The New Yorker about first struggle in Soviet Armenia for the recognition of the Armenian Genocide
Photos: the National Archives of Armenia
Freeman Dyson an American theoretical physicist and mathematician traveled to Soviet Armenia in 1971 and described his experience in the «LETTER FROM ARMENIA», published at The New Yorker magazine in the same year.
«Another victory of sentiment was achieved in 1965, in an event the Armenians call "our little revolution". That year was the fiftieth anniversary of the great massacre of the Turkish Armenians. About half of all Armenians alive in 1915 were in that part of the original homeland which lay in eastern Turkey near the Russian border. On the pretext of disloyalty in the war then raging between Russia and Turkey, the Turks massacred more than a million of these Armenians and drove the few survivors into exile. The 915 massacre is as deeply rooted in the folk memory of Armenia as Auschwitz in the memory of Israel. However, the Soviet government, which gained Control of Russian Armenia in 1920, did its best to discourage public recognition of the massacre.
Photos: the National Archives of Armenia
From the point of view of the government in Moscow, Armenia was a military liability rather than an as set-a remote and vulnerable salient that might have seen hard to defend against a Turkish attack at times when the Soviet Union was preoccupied elsewhere, particularly during the initial phases of the Second World War. So the Moscow government consistently maintained correct relations with Turkey and tried to convince the Armenians that it would be best to pretend that tile massacre had never happened. In 1965, there was no official commemoration of the anniversary. To the astonishment of the older generation of Armenians, who had learned under Stalin to keep their feelings to themselves, there was a large demonstration of young people in the main square of Yerevan.
The demonstrators demanded that the authorities finally put an end to their policy of disowning the million of their people who had died. The authorities sent in the local Armenian police, who dispersed the demonstration, bashed a few heads, but did not kill anybody. The authorities did not call in the Soviet Army, which was no doubt readily available in its positions along the Turkish frontier, a few miles away. A short time later, construction began on the brow of a hill where a public park overlooks the city of Yerevan.
A monument to the victims of the. massacre went up, austere and abstract in style, beautiful in its proportions. It is composed of two parts-a building in the shape of a low pyramid and, beside it, a high tapering pire.
At last, the fifty-year official silence is broken».
Freeman Dyson, “LETTER FROM ARMENIA,” The New Yorker, November 6, 1971, p. 126