1. The number given for the size of the demonstration varies: Omari Chechoian, one of the main organizers of the demonstration, states 20,000 participants; the Russian human rights activist Liudmila Alekseeva speaks of 100,000; the French-Armenian historian Claire Mouradian provides the number of 200,000; and the Russian historian Elena Zubkova found the figure given as 3,000 in documents sent to Moscow. See Khechoian, Omari, “Revoliutsiia v umakh,” Aniv, 1, no. 1 (2006): 7;Google Scholar Alexeyeva, Ludmilla, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movements for National, Religious and Human Rights, (Middletown, 1985), 123;Google Scholar Mouradian, Claire, De Staline à Gorbatchev: Histoire d'une république soviétique, I'Armenie (Paris, 1990), 224;Google Scholar and Zubkova, Elena Iu.,“Vlast’ i razvitie etnokonfliktnoi situatsii v SSSR 1953-1985 gody,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 4 (2004): 22.Google Scholar

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4. Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 161. Emphasis added.

5. In fact, Suny himself addresses this recently in general terms in his “The Contradictions of Identity: Being Soviet and National in the USSR and After,” in Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly, eds., Soviet and Post-Soviet Identities, (Cambridge, Eng., 2012), 17-36.

6. Suny, Ronald Grigor and Martin, Terry, eds., A State of Nations: Empire and Nation- Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin, (Oxford, 2001);Google Scholar Martin, Terry, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, (Ithaca, 2001).Google Scholar

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9. See, for example, Zhuk, Sergei I., Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960-1985, (Baltimore, 2010), 4.Google Scholar

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11. Roland Vardanian, interview, Yerevan, October 12, 2005. Vardanian, born in 1943 to two military doctors, was raised partly by his grandmother, a genocide survivor. This interview was conducted as part of a more general inquiry into national identity and socialism since 1945 based on archival material and half-structured interviews with members of a broadly defined urban intelligentsia. All interviewees’ names are pseudonyms.

12. In this respect, the reading of archival sources and interview transcripts resembles much of what Yurchak describes in chapters 3 and 6 of his Everything Was Forever.

13. Pavel Gukasian, interview, Yerevan, April 26, 2007. Gukasian, born 1951, was an apparatchik with the Armenian Komsomol and the Ministry of Culture.

14. Tat'iana (born 1958), interview, Yerevan, May 10, 2005. Her father had been deported to Central Asia from Nagorno-Karabakh in the aftermath of World War II; after his release, in 1953, he came to Yerevan to live among friends he had made in the camps. Her mother's family fled the 1915 genocide to settle initially in Rostov-on-Don before moving to Yerevan.

15. On “speaking Bolshevik,” see Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, (Berkeley, 1995), 223–25.Google Scholar

16. See, for example, Jan Plamper, “The End of the Soviet Union? Origins and Legacies of 1991,19.05.2011-21.05.2011, Bremen,” H-Soz-u-Kult, July 9,2011, at hsozkult.geschichte. hu-berlin.de/tagungsberichte/id=3712 (last accessed October 17,2014). On such preconceptions' impact on analysis, see Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen Hermeneutik, (Tübingen, 1990), 270–90.Google Scholar In a way, historians’ dealings with archival sources and writing history are similar, if more distanced in terms of time, to the effect the anthropologists’ presence has on the field they are researching and thus the ways they “write culture.” Clifford, James and Marcus, George E., eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, (Berkeley, 1986).Google Scholar See also Krylova, Anna, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika, 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 119–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. Tara Zahra has recently pointed out that “even as historians assert that national groups are imagined communities, [we] have continued to write the history of Eastern Europe… as though [national] collectives were self-evident entities.” Zahra, Tara, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review, 69, no. 1 (2010): 96–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Dunham, Vera S., In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, (Durham, 1990), xix, 104,131, 245;Google Scholar Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, chap. 6.

19. Slezkine, Yuri, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, 53, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 414–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. See also Suny, , “The Contradictions of Identity,” 17. 21.Google Scholar Bourdieu, Pierre, “Physischer, sozialer und angeeigneter Raum,” in Wentz, Martin, ed., Stadt-Räume, (Frankfurt am Main, 1991), 32.Google Scholar

22. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), fond (f.) 8131 (Prokuratura SSSR), opis’ (op.) 36s (Otdel’ po nadzoru za vedeniem seldstva v organakh gosudarstvennoi besopasnosti), delo (d.) 5728 (Tovmasian A.S.), list (1.) 49. “Western Armenia” represents territories mainly in Anatolia that had once been part of the medieval Armenian Kingdom before being conquered by the Ottoman empire; in the late nineteenth century, the Anatolian regions of Kars and Ardahan, integral parts of “Western Armenia” for Armenians, became part of the Russian empire before being ceded again to Turkey by the Soviet government in 1921.

23. Ter-Abramian, Grant, “Erevanskaia gorodskaia sreda i inakomyslie,” in Gerasimova, Ekaterina and Lezhava, Nino, eds., Iuzhnii Kavkaz: Territorü, istorü, liudi, (Tbilisi, 2006), 20.Google Scholar Ter-Abramian interviewed the core group who organized the demonstration.

24. Figes, Orlando and Kolonitskii, Boris, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917, (New Haven, 1999), 31,37.Google Scholar

25. Grant Ter-Abramian, introduction to his “Gorod i inakomyslie” (PhD diss., Yerevan State University, 2006).

26. Hornsby, Robert, “Voicing Discontent: Political Dissent from the Secret Speech to Khrushchev's Ouster,” in Ilic, Melanie and Smith, Jeremy, eds., Soviet State and Society under Nikita Khrushchev, (London, 2009), 169. On the relevance of performative reenactment of Soviet traditions, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 74-76, 96-98,124-25.Google Scholar

27. Hayastani Azgayin Arxivi (Armenian National Archives, HAA) Hasarakakanqaghaqakan p'astat'ght'eri bajhin (Department of Social-Political Documents, HQP’), f. 1 (TsK KP Armenii), op. 45 (Materialy TsK KP Armenii 1965 goda), d. 2 (Vtoroe zasedanie UP Plenuma TsK Kompartii Armenii, 29 aprelia 1965), 1.41.

28. Vardanian, interview.

29. Hayden, Dolores, Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 11.Google Scholar

30. An architectural guide published in 1968 described the city's twentieth-century layout as one of a big amphitheater facing Ararat. See Arutiunian, V. M., Asratian, M. M., and Melikian, A. A., Erevan, (Moscow, 1968), 93.Google Scholar

31. The Soviet-Turkish Treaty of 1921 reduced the territory of the Armenian republic to a third of what the Treaty of Sevres had granted the independent Republic of Armenia before its Sovietzation in 1920. See Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 131.

32. Hayden, Power of Place, 33.

33. Most of this architectural ensemble remains in place today. Only the Lenin statue was removed after 1991, and the postsocialist urban development has led to, among other things, an obstruction of the perspective onto the smaller peak through the arch connecting the post office and the building formerly housing the labor union.

34. Zukin, Sharon, The Culture of Cities, (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), 3.Google Scholar

35. Figes, and Kolonitskii, , Interpreting the Russian Revolution, 34.Google Scholar

36. Ter-Abramian, , “Erevanskaia gorodskaia sreda i inakomyslie,” 20; Vardanian, interview.Google Scholar

37. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2,1.41. Komitas (born Soghomon Soghomonian), a monk of the Armenian Apostolic Church, transcribed Armenian folk songs from Anatolia and turned them into choir music that was well received in the Ottoman empire and Europe. He was imprisoned in Istanbul on April 25,1915, the day after the start of the genocide, and subsequently lost his mind; he died in a Paris asylum in 1935.

38. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2,1.38.

39. Vardanian, interview; HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2, 1. 38, 49-50. On the role of hooliganism in the 1960s, see LaPierre, Brian, “Making Hooliganism on a Mass-Scale: The Campaign against Petty Hooliganism in the Soviet Union, 1956-1964,” Cahiers du monde russe, 47, nos. 1-2 (2006): 349–75.Google Scholar

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41. Ter-Abramian, “Gorod i inakomyslie.“

42. Alexeyeva, Soviet Dissent, 123-33; Suny, Looking toward Ararat, 186-87; GARF, f. 8131, op. 36s, dd. 5728, 6182 (Arshakian A.T.); and Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 5 (Apparat TsK KPSS), op. 58 (Otdel’ organizatsionno-partiinoi raboty TsK KPSS), d. 19 (Materialy otdela Zakavkaskikh respublik), 1.72.

43. Calls for solidarity with Vietnam's struggle against the American invasion, the general support for decolonization, and the official remembrance of World War II were omnipresent in the Soviet press in March and April 1965. On the Soviet press providing its readers with meaningful frames and schemata for interpreting the world around them, see Jeremy Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, (Princeton, 2000), 21.

44. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68 (Pis'ma sovestkikh grazhdan o velikoi tragedii armianskogo naroda 1915 g. i ob uvekovechnii pamiati pavshikh v rezul'tate genotsida armian), 1.13.

45. Ibid., 11. 6, 7.

46. Ibid., 1.5. It is unclear which particular article and photographs he was referring to. Pravda, featured an article on March 10,1965, with the headline “Ne zabudem, ne prostim!“ See also “Ne dopustit’ amnestii ubitsam!,” Pravda, March 11,1965.

47. Weiner, Amir, “The Making of a Dominant Myth: The Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity,” Russian Review, 55, no. 4 (October: 1996): 638–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. HAA HQP', f. 1, d. 45, d. 68,1.16; note also the similarity here to the interviewees' statements quoted in the introduction to this article. Weiner, “The Making of a Dominant Myth,” 660.

49. HAA HQP’ f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.19.

50. Ibid., 1.13. This concern correlates with Soviet border policy, which defined border regions as “front” districts. See Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 320.

51. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,11. 2, 3, 6,12,18,19. See also Davies, Sarah, Public Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941, (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), 124–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52. Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, chap. 11.

53. Grüner, Frank, Patrioten und Kosmopoliten: Juden im Sowjetstaat, 1941-1953, (Cologne, 2008);Google Scholar Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire, 313-16, 320, 325.

54. Bakhtin, Mikhail, “Discourse in the Novel,” in Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Holquist, Michael, trans. Emerson, Caryl and Holquist, Michael (Austin, 1981), 361.Google Scholar

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57. HAA HQP', f. 1, d. 44 (Materialy TsK KP Armenii 1964g.), op. 108 (Dokladnye zapiski), 1.31; RGANI, f. 5, op. 58, d. 19,1.24. The print run of the first Armenian edition of Werfel's novel amounted to 40,000 copies. RGANI, f. 5, op. 58, d. 19,1. 64f.

58. On suffering as a “Soviet” virtue, see Alexopoulos, Golfo, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926-1936, (Ithaca, 2003), 113–27;Google Scholar and Kaganovsky, Lilya, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade: Cultural Fantasy and Male Subjectivity under Stalin (Pittsburgh, 2008), 40–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The serialized contributions of “K 20-letiiu velikoi pobedy” in Pravda, likewise emphasized the overcoming of odds as a victory.

59. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.12.

60. Ibid., 1.13.

61. Ibid., 1.18.

62. Ibid., 1.4.

63. Ibid., 11. 2-4,12,13.

64. Ibid., 1. 4.

65. See, among others, “Ne zabudem, ne prostim!,” Pravda, March 10,1965.

66. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.13.

67. On the dissertation's popularity among students, see RGANI, f. 5, op. 58, d. 19, 1.24. On its use in other students’ work, see GARF, f. 8131, op. 36s, d. 7528.

68. HAA HQP', f. 1, op., 123 (Otdel’ kadrov), d. 5531 (Kirakosian Dzh, S.), 1.9.

69. Dzh. S. Kirakosian, “Pervaia mirovaia voina i zapadnye armiane (1914-1916gg.): Aftoreferat” (Yerevan, 1965), 3-4. Letters to Moscow authorities also referred to Hitler's quote, “Who remembers the massacres of the Armenians in Turkey?” See HAA HQP', f. 1, d. 45, d. 68,1.12.

70. Kirakosian, “Pervaia mirovaia voina,” 4.

71. Decolonization had been repeatedly endorsed by Nikita Khrushchev since the late 1950s. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 66-72.

72. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.19.

73. It seems as if Armenians echoed the official statements in the Soviet press on the independence of Asian nations in order to make the issue relevant to the Armenian claim for national territory. See, for example, a statement by the Soviet government addressed to the United States about Vietnam, published in Pravda, which declared the “right of the peoples to independence and sovereignty.” “Zaiavlenie Sovetskogo pravitel'stvo pravitel'stvu SShA,” Pravda, March 5,1965.

74. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.18.

75. Ibid. Emphasis added. On Turkish influence on the territorial division of the Soviet Caucasus in the 1920s, see Baberowski, DerFeind ist überall, 244-45.

76. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,1.13.

77. Ibid., 1.20.

78. For similar sentiments, see petitions and leaflets from Nagorno-Karabakh in HAA HQP', f. 207, op. 26s, d. 140,11.1-6; and RGANI, f. 5, op. 58, d. 19,1. 25.

79. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 46 (Materialy TsK KP Armenii 1966 goda), d. 66 (Perepiska s TsK KPSS), 1.112.

80. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 46, d. 65b (Obrashchenie obshchestvennykh deiatelei), 11.1-4. See also HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 68,11.12-13.

81. Quoted in Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, (London, 1990), 48.

82. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 223-25. For other, even more unlikely groups’ adaptations of the socialist idiom, see Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts;, Dobson, Miriam, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca, 2009), 12,116 Google Scholar; and Lehmann, Maike, “A Different Kind of Brothers: Exclusion and Partial Integration after Repatriation to a Soviet ‘Homeland,'” Ab Imperio, 3 (2012): 171–211.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

83. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2,1. 38.

84. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 44, d. 54,1. 64-65. These measures were the result of an initiative by Dzhon Kirakosian and the directors of the Armenian institutes for Marxism- Leninism and for oriental studies, who had, in July 1964, started to lobby the Armenian CC to officially commemorate the Armenian genocide. The Armenian CC supported this and tried to gain support in Moscow. See ibid., 11.66-73.

85. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2,1. 44.

86. Ibid., 11.38, 43, 44, 51, 52.

87. Ibid., 1.42.

88. Ibid., 11. 42, 43.

89. Ibid., 1.32.

90. Ibid., 1.48, 53.

91. Ibid., 1.39.

92. Ibid., 1.48.

93. Ibid., 1.37; see also ibid., 11. 43, 44.

94. Ibid., 1. 38; see also ibid., 1. 49.

95. On the role of Chingis Khan in Soviet propaganda, see Brandenberger, David, NationalBolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Russian National Identity, 1931-1956, (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 147,163–64.Google Scholar For the Caucasian historiography on the issue, see Shnirel, ‘man V. A., The Value of the Past: Myths, Identity and Politics in Transcaucasia (Osaka, 2001), 60–61.Google Scholar

96. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 45, d. 2,1.32.

97. Ibid., 11.32-36.

98. Ibid., 1. 49-50.

99. Ibid., 11. 39, 48.

100. Ibid., 1. 38f.

101. Ibid., 11.55-62.

102. Ibid., 1. 45.

103. Ibid., 11. 51-52.

104. Ibid., 1.39.

105. Ibid., 1.38; see also 11.46,49, 54.

106. HAA HQP', f. 1, op. 46, d. 65a (Pis'mo Kochiniana A. i Muradiana B. v TsK KPSS po voprosu prisoedinenii NK k ArmSSR), 1. 3. Iakov Zarobian was “promoted” in 1966 from his post as First Secretary of the Armenian Central Committee to Deputy Minister for Electrification in Moscow.

107. Ibid., 11.1, 3, 5, 7.

108. Tumarkin, Nina, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, (New York, 1994).Google Scholar

109. Arutiunian, Asratian, and Melikian, Erevan, 236.

110. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 127.

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