The Armenians: A People in Exile

This book was completed in 1980, and first published in 1981. Events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere move fast. Some leading figures in modem Armenian politics and culture have died; also, there has been a wind of change blowing through the Soviet Union and the world generally since the accession of Mr Gorbachev to power, and the assumption of high office by the Georgian Edward Shevardnadze, a competent Caucasian administrator, as Foreign Minister of the USSR.

Among the leading figures in Armenian public and cultural life who have died recently, we must assign a special place to Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan; having survived the murder of the Baku Commissars by British backed left-wing desperadoes nearly 70 years ago, he lived to become the Soviet elder statesman par excellence. We also regret to record the death of the chanteuse Cathy Berberian at the age of $4; also of my friend the violinist Manouk Parikian, still at the height of his powers, aged 67; finally, the nonagenarian Rouben Mamoulian who, with Greta Garbo, raised the art of the cinema to new heights in Hollywood of the 1930s.

Since the middle of February 1988, the world has been fascinated and somewhat shattered by newspaper and television reports of outbreaks of communal violence in Soviet Transcaucasia, notably in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. The nub of the conflict is the Autonomous District of Mountain Karabagh, which forms a largely Armenian enclave within the fraternal Turkic republic of Azerbaijan, based on Baku on the Caspian.

Although there has been competent reporting by Western correspondents (for instance, Xan Smiley of the Daily Telegraphy and BBC Television) many details of the disturbances remain obscure. On my eight visits to the Soviet Caucasus between i960 and 1978, I was always told that Karabagh was 'out of bounds’, though I have been able to collect a large file on the area, its history and current problems.