A MONUMENT FOR THE JUST
Mirror Spectator
Editorial 11-29 Nov
By Edmond Y. Azadian
While Armenians around the world are gearing up to commemorate the
centennial of the Genocide, another calamity in our history must not
be overlooked: the atrocities perpetrated against our beleaguered
nation during the Stalin period.
It would not be historically proper to draw parallels between the
two tragedies in terms of cause and effect, but the net outcome in
both cases was the destruction of the creative minds of our people.
It is ironic that the executioners of history seem to be well versed
enough in literature, arts and scholarship to be able to pick out
the cream of the crop and target them for extermination — or else
they employ advisors with enough intellectual capacity for this
grisly selection.
Talaat Pasha sent to their deaths Daniel Varoujan, Siamanto, Zohrab,
Yeroukhan, Rouben Zartarian, Telgadintzi, Indra and myriad other
talents.
Similary, Stalin and his henchmen targeted literary luminaries such as
Axel Bakuntz, Yeghishe Charents, Zabel Yessayan, Aghassi Khanjian and
many others. Recently, a film clip was distributed on the Internet
citing the names of Armenian victims of Stalin’s purges — and the
count was raised to 7,000.
Armenians had barely survived the first genocide of the 20th century,
after losing their entire leadership and creative geniuses, when they
succumb yet again to a second calamity under Stalin.
The occasion for comparing the two tragedies occurred to me on
November 22 in Yerevan, when I was asked to announce the winner of
the literature category of the Tekeyan Cultural Association’s annual
literary and artistic contest.
The winner was a 447-page monumental literary monograph by David
Gasparyan on the life and works of Gourgen Mahari, whose creative
life was interrupted at its prime for 17 years when he was exiled to
Siberia to endure hard labor. Mahari was one writer who bridged the
two calamities; he was born in Van at the turn of the 20th century
and soon he was exiled from his native land to be dropped from one
orphanage to the other in emerging the first Armenian Republic and
during the early years of Soviet Armenia.
His life as an exile from his native land and then from Soviet Armenia
to Siberia is reflected in the entire body of his literary output.
Despite the suffering and interruptions, he managed to produce an
impressive amount of poetry and exquisite prose: novels, novellas
and short stories.
One of the most punishing periods in Siberia was when he was banned
from touching pen and paper — a sadistic punishment for a prolific
writer.
In addition to symbolizing the bridge between the two calamities,
Mahari utilized a new brand of literary language deriving from the
rich heritage of his Western Armenian roots and building on them with
the colorful idiom of the Eastern Armenian dialect.
The writer was also a trailblazer and literary polemist, always in
search of new paths in literature. His creative career was encouraged
by his mentor, Yeghishe Charnets. Maybe that was one of the reasons
that he was accused of being a “terrorist,” “nationalist,” and a
“plotter to kill Lavrenti Beria,” Stalin’s security chief, and
eventually exiled to Siberia twice.
Literary competitors also had their role in the his destiny and in
the loss of Charents, Bakunts, Yessayan and Vahan Totovents, all
of the latter were accused of being “nationalists,” an unpardonable
crime in the Stalin era. Woody Allen has a very appropriate statement
regarding the cowardly net of fellow writers. He says, “Intellectuals
are like the Mafia; they only kill their own.”
All of the exiled and convicted writers and intellectuals were
exonerated during the later Khrushchov era in the USSR, but for
many of them, it was too late. Thus, the death of a large crop of
intellectuals under Stalin’s tyranny came to compound our earlier
losses at the hands of Talaat Pasha.
Of course, the entire nation laments that monumental loss. But little
action has been taken by the authorities in Armenia to discover the
burial sites of Charents or Bakunts.
Gasparyan, who had written earlier a monumental volume on Charents,
a literary detective work, has undertaken excavation campaigns on the
outskirts of Yerevan, where the bodies of two writers are rumored to
be buried, defying the police ban, but to no avail.
Some people tend to justify this inaction, arguing that all the
nationalities of the Soviet empire were subjected to Stalin’s terror.
Even Ukraine’s “potato famine” in the 1930s is ranked as a genocide.
In addition to being Stalin’s victims, Armenians suffered some
300,000 casualties during the Great Patriotic War (World War II)
against Hitler.
But what is dissimilar to all other nationalities is that Armenians
had already experienced a Holocaust — too big a loss to follow it
up with a further loss of such magnitude.
When Poland joined the European Union, its president officially asked
for additional seats in the European Parliament to represent the 25
million martyred Poles, killed by Stalin and Hitler.
Although there was no such provision in the charter of the European
Union, no one dared to criticize the request.
On November 22, upon presenting the award to Mr. Gasparyan, I seized
the opportunity to come up with a proposal, as two government ministers
were attending the ceremony. Using the formulation of the late poet
Paruyr Sevak, I said, “I implore you like demanding” that the time
has come to erect a monument in Armenia commemorating the collective
loss of the Armenian creative mind during the Stalin era.
The eve of the Genocide centennial makes the issue that much more
compelling. A memorial simply named, “A Monument for the Just.”
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
