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Index

Armenia

The Urartu Civilisation

Victory for Independence

Artashisian Dynasty on the Armenian Throne

Armenia caught between Rome and the Arsacids

The Acceptance of Christianity

Defending Christianity

Armenia Under the Bagratouni Dynasty

Cilicia - the New Armenia

Armenia Under Turanian Rule

The Renaissance or the Resurrection of Armenia

The Eastern Question

Russia in the Caucasus

The Armenian Question

Battle on Two Fronts

Tsarist Russia Against the Armenians

The Revolution of the Young Turks and the Armenian People on the Eve of World War I

The First World War

The Resurrection of Armenia

Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918

- Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918

Eastern Armenia

Western Armenia

"The Fateful Years" (1914-1917)

"Hopes and Emotions" (March-October, 1917)

The Bolshevik Revolution and Armenia

Transcaucasia Adrift (November, 1917

Dilemmas (March-April, 1918)

War and Independence (April-May, 1918)

The Republics of Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia

The Suppliants (June-October, 1918)

In conclusion

- In conclusion

Soviet Armenia

The Second Independent Republic of Armenia

Epilogue

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As the Soviet government attempted to reshape Armenia, making it both more Armenian and socialist, it met considerable resistance from the most ancient of Armenian institutions, the national church. The Catholicos of All Armenians, Gevork V (1911-1930), refused to recognise the atheist regime first. Antireligious zealots closed churches and insulted clergymen. Sevana Vank, the medieval monastery on Lake Sevan, was turned into a rest area for artists. Education was taken out of the hands of the priests, and religious instruction was restricted to the homes. IN 1922 the government set up a Free Church made up of Soviet sympathizers to rival the Armenian Apostolic Church. Since the mass of the peasants was still religious, the antireligious campaign struck at the heart of the worldview of the majority of Armenians.

Only in themed-1920s was an uneasy reconciliation achieved between church and state. By order of Deputy Foreign Affairs Commissar Lev Karakhan, an Armenian, the medieval manuscripts that had been taken from Etchmiadzin to Moscow earlier in the decade were returned to Armenia and placed in a new repository, the Matenadaran. In 1927 the catholicos acknowledged the Soviet government as the lawful authority in Armenia. But periodical anticlerical campaigns by the party continued to plague church-state relations. At the very end of the decade, militant atheists again closed churches in certain villages, despite the admonitions of moderate Communists such as Sahak Ter-Gabrielian, who warned that emancipation from the influences of religion could not be forced but would come only through education. By this time, however, the NEP was coming to an end, and the state was about to engage in a concerted assault on the whole peasant way of life.

Stalin's Revolution

As impressive as he successes of the New Economic Policy had been up to the last years of the 1920s, party leaders could not avoid the conclusion that the Soviet Union was not growing fast enough economically. While peasant agriculture was thriving, investment in new industry was simply inadequate to produce the quantities of industrial goods needed to trade with peasants for their surplus grain. By the end of 1927 the amount of grain collected from the peasantry was steadily declining. Low agricultural prices and the shortage of industrial goods convinced peasants to hold on to their produce until the terms of trade with the towns improved from them. When food shortages were felt in the cities, the party leaders decided to take "extraordinary measures", forcing the peasants to give up their grain. Stalin, who by 1928 was the most powerful party leader in the Soviet Union, became convinced that only a tough line toward the peasantry could save the regime. His opponents gathered his former ally, Nikolai Bukharin, and argued in favour of a continuation of the moderate NEP. They were defeated, however, in the fall of 1928 and systematically excluded form key decision-making positions. The road was now clear for the launching of an ambitious assault on the countryside and an all-out effort to industrialise the country. On Stalin's urging the Sixteenth Party Conference (April 1929) adopted the most radical version of the First Five-Year Plan.

Communists throughout the Soviet Union were dedicated to the idea that their country would someday have to overcome its peasant backwardness and become an industrial giant able to defend itself from external enemies. But within the party many Old Bolsheviks considered Stalin's "general line" of very rapid industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture to be destructive of the peasant-worker "alliance" that had been painstakingly built up in the 1920s. Many leaders in Transcaucasia tried to convince Moscow to exempt their region from the harsh policy toward the peasantry. After all, Transcaucasia had always been an importer of foodstuffs, not self-sufficient, and was certainly unable to produce agricultural surpluses in grain for export. Bu the central leaders rejected such an argument, and in November 1929 Moscow dismissed the Georgian First Secretary of the Transcaucasian Party Committee, Mamia Orakhelashvili, and replaced him with an outsider, Alexandr Krinitski, a man who did not know the local scene. The radical policies of Stalin were then systematically applied to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. Not only were peasants forced to join collective farms and give up their grain to state collection agencies, but they were subjected to another antireligious campaign. Churches were closed; icons broken; and the heavy veils torn off devout off Muslim women.