“Soviet mentality?” The role of shared political culture in relations between the Armenian state and Russia's Armenian diaspora

Abstract

Russia's Armenians have begun to form diaspora institutions and engage in philanthropy and community organization, much as the pre-Soviet “established” diaspora in the West has done for years. However, the Russian Armenian diaspora is seen by Armenian elites as being far less threatening due to a shared “mentality.” While rejecting the mentality argument, I suggest that the relationship hinges on their shared political culture and the use of symbols inherited from the Soviet Union in the crafting of new diaspora and diaspora-management institutions. Specifically, “Friendship of the Peoples” symbolism appears to be especially salient on both sides. However, the difference between old and new diasporas may be more apparent than real. The Russian Armenian diaspora now engages in many of the same activities as the Western diaspora, including the one most troublesome to Armenia's elites: involvement in politics.

Keywords:

• diaspora
• Armenia
• Soviet mentality
• Russia
• political culture

Acknowledgements

This article incorporates fieldwork conducted in Armenia between October 2009 and March 2010 and in Russia in June and July 2010, which included semi-structured interviews with over 80 individuals, including former and current ministers and bureaucrats, representatives of diaspora organizations, “repatriates,” journalists, and political analysts and activists in both Armenia and Russia (Moscow, Krasnodar, and Tuapse). I would like to thank the American University of Armenia's Turpanjian Center for Policy Analysis for its generous facilitation of the Armenia portion of this research, and the University of Toronto's School of Graduate Studies for its support of my research in Russia. I would also like to thank Dr. Nona Shahnazaryan, without whose assistance many of the interviews in Krasnodar and Tuapse would not have been possible.

Notes

Though the scholarly “discovery” of transnationalism may be relatively recent, Smith notes that instances of it appear throughout the history of the state (2003, 725). “Recent” discussions of the phenomenon include Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc (1994) and Shain and Barth (2003).

Very little institutionalization existed, with the notable exceptions of the Hayastan All-Armenia Fund, a government-initiated organization meant to consolidate diaspora philanthropy and channel it toward the government's development priorities, and the constitutional ban on dual citizenship, which, while defended as a way to keep RA citizens from evading army service, was in fact an attempt to limit the political influence of Western diasporans, whose loyalty to the state was suspect.

A thorough discussion of Soviet nationalities policy is beyond the scope of this paper. However, for two different treatments of the phenomenon, see Hirsch (2005) and Slezkine (1994).

Brubaker (2005, 5) suggests that most definitions agree on three broad criteria: dispersion in space, orientation to a “homeland,” and boundary maintenance. Even Safran has revisited his original definition, so that the relationship with the homeland may now be a more “symbolic” one, and the ideal of return is now seen as more “mythical” (2004, 11).

Tölölyan suggests that “diasporic” Armenians differ from “ethnic” Armenians in that “they care about kin in the homeland and elsewhere, so their concerns are multi-local and trans-national; they create, staff and finance institutions that actively enact their caring, including through lobbying; and they make sustained efforts to ‘diasporize’ the consciousness and identity of their ethnic kin through cultural, social and political actions” (2007, 110).

The exceptions are Armenians living on “historic Armenian lands” such as the Armenians of Javakheti, in southern Georgia, and the “hidden Armenians” living in secret in what is now eastern Turkey.

All attempts to enumerate “the Armenian diaspora” are highly problematic. The Ministry of Diaspora uses community self-reporting to arrive at approximate numbers; other figures are derived from official census data. All appear to use ancestry as a proxy for diaspora membership, a practice which, as Brubaker notes, is fraught with assumptions about boundary maintenance (2005, 11). While it is problematic to refer to recent economic migrants as diasporans, this is a move the Armenian state has made in recent years. The term has come to apply to nearly all Armenians living beyond the present-day borders of the Republic of Armenia (and the ethnic-Armenian de facto state of Nagorno-Karabakh).

Figures for the RA often include NK, whose population, in any event, is less than 200,000.

The diaspora is occasionally cited as the natural resource of this otherwise resource-poor state, at war with oil-rich Azerbaijan.

The Committee for Cultural Ties with Diaspora Armenians (Spyurkahayutyan Het Mshakutayin Kapi Komite) was established in Yerevan in 1964. Officially, its purposes were to promote patriotic activity among Armenian diaspora communities in the non-communist world and to establish ties with the more “progressive organizations.” It provided Armenian schools abroad with textbooks and organized summer camps for diaspora children in Armenia, training programs for schoolteachers, and the placement of diasporans in Soviet Armenian universities. It arranged for Armenian artists, writers, choirs, and dance troupes to visit Armenia, and its press division distributed articles about Soviet Armenia to the diasporan press. In essence, the committee was the gatekeeper of Armenia–diaspora relations, and while it facilitated diasporan visits to Soviet Armenia, it also tightly controlled them. Unofficially, the committee's aim was to bind diaspora loyalties to the Soviet Republic of Armenia. This was no easy task, especially given Cold War ideological animosities. The Committee was dissolved by independent Armenia's first president, Levon Ter-Petrosyan.

Specifically, the first president's refusals to champion the cause of Genocide recognition and to recognize the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh were criticized by diaspora Armenians, especially those belonging to the Dashnak political party, to which Ter-Petrosyan responded by banning the party from Armenian politics, beginning a vicious cycle of mutual suspicion (Payaslian 2007, 203–05).

The term “diaspora management” has been used by institutions such as the International Organization for Migration to denote various aspects of homeland–diaspora relations, such as “promotion of relations with [compatriots] abroad, managing economic relations with diaspora communities, cultural and educational outreach, information management with diaspora communities, and protection of migrants’ rights.” In this article, I emphasize the public-relations and state–diaspora relationship-management aspects of this general definition (“Recommendations of the Policy Seminar on Diaspora and Homeland Development,” 2008).

Laitin suggests that a “beached diaspora” is one that acquires the status of a diaspora because borders have changed rather than as a result of the group's dispersal. Russia's Armenians are a varied group, who have migrated in “waves” from both Western and Eastern (Soviet and post-Soviet) Armenia. While some fled persecution, others migrated for economic and other reasons within what was then a single state. Collective reference to them as a “beached diaspora” indicates that the term “diaspora” was not thought to apply to them before the collapse of the Soviet Union, since they shared a state with the “homeland” (Soviet Armenia) (1998, 29).

Before this time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs contained a small diaspora affairs section. Other initiatives include the establishment of a masters-level Department of Diaspora Studies at Yerevan State University.

Official numbers are much lower. In 2002, according to the All-Russia Population Census, the officially registered Armenian population of the Russian Federation had reached 1,130,500, or 4.1% of the total population and more than double the 1989 Armenian population of 532,390 (“2002 All-Russia Population Census”).

The Ministry of Diaspora frequently mentions the figure of 2 million Armenians in Russia and 1.5 million in the United States, though employees note that they rely on community self-reporting for their data(V. Petrosyan, pers. comm.). Two million is, according to these estimates, a conservative figure.

Notwithstanding the global economic crisis, the past decade saw the Russian economy grow at an average of 7% annually. It returned to modest growth in 2010, and fiscal surplus in 2011 (“Russia Overview” 2012).

Given its neighbors Iran, Georgia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan (with whom Armenia is officially at war), this relationship is one that Armenia values highly.

These figures, however, do not account for the many illegal, unregistered labor migrants.

Interviewees suggest that the worst physical threats have largely subsided.

While the tendency is for highly skilled labor to migrate to the European Union and the United States (and do so permanently), those heading to Russia tend to be “temporary rural migrants with comparatively lower skill sets” (Gevorkyan et al. 2006, 15, 32).

By way of comparison to other remittance-heavy economies, remittances to Mexico in 2006 totaled over $25 billion, but less than 5% of Mexico's GDP, while remittances to the Philippines totaled approximately $15 billion, and 15% of GDP (The Economist, qtd. in Fitzgerald 2009, 25). The recent economic crisis, which drastically reduced the number of construction-sector jobs in Russia, which are normally filled by Armenian labor migrants, had a severe impact on Armenian families who normally rely on remittances to meet day-to-day living expenses (Mitra et al. 2007, 181, 371).

Abrahamyan is also spelled Abramyan (due to the lack of the letter H in the Russian language).

Laitin (1998, 29) uses this term to refer to Russians living outside Russia in former Soviet states, since the collapse of a state, rather than their physical dispersion, is the source of their diasporic status.

An early illustration of this “diaspora renaissance” is involvement in the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute. In the late-Soviet period, Armenians living in Russia, especially those with ancestral ties to the NK region, were some of the earliest advocates of the (re)unification of NK with Soviet Armenia. When war erupted with Azerbaijan over the territory, Karabakh Armenians who had risen to positions of prominence in the Soviet Army returned to NK to lend their expertise to the command of Armenian forces (Tölölyan 2007, 115–16).

“Kazak” is the pronunciation used locally. There is an ethnic component to this identity, but it is also conflated with a certain brand of Russian nationalist, at least among local Armenians.

The dialect spoken in Tuapse, on the Black Sea coast in Krasnodar Region, though difficult for outsiders to understand, is clearly a variety of Western Armenian.

In addition to the usual schools and clinics, Hayrapetyan built “Titanic,” a garish restaurant-hotel complex in the shape of an ocean liner, in this tiny village.

This echoes Laitin's finding regarding Russians who chose to remain in the new former-Soviet republics. “Even [for] the Russians who remained in the republics … the notion of Russia as ‘homeland’ (rodina) reoccurs in everyday talk” (1998, 164).

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun) was founded in Tbilisi in the late 1800s, served as the government of the First Armenian Republic from 1918–1920, and was the strongest of the three political parties active in the diaspora during the tenure of Soviet Union. It was outspokenly anti-Soviet until the late Soviet period. While it currently also operates as a local political party in the RA, it continues to command significant allegiance among “established diasporans.”

This was the opinion expressed by nearly all of my interviewees with whom the conferences were discussed. One delegate described them as a “feel-good exercise.”

It elevated the previous State Committee on Relations with the Diaspora, a small department within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to the status of an independent (if underfunded) ministry.

Hayadartsuytun is a difficult word to translate. It is a derivative of the Armenian word for repatriation, hayrenadartsutyun, but instead of connoting a return to the fatherland (hayrenik) it suggests a return to “Armenianness” (in the Armenian language, the ethnonym for Armenian is Hay).

In interviews, ministry employees stressed that an actual repatriation policy is seen as impractical at this time, given the inability of the RA government to provide “help” to repatriates.

This hostility centers around such issues as the choice of minister – a non-diasporan with a communist (Komsomol) background – the ministry's vague or misguided mandate, underfunding, lack of diaspora employees, and even the lack of French language on its (newly updated) website (in spite of France's large and influential Armenian diaspora community).

Textbooks, as Lisovskaya and Karpov note, “can be viewed as symbolic formations used within the framework of relationships between the dominant (older) and the subordinate (younger) generations. As instruments of socialization, they introduce new generations to the existing social order with its relations of power and domination; in this sense, they legitimize the status quo” (1999, 527).

The ministry's activities are remarkably similar to those of its Soviet predecessor, the Committee for Cultural Ties with Diaspora Armenians. Even the crest chosen as the ministry's official symbol is nearly identical to that of the committee. Both crests are round, and feature Mt. Ararat with the rays of the sun behind it and a stylized crane in flight in the foreground.

In an interview promoting a “Miss Armenian” beauty pageant open to both RA citizens and diasporans, the minister was quoted as saying that Armenian women should know how to cook, be modest, have good manners, and be good mothers, daughters, and wives (“Traditional Armenian Woman” 2010).

The fourth pillar is clearly not reminiscent of Soviet nationalities policy, which was staunchly atheist.

While a similar organization exists in Ukraine (the Union of Armenians of Ukraine), umbrella organizations claiming to be so broadly representative do not exist in “outer diaspora” centers such as the United States, Lebanon, Syria, and France. Arguably, the European Armenian Federation, founded in 2000 in Brussels, is a similar umbrella group, but its activities appear to be confined to EU-level lobbying. The Armenian Assembly of America is likewise devoted to lobbying the US government. These organizations do not claim to be the representatives of all Armenians in the EU or the United States.

One news article claims that the UAC has 640 branches throughout Russia, but this could not be verified (“Who is Ara Abrahamyan?” 2009).

In an interview, one local community group organizer in Krasnodar region, where the Armenian population has lived since the 1800s, described UAR efforts to crowd out community events with better-funded, more lavish ones put on by UAR-affiliated groups.

While the magazine was available at the UAR's Yerevan office, a used copy of the DVD was a random discovery in an open-air market in Yerevan.

Lists of delegates are not available from the UAR, nor are conference proceedings.

In a recent interview, Abrahamyan responded to allegations that he had done nothing for Armenia by speaking about himself in the third person: “Ara Abrahamyan is not obligated to do anything. Ara Abrahamyan is one of those 10 million Armenians. Ara Abrahamyan has taken a responsibility and together with his supporters created an organization that is Russia's NGO and is under no obligation. We are patriotic people” (“Ara Abrahamyan is Convinced” 2010).

This move was received with skepticism by “established” diaspora organizations.

Diaspora organizations in the United States and Western Europe also expressed their dissatisfaction with Abrahamyan's efforts, which prompted Abrahamyan to demonstrate “good will” by contributing $200,000 to a Dashnak party fundraiser in Paris (Zakarian 2005).

Aghayan claims that 36 countries are represented in the WAC. However, when asked for examples, he listed Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Rumania, and Bulgaria, all former Soviet or Eastern Bloc states (V. Aghayan, pers. comm.).

It is unclear where the UAR ends and the WAC begins. For all intents and purposes, they appear to be the same organization, with the same president, vice president, offices, and business cards.

This last comment hints at the contentious nature of “diaspora politics” in the established diaspora, where many people have diaspora political-party affiliations and cooperation among organizations is thus difficult.

The village is located in Yeghegnadzor Region, in Southern Armenia. Incidentally, there is no St. Anna in Armenian Apostolic Church tradition.

Further reinforcing the image are visits to Molokan (Russian Old Believers) villages in Armenia, where local women greet UAR representatives with the traditional welcome of bread and salt (Doroga 2005, 76).

Avarayr and Sartarapat were two decisive battles in Armenian history.

Abrahamyan was also named a UNESCO Good Will Ambassador for encouraging dialogue between civilizations (“French Legion of Honor Awarded to Ara Abrahamyan” 2005).

Internal memorandum. The ministry's priorities for Ukraine similarly stress fostering ties with the Union of Armenians of Ukraine.

This view is not widely shared by the non-UAR-affiliated Russian Armenians I interviewed. Views ranged from ambivalence to outright scorn regarding the UAR's role in Russian Armenian community life.

The term “old guard” is not a perfect fit for Abrahamyan, who was born in Armenia and is a newcomer compared to Armenians who have been in Russia for generations, but it indicates his deep network of connections and the fact that he does not contend with the insecurity experienced by more recent migrants.

My own interviews revealed a tendency for “old guard” Armenians to assume that the problems of newcomers had largely been solved, or were their own fault. Abrahamyan, too, in a recent interview, denied that there were any general “problems” faced by Russian Armenians, only “individual cases” (“Ara Abrahamyan is Convinced” 2010).

Abrahamyan, for instance, has indicated his distaste for the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, respectively, and has called for an effort to discourage such pursuits in Armenia (Zakarian 2005).

The 2008 Armenia-Turkey Protocols, signed but never ratified by either state, were designed to open the border, but contained controversial sections regarding, among other things, the establishment of historical commissions to examine the issue of the Armenian genocide.

Abrahamyan financially supported both the Orinats Yerkir and Ramkavar Azatakan parties in the run-up to the 2003 parliamentary elections. He also claimed that as head of the UAR (with a constituency of 500,000) he would be “actively involved” in the 2008 Armenian presidential elections. Armenian law forbids political parties from accepting financing from a foreign country. In the 1990s, this was one of the key objections of the Ter-Petrosyan regime to the Diaspora-supported Dashnak party operating in Armenia. He eventually banned the party and jailed many of its leaders.

Apparently he blamed the government for impeding his real estate development projects in central Yerevan, a situation which he later credited then defense minister and current president Serzh Sargsyan with resolving (Zakarian 2005).

As Blakkisrud and Nozimova note (with respect to Tajikistan, though the same may be said of Armenia), due to decades of socialization into a world in which the distinction between “Russian” and “Soviet” was a blurry one, and in which Russians/Soviets were the civilizing and modernizing “elder brothers,” Russians are still seen as an “external self” rather than as an “other,” and grievances with the Soviet system, especially the territorial delineation of the Union Republics and political repressions, are attributed to Stalin and competing national minorities (in Armenia's case, Azerbaijanis), respectively, rather than to the colonizing Russians/Soviets. There has been no current of post-colonial historiography in Tajikistan, according to the authors, and this appears to be true of RA historiography as well (2010, 175, 181, 183).