A three-day conference entitled “Political Violence, Exile, and Memory in the USSR” took place

The conference titled “Political Violence, Exile, and Memory in the USSR,” organized by the Applied Anthropology Research Group of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in collaboration with the Department of Modern Anthropology, has concluded. The event was held over two days in the city of Goris, Syunik Province, and one day in Yerevan, at the Memorial Complex dedicated to the Victims of Political Violence.

The presentations in the first and second sessions of the conference explored specific episodes of political violence in Soviet Armenia — from the suppression of peasant resistance during the establishment of “kolkhozes” (collective farms) to the 1949 deportation of Armenians from Soviet republics in the Black Sea region. During the discussion of the deportation of the Hamshen Armenians, participants honored the memory of their late colleague Sergey Vardanyan with a minute of silence. Vardanyan had extensively studied the life of the Hamshen Armenians, who were exiled in 1944 and have still not been granted the right to return. The sessions also addressed less overt forms of political violence, including the restriction of individual and group identity choices during official Soviet censuses. Several presentations focused on the official, administrative, colloquial, and journalistic language used to “cover” acts of violence—language that, in reality, facilitated and legitimized the implementation of that violence. The concluding presentation examined the ethno-social composition of those repressed in Soviet Armenia between 1920 and 1953, based on materials from the National Archives of the Republic of Armenia.

The third session took place at the Axel Bakunts House-Museum, honoring the writer who was executed in 1937 under the so-called “Stalin Lists.” This session featured individual stories of victims of political violence—shared as biographical sketches, memoirs, and most importantly, as integral parts of the broader narrative of political repression. On June 13, the conference participants took part in the celebration of the 126th anniversary of Axel Bakunts' birth in the city of Goris.

On June 14—marked in Armenia as the “Day of Remembrance of the Repressed,” in accordance with the RA Law “On Holidays and Days of Remembrance”—they visited the Memorial Complex for the Victims of Political Violence in the USSR in Yerevan. There, they presented data on the quantitative and qualitative characteristics of those convicted in Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan according to Stalin’s lists, and read aloud the names of 200 individuals who were sentenced to death in Armenia between 1936 and 1938. The full conference proceedings and reports are available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLclo6JyCE6xmbAfVBM2mZSUvf2lUUQEjw