glasnost and perestroika are suffering severe strains as the minority peoples of the Soviet Union demand the national rights promised them by the Bolshevik Revolution. Ukrainians, Latvians, Crimean Tartars, and Armenians are among those knocking on the Kremlin door demanding the right to truly autonomous homelands within the framework of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Generations of Tsarist and foreign oppression, followed by decades of Stalinist betrayals, have generated burning resentment among the scores of national minorities making up the Soviet Union.
The wave of anti-colonial struggles from Eritrea to New Caledonia have kindled national aspirations among all subject peoples. Now talk of "openness" and "restructuring" have emboldened the Soviet minorities to speak up and make demands.
Last February, and again in May, up to 100,000 Armenians marched daily for over a week in the streets of Yerevan, the capital of the Armenian Republic.
They are demanding that the Republic's boundary lines be redrawn to include the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.
This is a political subdivision of the neighboring Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan. The district is populated by 126,000 Armenians, most of whom Christians, Shite Moslems.
tortured history The intensity of feeling the Armenians are displaying over a seemingly small boundary adjustment is explained by the tortured history of the Armenian people.
The Armenians form one of the oldest ethnic groups in Europe and Asia Minor, with a 2000-year-old language and culture. The Armenians were a nation when Alexander the Great was marching to India. They occupied an area that now includes parts of the Soviet Union and Turkey.
In the vicissitudes of medieval and modern history, Armenians were conquered by various invaders. In the 19th century, they became subjects of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
As Christian people subject to Moslem rule, the Armenians were never assimilated, and the "Armenian question" was long the súbject of desultory debate by the Great Powers. In 1915, the Turks determined to "solve" the Armenian question by the first major act of genocide in modern times.
Up to 1.5 million Armenians were murdered, either by outright slaughter, or by being driven into the deserts to starve. This holocaust has never been admitted by the Turkish government, but it has been central to the consciousness of the surviving Armenians for over 70 years.
About a million survivors regrouped around the ancient Armenian capital of Yerevan, located in area alternately under Tsarist Russian and Turkish rule. During the years of civil war, the Armenians maintained a precarious existence as an independent nation-constantly threatened by invasion by the dreaded Turks.
Revolution guarantees national rights With the triumph of the Russian Revolution, the Armenians chose, in November 1920, to become one of the 15 autonomous Soviet Republics within the USSR. Prospects for the Armenians-and the other national minorities in the Soviet State-looked good in 1920.
Lenin had said, "The dictatorship of the proletariat has opened up for the first time the possibility of a correct solution to the national question." The Soviets proclaimed the right of every nationality to the use of its own language, the preservation of its culture, the maximum local autonomy, and the right to secede from the union.
Statutes on paper, however, could not alone overcome generations of domination by the European Russians—the so-called Great Russians, who constitute 51 percent of the population of the USSR. Lenin demanded the utmost vigilance by the Bolshevik cadres to repress every manifestation of Great Russian chauvinism.
These principles did not long survive the degeneration of the revolution under Stalin. Great Russian boots stamped out every independent thought in the national republics. While some minorities retained their language and culture, others were branded traitors by collective guilt.
The Crimean Tartars were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and banished thousands of miles to Siberia. The Baltic states were incorporated into the USSR as subject peoples, occupied by the Red Army.
Under Stalin, race and national prejudices survived. Old antagonisms festered and grew.
Scan page 9
hopes wave spelled an end to the regime's of destroying the legacy of Solidarity. Reforms disorient Solidarity leadership By raising prices and cutting back the