1946: ON BOARD THE “POBEDA” TO SOVIET ARMENIA
By Paolo Martino
11:12, July 30, 2012
Vartuhi left Beirut in 1946, to reach Soviet Armenia aboard a ship
called “Pobeda”. In Stalin’s land, however, the survivors of the
genocide saw the dream of a homeland turn into a nightmare. Fourth
episode of the story “From the Caucasus to Beirut”
“To overcome the censorship of the Soviet regime, we used code
messages. ‘The bread is good’ meant we were starving. ‘The wardrobe
door is broken’ meant persecution, imprisonment. If in a picture there
were people lying down, it meant someone had died, and so on”. In her
apartment in the centre of Anjar – three thousand Armenians up in the
Lebanese mountains, Angel goes over the thread of family memories
dating back to over 60 years ago, when her sister Vartuhi left
Lebanon to move to Soviet Armenia. “Right from the early letters,
all that was written about was bread and wardrobes, and then the
pictures also slowly started coming in. I realised that Armenia was
not the heaven the Russians wanted us to believe. And that I would
never see my sister again”.
Following World War II, the Armenian diaspora was faced with yet
another challenge. Determined to rebalance the demographic gap
left by the millions of casualties from the war, the Soviet Union
promoted huge repopulation campaigns. Anxious to finally be in a
“motherland” of their own, American, European and Middle-Eastern
Armenian communities, moved en masse. Starting from 1946, trains,
ships and convoys with the red star moved thousands of children of
the Armenian diaspora to Yerevan, in Soviet Armenia. Seventy percent
of Anjar’s inhabitants, 3.500 out of 5.000, chose to leave. Among
these was Vartuhi, Angel’s sister.
“It was very hard, at the beginning. Lebanese Armenians were used
to moving, reading the newspaper, speaking their minds, so they
were immediately spotted by the merciless eye of the regime. Many
were shipped to Siberia, to concentration camps”. Angel’s memory
moves smoothly to distant seasons, sweeping through the immeasurable
geography of the diaspora as if no corner of the world were unknown.
“But Anjar’s Armenians are thick-skinned. Slowly, they built their
lives, their homes, even a village, close to Yerevan”. I interrupt
her. “Is this village still there?” Angel smiles: “Of course.
It’s called Musa Dagh. Just like our native land. My sister lives
there”. Enraptured by her memories, the old lady recounts the years
of her youth, of the irreversible choices, while in my mind, a blurred
idea is becoming clearer and clearer. While saying goodbye to Angel the
Lebanese way, with three kisses on the cheek, I take a picture of her
and make her a promise: “I will come back to see you, with a surprise”.
>From my diary. 3rd November
The stream of memory that links the Caucasus to the Middle-East flows
just under the surface of everyday life. The Inhabitants of Musa Dagh
who leave Turkey in 1939 to move to Lebanon travel to Armenia eight
years later. One-way journeys, decisions without appeal, but each
displacement marks the land, tracing a path that from the Caucasus
leads to Beirut and vice versa.
Vakif, the only one of the seven villages of Musa Dagh that chose
to remain under Turkish authority, still inhabited by Armenians;
Anjar, the Armenian jewel in the Bekaa valley, a pacific oasis in
one of the world’s most conflict-ridden areas; the new Musa Dagh
in Yerevan’s suburbs, a refuge for those who in 1946, after so much
misery, thought they had finally found the road to the Rising Sun of
the Future. Splinters getting lost in the tragedy of the genocide, in
games between powers, among the ruins of the wars of the Middle-East
and the Caucasus. The only way to get back to the human element, to
understand the choices of the many Vartuhis and Angels of this story,
is to walk on the paths of those migrations, measure them with one’s
steps, with the rain and the monotonous horizons of the plateau and
the desert.
“I’m going to Yerevan, I already have a ticket”. Sitting as usual
in front of the shutters of the shoe factory, Rafi blows the dense
smoke of the Turkish pipe unperturbed. “I knew you would leave,
one day or another. You have become paranoid in your search for a
rational logic in the history of my people. In time, you will learn
it’s not worth it”. Rafi screams something in Armenian to a boy,
who immediately serves us arak, an aniseed liquor diluted with water
and ice. A one-dollar tip and the boy disappears, swallowed up in
the chaos of Burj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter in the heart of Beirut.
“What are you going to Armenia for?” While the night is falling on the
alley, Rafi listens to the story of Vartuhi and Angel, the sisters
separated by the Pobeda, the ship that in 1946 moved thousands of
Lebanese Armenians beyond the Iron Curtain. “I want to retrace those
events, feel the missing part in the story”.
Rafi orders some more arak. “Focus on this principle: in the
Middle-East, it is points of view that count, not facts”. Burj
Hammoud is now empty, and Rafi’s words snap like stones. “Take the
story of the Pobeda, for example. It stopped existing a long time
ago. In its place, what is left is the points of view of those who
had an interest in Armenians leaving, and of those who, instead,
wanted them to stay. And above all this, the Soviet Union”. Rafi’s
allusion leaves no room for doubt. “You mean the Lebanese Armenian
community was split by the Cold War too?”. Rafi is at his third arak:
“It was a fratricide. That war killed hundreds of people right in
these alleys. No one likes to admit it, but the trail of blood has
reached our days”.
While I am walking away through the deserted alleys of Burj Hammoud,
the rosary is told by the splintered walls in front of my eyes. I
think back to Rafi’s words, to the unresolved ambiguity of the civil
wars, to the warning that seems to come from the bullets thrusted
on the walls. “It was not the foreign occupant to open the fire,
but the neighbour, never forget that”. Sprayed letters steer these
thoughts: “PKK”, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. The movement born in
Turkey in the ’80s fights for the independence of Turkish Kurdistan,
the region that was once the ancient Western Armenia. In the name
of anti-Turkish resentment, the children of the Armenian diaspora
support the Kurdish cause, even though they accuse the same Kurds of
having been accomplices of the Ottoman army during the genocide. The
labyrinth of these alleys is a metaphor for the intrigued stories of
those living here.
The plane takes off on time from the cement carpet in South Beirut,
where Shiite quarters fill every space before making room for the
first bits of greenery on the spur of the mountain. From the pile of
notes, e-mails and maps that I printed out in a rush before leaving,
the answer that Adakessian, the Professor at the Beirut Armenian
university, sent me a few hours ago pops out:
Dear Paolo,
I wish you the wisdom you need to discern the fine line and make things
better understood. Find the contact of Dr. Demoyan, the director
of the Armenian Genocide Research Institute in Yerevan. This is the
Middle East, and the Genocide issue is one of the central ingredients
of this intriguing complex.
Regards, A.
Wisdom, insight, complex intrigues. Where am I going, exactly? The
night spent organising my journey has left me with doubts, more than
answers. And while the vast blue of the sky and the Lebanese sea
makes room for leaden landscapes, my mind is suddenly empty and my
body finds refuge in deep sleep.
(This article was originally published on July 25, 2012 in
“Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso”)
Musa Dagh Museum – Boarding pass for Armenia 1948, photo by Paolo
Martino
http://hetq.am/eng/articles/17080/1946-on-board-the-%E2%80%9Cpobeda%E2%80%9D-to-soviet-armenia.html