Aghasi Khanjian

Aghasi Khanjian

Khanjian in 1934
First Secretary of the
Communist Party of Armenia
In office
May 1930 – July 1936
Preceded by Haykaz Kostanyan
Succeeded by Amatuni Vartapetyan
Personal details
Born January 30, 1901
Van, Ottoman Empire
Died July 6, 1936(1936-07-06) (aged 35)
Nikita Khrushchev, Lavrenti Beria and Khanjian

Aghasi Khanjian (Armenian: Աղասի Խանջյան; Russian: Агаси Гевондович Ханджян, Agasi Gevondovich Khandzhyan) (January 30, 1901 – July 6, 1936), was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from May 1930 to July 1936.[1]

Biography

Khanjian was born in the city of Van, Ottoman Empire (today eastern Turkey).[2] With the onslaught of the Armenian Genocide, his family emigrated from the city in 1915 and settled in Russian Armenia.[1][3] In 1917-19, he was one of the organizers of Spartak, the Marxist student's union of Armenia. He later served as the secretary of the Armenian Bolshevik underground committee.[3]

In 1920, Khanjian became secretary of the Yerevan city committee and in 1930, the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party.[3] He proved to be a charismatic Soviet politician and was very popular among the Armenian populace.[1] He was a friend and supporter of many Armenian intellectuals, including Yeghishe Charents (who dedicated a poem to him), Axel Bakunts and Gurgen Mahari.[3] Khanjian also tried unsuccessfully to have Moscow annex Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.[4] He was arrested in 1936 and died while being interrogated.[5] Richard G. Hovannisian describes the circumstances of his death as follows:

But by the mid-1930s Khanjian had come into conflict with the most powerful party leader in Transcaucasia, Lavrenti Beria, a Georgian close to Stalin. Early in July 1936 Khanjian was called to Tiflis. Suddenly and unexpectedly it was announced that the Armenian party chief had committed suicide.[2] Though the circumstances of his death are murky, it is believed that Beria had ordered Khanjian's death to remove a threat to his own monopoly of power.[6]

Along with an entire generation of intellectual Armenian communist leaders (such as Vagarshak Ter-Vaganyan), Khanjian was denounced as an enemy of the people during the Great Purge.[1][7]

Khanjian was officially rehabilitated after the death of Joseph Stalin.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers, Frederic Harned. Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, p. 146-7. ISBN 0-02-917090-7
  2. 1 2 Suny 1993, p. 156.
  3. 1 2 3 4 (Russian) Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Aghasi Khanjian
  4. ↑ Armenian History: History of Artsakh, Part 2, Yuri Babayan
  5. ↑ Khronos biography.
  6. ↑ Richard G. Hovannisian, The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times: Foreign Dominion to Statehood (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997: ISBN 0-312-10168-6), p. 362.
  7. ↑ Cornell, Svante E. “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict.” Report no. 46, Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University, 1999.

Sources

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