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The first major outbreak of dissident nationalism within Soviet Armenia occurred on April 24, 1965, when thousands of Armenians in Yerevan demonstrated on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1915 deportations and massacres. Crowds gathered at the Spendiarian Opera House as a quiet official commemoration was being held inside. Soon the observers became angry, rocks were thrown, and the protesters demanded that the Turks return the Armenian lands to Armenia. Armenians called upon the Russians to aid them in retrieving their irredenta. Government officials were unable to calm the crowd, and even the Catholicos Vazgen I, a man regarded by many as the true head of the nation, had difficulty in restoring some semblance of order. The demonstration was an extraordinary event in the Soviet Union, and its consequences were impressive. Order was restored without resource to armed suppression and bloodshed, in contrast to what had occurred nine years earlier when Georgians in Tbilisi had demonstrated their national concern about the criticisms of Stalin. But the Armenian party leader, Iakov Zarobian, was dismissed, and his successor, Anton Kochinian, denounced him for permitting "local nationalism" and tolerating "the poor situation in ideological work in Armenia". At the same time the party leadership made it clear that a monument would be built in Yerevan to commemorate the victims of the genocide. In November 1967 Kochinian inaugurated the Tzitzernakabert monument to the genocide, fifty-two years after the events and forty-seven years after the sovietisation of Armenia.

The Armenian Question was kept alive outside Soviet Armenia as well. The "Armenian Question" was highly brought into attention on January 27, 1973, when Gourgen Yanikian, a 78 years old Armenian living Santa Barbara, shot and killed two Turkish consuls. Gourgen Yanikian was an Western Armenian who at an age of 20 had witnessed how Turkish soldiers had slaughtered his older brother during the genocide. He had survived the genocide, but the memories lived on. After many years in Persia (where he, during the Second World War, supervised the construction of the railroad between Tehran and Tabriz for the allied powers, a contract which was supposed to give him millions) moved to USA and settled down there. His dream had always been to make a movie of the Armenian Genocide in order to tell the world about the events which had struck his family and nation. But when he realised that neither Armenian organisations and political parties (who did not take the old man seriously) nor foreign governments, due to unwillingness to hamper their relations with Turkey, were willing to take measures in this issue, he decided to achieve the attention of the world by much more drastic measures. He invited the two Turkish consuls in California in order to, seemingly, hand over a historical heirloom to the Turkish government. At the meeting he shot the consuls, sat down and waited for the authorities to arrive. He was arrested, sentenced to prison and released after 10 years, because of humanitarian reasons, seriously ill, and was put under house arrest. He died some weeks later, 88 years old.

Yanikian's action aroused a relative major attention and received large media coverage in USA, but it's maybe some bigger after-effect was that it, indirectly, gave birth to the creation of Armenian terror organisation, among which the most famous was ASALA (Armenian Secret Army of Liberation of Armenia). ASALA, a Marxist-Leninist oriented group was established in 1975, under the leadership of Hagop Hagopian. However, during the coming years it gathered members from different political camps, all between nationalists and Marxists. The group executed many terror acts between 1975 and 1994. These actions gave definitely new life to the Armenian Question and might have forced the nations of the world to revise their stance on this question. But even if it did achieve its primary goal, many mean that it also divided the Armenian Diaspora in two camps, about whether this kind of actions are necessary and offered the Turkish state an opportunity to make itself to look like the victim.

By the 1970s national expression in Armenia could not be contained without official bounds. On January 20, 1974, a young man of twenty-five, Razmik Zohrabian, set fire to a portrait of Lenin in Yerevan's central square. He announced that he was protesting "the anti-Armenian internal and foreign policy" of the Soviet government and the repression of Armenian patriots and dissidents. Investigations revealed that the young protester was a member of a secret underground Armenian nationalist party, the national Unity Party, a small group of young Armenians who demanded the return of Nakhichevan, Karabakh (Artsakh), and Western Armenia to the Armenians and the formation of a united independent state. This separatist movement had been formed in 1967 by Stepan Zatikian and others, who managed to put out one issue of an illegal journal, Paros, before they were rounded up, tried and imprisoned in 1974. Some eighty Armenians had been tried and imprisoned for nationalist activity in the decade up to 1974. Soviet authorities later reported that Zatikian broke with the more moderate members of his party while in prison and began to advocate terrorism. On January 9, 1977, a bomb exploded in Moscow subway killing seven and injuring thirty-seven. Two years later TASS announced that Zatikian, along with Hakob Stepanian and Zaven Baghdasarian, had been secretly tried, found guilty of the bombing, and summarily executed.

The separatists of the National Unity Party were the most extreme and violent of the dissidents who emerged in Armenia in the late 1960s and 1970s. A Human Rights Group, much more moderate and concerned with broader civil rights issues, was set up in Yerevan in April 1977 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Agreement in 1975. The five members of this small group made contact with similar groups in Russia, Ukraine, and Georgia, but by December of that year had all been arrested. In its first declaration the Armenian "Helsinki Group" combined issues of human rights with specific Armenian national aspirations, namely the repatriation of Armenians to Armenia, Armenian membership in the United Nations, and the rejoining of the Armenian republic of Mountainous Karabakh and Nakhichevan, which were included in the territory of Azerbaijan. This last issue, the question of Karabakh, remained the single most volatile political demand of Soviet Armenia trough the 1980s.