75th anniversary of VE: The monument to Garegin Nzdeh as a test for Nikol Pashinyan

On the eve of the 75th anniversary of the victory over fascism at the international level, historical discussions once again flared up on the interpretation and assessment of the role of some problematic participants of the Second World War. This kind of discussions often transpose into the political dimension. Thus, in November, the third committee of the UN General Assembly on social and humanitarian issues adopted by a majority vote a draft resolution on combatting the glorification of Nazism.

Guest post by Matthias Wolf

The WWII, having claimed the lives of tens of millions of people all around the world, to this day continues to keep old wounds alive. For instance, Ukraine and Poland have been quarreling for many years because of the ambiguous personality of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera.

Likewise, today the issue of assessing the personality of the Armenian nationalist Garegin Nzdeh is also becoming increasingly relevant.

Notably, the problem of the glorification of Nzdeh was raised for the first time at the international level by the President of Azerbaijan, and today it is in the spotlight of attention within the world Jewish community. President Aliyev discussed this issue during his meeting with Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The leading media organizations of Russia, – the country which, for understandable historical reasons, is especially sensitive to the glorification of accomplices to fascism, – also picked up the topic.

While one may suspect a political subtext of the issue raised, – because of the occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh and the adjacent regions by Armenia, – the President of Azerbaijan indeed took quite a balanced position during the meeting of the Council of CIS Heads of State in Ashgabat on October 11, 2019.

The glorification of Nzdeh began during the reign of the previous administrations of Armenia. As a matter of fact, the previous leaders of Armenia, namely Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sargsyan, repeatedly expressed their sympathies for the philosphy of “Tseghakronism” founded by Garegin Nzdeh, – an ideology that incorporated the fascist ideas characteristic of Europe during the 1930s.

The proximity between Hitler’s racial ideology and Nzdeh’s philosophical writings has been mentioned in papers and articles of many European experts, including Volker Jacoby and Thomas de Waal.

One of the latest critical articles in relation to tolerance for Nzdeh’s ideological legacy was written in Germany, by a German linguist, Matthias Wolf. In his article dated November 13, 2019, he talks about a monument to Garegin Nzdeh in the old Bulgarian capital, Pliska. In fact, the initiative of establishing a monument to Garegin Nzdeh in Bulgaria, which is mentioned by Wolf, can be considered as a precarious move from different points of view. It is not about the national movement of the Armenian diaspora, which sought to to perpetuate Nzdeh’s actions in the public, but about the initiative to build the monument in the territory of a private ownership, – in the so-called “Cyrillic courtyard” in Pliska. Many experts questioned whether the character of Nzdeh is suitable for the “Cyrillic courtyard”. Nzdeh’s works were mostly written in Armenian, and Cyrillic is by no means an Armenian alphabet. Armenians have their own very interesting graphic signs, and they are proud of it. However, they do not even have an indirect relationship to the Cyrillic alphabet. Besides, while different nations can be proud of numerous merits and achievements of their heroes, Armenian heroes, such as Nzdeh, Andranik or Dro Kananian, unfortunately, have too much human blood on their conscience, especially relating to the period of 1920s.