Vol. 8 (2022): Political power, censorship and literary creation in Soviet Armenia

This article focuses on Armenian-Soviet literature and examines the relationship between communist power and writers. The latter were subject to the injunctions of a totalitarian state which, since Lenin, has always considered literature as an instrument of propaganda, and writers – and more generally intellectuals – as auxiliaries of the Party. Hence the difficulty of dealing with literary currents and aesthetics independently of the various phases of the history of the USSR. In addition to issues common to non-Russian peoples – is it a national or provincial literature? –, in Armenia, we can add those specific to a country that has inherited diverse cultural influences after several centuries of division between empires, a double linguistic norm (Eastern and Western), and a worldwide diaspora resulting from the genocide of 1915. We can thus measure the effects of the attempt to standardise a literature that must be "national in form, socialist in content", often leading to its folklorisation, but also a degree of resistance to this process by the "engineers of souls".

In this article, I examine Yeghishe Ch‘arents‘’ dedication to the national theme by identifying the historical events that affect the formation and evolution of his poetics.

An inspired poet of the Internationalist Revolution, an advocate of Lenin and of the revolting masses, Ch‘arents‘, a daring writer through his actions and his work, is by his destiny the embodiment of the tragedies, the hopes and the disenchantment of his nation, which irrigate his poetic language, constantly changing with political and geopolitical developments. Moreover, the impossibility of realising his “national dream” in Stalin’s USSR makes his relationships complex and his reactions to the established order unusual. Ch‘arents‘ is still considered contradictory in his life, and antithetical in his poetry.

Gurgen Mahari (1903–1969) is one of the most important writers in the literature of Soviet Armenia. In his youth, he was an active participant in the intellectual movements of the capital, briefly presented in this paper, before falling into disgrace in 1936 and being deported to the Gulag camps, from which he could only return after Stalin’s death. This article focuses on Barbed Wires in Blossom, a work written in 1965 and resulting from the writer’s long years in the camps. Censored in Soviet Armenia, it was first published in the diaspora (Beirut and Paris) in 1971–1973, and only in 1988 in Armenia, in the context of perestroika. This article analyses the narrative plans of Barbed Wires in Blossom and the writing processes employed by Mahari by comparing them with the writing choices adopted by other non-Armenian writers to “write the camps”. A cross-reading with Mahari’s second major work, Burning Orchards, about the self-defence of the city of Van in 1915, proved to be fundamental. In both works, the author makes use of dialogism and refraction, to make a plurality of voices and perspectives heard. The article also recalls some aspects of the bans on Armenian-Soviet literature, not only in the name of party ideology, but also of the official Armenian discourse on the history of the liberation of the Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. The Armenian censors did not forgive Mahari for showing the Armenian revolutionary movement, in Burning Orchards, from the perspective of deheroisation and desacralisation.

Kostan Zarian, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century Armenian literature, left a vast literary corpus of prose and poetry. This essay introduces one of his main subjects: his project of nation building through literature, particularly addressed during the decades he spent in the Armenian diaspora. It is noteworthy that Zarian explicitly rejected the Armenian dispersion brought by the catastrophic genocide of 1915, a rejection embodied by his (re)turn to the homeland in the twilight of his life.

Vasily Grossman, the Soviet author of the novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows, travelled to Armenia in November and December 1961, to rewrite the Russian translation of a book, written in Armenian by one of the leaders of the Union of Armenian Writers, Hratchia Kotchar. Less than two years later, in September 1963, the French intellectuals Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, surrounded by local authorities, including Hratchia Kotchar, spent two or three days in this Soviet republic, at the very end of a six-week stay in the USSR.

Afterwards, Grossman and Beauvoir – but not Sartre – both wrote texts in the first-person singular recalling their stays in Armenia, and, if these texts are of very different lengths, they reflect two partly complementary observations of Armenia, its society and its literary world at a specific time: during the Thaw and de-Stalinisation. Furthermore, Grossman develops in his text an explicit comparison between Armenians and Jews, two peoples who were victims of mass massacres in the 20th century, and he thus continues his reflection on the totalitarianisms of the century. Therefore, his and Beauvoir’s texts are also revealing of the perceptions and expectations of their authors: a Soviet writer, who had become very critical of Stalinism and Leninism, marked by the collective murders of the 20th century, and seduced by the simple people in Armenia, and a French woman who remained fascinated by communism and revolutions, and spoke neither Russian nor Armenian.

Violette Krikorian analyses the literary bridge between two icons of Armenian literature, Vahan Terian and Yeghishe Ch'arents', whose tragic destiny merges with that of the nation. Witnesses to the turmoil of war, genocide and revolution, both died in the prime of their lives. The elder Terian succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five, far from his hometown, in Orenburg, where he was spreading the Bolshevik word. His younger brother, his admirer and critic at the same time, embodies another romantic figure, that of the murdered poet, victim of Stalinist repression at the age of forty. In a way, they are the emblem of the revolution that devours its children.

Gorbachev’s call for Glasnost made it possible to re-examine the “blank pages” of history, particularly those of the Stalinist period in Armenia as in the rest of the USSR. In Armenia, the first republic to tear down the statue of Lenin (13 April 1991), this new Thaw opened the way for a critique of Stalinian nationalities policy in terms of territorial organisation (the demand for reuniting Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia) and of cultural life (the attempt to erase national past and identity). Published in the liberal Garoun [Spring], in April 1991, a few months before the declaration of independence and the end of the USSR, David Gasparian presents a not exhaustive list of the literature banned during the Great Terror. Drawn from the archives, the list offers a sample of the works considered dangerous by the censors: from the 19th century classics, including those with progressive, if not socialist, ideals, to the revolutionary writings of the rallied partisans of the new regime. The article also shows the oscillating directives of the Party, which the censors do not always manage to follow, at the risk of becoming victims of the purges themselves. The chronology of reprints of these works in Armenia is a political barometer. Reprints abroad allow us to map the communities in the diaspora where the literary heritage was preserved. The number of reprints and translations give us a glimpse of the reception of this literature.

Gender norms and sexuality have become a part of cultural and geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West. In the early 1990s, Russia was ready to embrace Western liberal values welcoming foreign and international nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to work in the country. In the last two decades, the Kremlin has started to perceive the promotion of Western liberal ideals across the globe as a sign of imperialism. Putin’s Russia presents itself as an advocate of “traditional values” and a defender of “traditional family”. The rejection of LGBT rights is part of Putin’s narrative of resisting Western liberal dominance. The Kremlin views Western NGOs promoting liberal agenda as actors working to undermine the county’s sovereignty and security. The paper analyses the role of foreign and international (Western) NGOs in Russian LGBT activism. It discusses how changes in geopolitical orientation and foreign policy that Russia has experienced in the post-Soviet period affected the connections between Russian LGBT activists and Western donors.

With the kind permission of the Journal, we present below a slightly abbreviated translation of Mikhail Minakov's article that appeared in Neprikosnovennyi Zapas in 2020 (n° 129, pp. 161–179).

It seems important to us to make this text known to the French-speaking reader in the context of the Russian invasion that started on 24 February 2022. At the time, the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian army and of the Ukrainian state seemed the most likely hypothesis not only for the Kremlin but also for many commentators. To explain Ukraine's surprising resistance to aggression, the role of civic mobilisation was emphasised, in line with sociological research conducted since 2014 on the “volunteers” in Maidan and in the Donbass.

Mikhail Minakov’s article, on the other hand, focuses on the state itself and takes a step back by considering a century of history rather than the last eight years alone. It shows the paradoxical continuity in the construction of a solid political system in Ukraine.

This Open Fora constitutes a record and a transmission of the voices of five Armenian feminists, currently involved in several forms of activism. Interviews were led in January and and February 2022 in Erevan and Vanadzor. What is their definition of feminism? How do they carry out this struggle in Armenia? What are their sources of information and inspiration?

We consider patriarchy spares no society. It therefore seems important to us to understand this system through the testimonies of those who struggle against its local manifestations.

This article is the result of my reflexion, on myself, on my city, on my country in this political, military, cultural situation that is ours now. As If I had gone back to my years of youth, I asked myself the same obsessive and inescapable questions over and over again: how could this have happened, how could we, and in particular I, do something to avoid the catastrophe? When did this country, which seemed be committed to the path of freedom, commit a fatal error? What have we done that we should not have done? And who is this “we”? Who is this “me”? Is there any future left for those who have so easily and unwittingly repudiated it to favour an illusory present, bewitched by a past that was itself invented by ideologues from their ivory tower? Are they many in Russia that endorse the war, and where are the sources of our resistance? What is happening to our language, to human nature? I raise all this as an artist and as a human being who is facing a critical situation.

Those reflexions took me three long months, from the stifling heat of August to the darkest days of November, which was cold in Russia. This article is the diary of my observations on the things of this world, on the dead and the living, on the mystical and the mundane, on the changes that have affected Moscow and its inhabitants in the last few months, on the process by which I understood that there are two “peoples of Russia”, impossible to mix, who are ontologically hostile and who have now met at a crossroads, although they are following opposite directions.