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1946: On Board The "Pobeda" To Soviet Armenia

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  • 1946: On Board The "Pobeda" To Soviet Armenia

    1946: ON BOARD THE "POBEDA" TO SOVIET ARMENIA
    By Paolo Martino

    http://hetq.am/eng/articles/17080/1946-on-board-the-%E2%80%9Cpobeda%E2%80%9D-to-soviet-armenia.html
    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



    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
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