With Khanjian out of the way, Beria's appointee to head the Armenian party, Haik Amatouni, began a purge to rid the party of a newly discovered heresy, Khanjianism. Throughout the Soviet Union deviant and even mildly critical Communists were being removed from office. By 1937 they were being arrested, tried, and either shot or exiled to prison camps. Apparently the pace and ferocity of the purges in Armenia were not satisfactory to Stalin, and the Armenian leaders. Amatouni and his deputy, Stepan Agopov, were chided for leniency. Despite this criticism from Moscow, the Armenian Communists did not remove their leaders but re-elected them to their high posts. From Moscow the Politburo decided to intervene directly and en this insubordination. On September 8, 1937, Stalin wrote to Bureau of the Armenian Central Committee, accusing it of covering up enemies of the Armenian people. A week later two of Stalin's closest associates, Georgii Malenkov and Anastas Mikoyan, arrived in Yerevan with Beria. The year-old leadership of the Armenian party was arrested, and Beria's protégé, Grigor Haroutunian (Aroutiunov), former head of the Tbilisi party committee, was named first secretary in Armenia. Immediately the systematic decimation of Armenian Communists ranks began. One after the other the men who had ruled Armenia in the first fifteen years of Soviet power were arrested and shot; Aramayis Erzinkian (1879-1937), commissar for agriculture (1921-1930); Sargis Kasian (1876-1937), head of the; Avis Nurijanian (1896-1937), member in that first government; Sahak Ter-Gabrielian (1886-1938), Armenian representative in Moscow (1921-1928) and chairman of the Council of People's Commissars in Armenia (1928-1935); Haik Hovsepian (d. 1937), once head of the Armenian Communist Party; and Haik Amatouni, who had been appointed to lead the party by Beria after Khanjian's death.
The purges did not only hit the top party leaders but the lower ranks and non-Communist intellectuals as well. The writer Aksel Bakunts perished for the crime of "bourgeois nationalism". The leading Soviet Armenian poet, Yeghishe Tcharents, who earlier had been one of the most ardent supporters of Soviet power in Armenia, was accused of "right deviationism" and nationalism for his poem "Message". On the surface the poem appeared to be standard verses in praise of Stalin, but when one read the second letter in each line vertically a secret message read: "O Armenian people, your only salvation lies in your united strength!" Tcharents died in prison, as did Vahan Totovents, a brilliant short-story writer from Western Armenia. Few writers were fortunate as Gurgen Mahari to emerge after decades in Stalin's prisons to a brief period of freedom in the twilight of their lives.
Historians are still divided as to the motivations of the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938. Perhaps the results give some clues to the causes for the massive bloodletting. Once the purges were called off in early 1939, Stalin was secure in his autocratic powers. No longer did any fractions or prominent personalities pose an alternative to his absolute rule. The party ranks and leaders had been tamed by the political police, the NKVD, and Stalin remained unchallenged until his death in 1953. A second major result of the purges was the removal of the older generation of Bolsheviks from positions of authority. The men and women who had made the revolution, led the country through the periods of civil war, NEP, and the early Stalin Revolution were viciously eliminated, and in their place a younger generation of Soviet-educated technicians and managers was thrust into power. That "Stalin generation" would remain in commanding positions well into the early 1980s. One ruling elite, more cosmopolitan and steeped in the pre-revolutionary Marxist movement, had been physically destroyed; another, largely recruited from the working class and technical intelligentsia, and presumably more loyal to the new order, was rapidly elevated to administrative positions and rewarded with power, prestige, and privileges. And, finally, the purges ended any pretension by regional or republic leaders to autonomy from the centre. Stalinism created a hyper-centralised political system in which all important decisions were made in Moscow and communicated downward to loyal and unquestioning subordinates.
|
