Soviet Armenia
For seventy years Armenia is a Soviet republic, transformed by industry, cities and schools, scarred by Stalin's terror, and home to a revival of national memory that breaks into the open in 1965.
- Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History — Ronald Grigor Suny, Indiana University Press (1993)
- The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars — Razmik Panossian, Columbia University Press (2006)
- The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present — Simon Payaslian, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)
- Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide — Thomas de Waal, Oxford University Press (2015)
Soviet Armenia began as a ruined, hungry country of refugees. Over the following decades it was transformed: the architect Alexander Tamanyan replanned Yerevan as a modern capital, built in local pink tuff stone; industry, hydro-electric dams, universities and an Academy of Sciences followed. Armenia became one of the most ethnically homogeneous Soviet republics, and Armenian was the language of schools and culture.
- Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History — Ronald Grigor Suny, Indiana University Press (1993)
- The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars — Razmik Panossian, Columbia University Press (2006)
The price was high. Collectivisation and Stalin’s purges killed or exiled thousands, including writers such as Yeghishe Charents and the head of the church, Catholicos Khoren I, who died in 1938 in murky circumstances. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians fought in the Second World War, and after it Stalin invited diaspora Armenians to “return”; around 100,000 came from the Middle East, Europe and America in 1946–49, many to hardship and some to deportation to Siberia.
- Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History — Ronald Grigor Suny, Indiana University Press (1993)
- The Armenians: From Kings and Priests to Merchants and Commissars — Razmik Panossian, Columbia University Press (2006)
- The History of Armenia: From the Origins to the Present — Simon Payaslian, Palgrave Macmillan (2007)
Under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, national feeling grew more visible. On 24 April 1965, the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide, tens of thousands marched in Yerevan, an extraordinary event in the Soviet Union, and in 1967 the authorities built the genocide memorial at Tsitsernakaberd, where crowds walk every 24 April. By the late 1980s, environmental protests and anger over Karabakh were ready to explode.
- Great Catastrophe: Armenians and Turks in the Shadow of Genocide — Thomas de Waal, Oxford University Press (2015)
- Looking Toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History — Ronald Grigor Suny, Indiana University Press (1993)
Why it matters today
Soviet rule built modern Armenia: Yerevan's pink-stone centre, near-universal literacy, a scientific and industrial base and a country where Armenians were the overwhelming majority. Many older Armenians speak Russian well and remember stability and security with some nostalgia, while also remembering repression. Ties to Russia, in family, work and trade, remain strong.