Aghasi Khanjian
Aghasi Khanjian | |
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Khanjian in 1934
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First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia | |
In office May 1930 – July 1936 |
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Preceded by | Haykaz Kostanyan |
Succeeded by | Amatuni Vartapetyan |
Personal details | |
Born | January 30, 1901 Van, Ottoman Empire |
Died | Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist. |
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]
Contents
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
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Zev Katz, Rosemarie Rogers, Frederic Harned. Handbook of Major Soviet Nationalities, p. 146-7. ISBN 0-02-917090-7
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Suny 1993, p. 156.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 (Russian) Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Aghasi Khanjian
- ↑ Armenian History: History of Artsakh, Part 2, Yuri Babayan
- ↑ Khronos biography.
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ Cornell, Svante E. “The Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict.” Report no. 46, Department of East European Studies, Uppsala University, 1999.
Sources
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- Articles with Russian-language external links
- Articles containing Armenian-language text
- Articles containing Russian-language text
- Pages with broken file links
- 1901 births
- 1936 deaths
- Party leaders of the Soviet Union
- Great Purge victims from Armenia
- People from Van, Turkey
- Communist Party of Armenia (Soviet Union) politicians
- Ottoman Armenians
- Armenian atheists