The real background and destinies of the characters of "My Armenian Friend" (video)

According to ethnographer Hranush Kharatyan, Armenians were accused of conducting a separatist policy and establishing a secret organization. “Such doubts have always existed, after the Second World War, a group was created in Talin, they wrote leaflets, thinking that the USSR would be defeated and they would go to the homeland. They were all shot. There are living members of their families, and oral memories have been preserved. Creating a group and fighting was difficult under the USSR, I'm sure they had the desire, but even talking to the next-door neighbor was impossible, even memory was strictly forbidden to recall”.

Ethnographer Hranush Kharatyan, who has studied the cases of many repressed Armenians, says that the sentencing of the exiles took place after the exile. There were never cases of justification before the exile. The exiles were simply driven to Siberia without charge. One or two years later, the accusation also appeared in the documents. "There was silence, the oppressed did know nothing, and no charges were presented against them. In individual cases, the nationality was written. Nationality: Armenian. The exiles of the Tomsk region were given identity papers when they left. Turkish was written in the identity papers".

Western Armenians were a special group among those exiled for social, political, or other reasons. Then it should have turned out that the survivors of the Genocide, who still dreamed of Ergir and Ararat, were a special target for the USSR authorities. In Andrei Makin's book, the family of an Armenian friend from Western Armenia, survivors of the Genocide, were again forced to leave their homeland and go into exile. “Many years had passed from the Genocide. These people were born in the USSR, but their parents were Turkish citizens, or they had that stamp on them".

The memoirs of the exiled Armenians show that the descendants of Western Armenia not only experienced the misfortune of being deprived of their homeland for the second time but also had to bear the nationality, the Turkish label, in exile. Some oppressed Armenians were exiled for ethnic reasons. “The phenomenon of the Thaw in the USSR is about the memory and symbols of the homeland in Armenia. Sargis Muradyan drew Komitas. In our case, it was not so much about life, avant-gardeism, but the opportunity to express national feelings at that moment”.

On June 14, 1949, 13,000 Armenians were deported to Altai by freight trains with Stalin's decree "On the Deportation of Traitorous Peoples". According to official data, 42,000 people were deported from Armenia during the Soviet years, and most of them were shot. In 1952, 25,000 Armenians were held in Soviet prisons.