Osiecki , Jakub The Armenian Church in Soviet Armenia: The Policies of the Armenian Bolsheviks and the Armenian Church, 1920–1932 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 99, 4, OCTOBER 2021 778 new: they demonstrate that the Central European countries, as individual states, as the location of globally-networked cities, and as a regional force, were not just acted upon, but were able to act as sovereign entities and assert their own political identities and ambitions through the League. The volume certainly leaves a lot more nuance in our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the League and the ex-Habsburg lands. But I would have liked greater appreciation of the sheer fragility of the political and cultural idea of Weltösterreich. There was nothing inevitable about Austria’s survival as a post-imperial nation-state detached from its bigger German neighbour. Not only Pan-Germans and Austrian Nazis, but also Social Democrats, commercial interests and a ‘wide segment […] of the public’ favoured Anschluss in the 1920s, as Madeleine Dungy rightly notes (p. 225). Moving forward to the present, right-wing leaders Sebastian Kurz, Andrej Babiš and Viktor Orbán can hardly be cast as products of what Patricia Clavin calls the ‘formative years of global governance’ after 1918 (p. 374). If tied to history at all, they invoke a populist longing for the fabled Habsburg Gemütlichkeit of the pre-1914 period, not for the time when the League and its mid-century replacement, the United Nations, were forced to grapple with practical questions of reshaping international politics in the interests of turning a delicate peace into something more than the mere absence of war. Department of Humanities Matthew Stibbe Sheffield Hallam University Osiecki, Jakub. The Armenian Church in Soviet Armenia: The Policies of the Armenian Bolsheviks and the Armenian Church, 1920–1932. Translated by Paweł Siemianowski and Artur Zwolski. Peter Lang, New York, Bern and Oxford, 2020. xvi + 271 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. €79.20: £64.00;£76.80 (e-book): $94.95. The history of the Armenian Church in the first decade after the imposition of Soviet rule on Armenia in 1920 has been little studied by foreign scholars. The opening of the archives in the 1990s allowed a long-forgotten history to emerge, and several collections of archival documents and monographs have appeared in Armenian, with some publications also in Russian. Hacik Rafi Gazer provided an extensive analysis of the Armenian Church in the years up to the Second World War in his German-language work Die Armenische Kirche in Sowjetarmenien zwischen den Weltkriegen (Hamburg, 2001, reviewed in SEER, 81, 2003, 3, pp. 573–75). Jakub Osiecki draws on these sources, but has also delved into the archives in Yerevan, Tbilisi and elsewhere to fill out REVIEWS 779 this picture for the 1920s and has included insights from several oral history interviews he conducted in Armenia between 2011 and 2014. For those who might think that the anti-religious policies imposed by the Bolsheviks in Armenia were entirely new, Osiecki offers a corrective. He notes the popularity of ‘the ideology of secularism’ (p. viii) especially among Armenian intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of whom expressed anti-clerical views. Political parties advocated the separation of Church and state and the secularization of schools, and the removal of land holdings from the Church. The tsarist government had seized Church property in 1903. The genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire left fleeing survivors disillusioned and impoverished. The government of the independent, Dashnak-led Armenian Republic (1918–20) nationalized almost all Church schools. The Bolsheviks — determined to crush the Church as they were the Dashnak party and any other source of actual or potential opposition — could draw on these earlier impulses. For those not familiar with the first decade of Communist rule in Armenia, Osiecki provides a useful summary chapter before looking in detail in further chapters at Communist policies towards the Church (the party’s anti-religious policies, the secret police’s anti-Church activity and anti-religious and antiChurch propaganda), and the consequences of these policies (destruction of Church structures and the Church’s independence, persecution of the clergy, and atheization of the population and persecution of laypeople). The Bolshevik authorities in December 1920 immediately imposed in Armenia the range of measures they had already used in Russia to...