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Historian Pietro A. Shakarian’s book, Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin, was published by Indiana University Press in August 2025. The book’s launch took place in Yerevan at InVino on Saryan Street on July 31. At the request of Epress.am, Bryan Gigantino, historian and co-host of the podcast Reimagining Soviet Georgia, interviewed the author following the event.
Gigantino: So, the first question I would like to ask you is: Why was Mikoyan’s Yerevan speech of 1954 so significant?
Shakarian: Mikoyan delivered his Yerevan speech in March 1954, two years before Khrushchev denounced Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. In fact, his Yerevan address was part of a larger process in the Soviet Union that historian NanciAdler calls “silent de-Stalinization,” that is, a process that set the stage for Khrushchev’s famous report and his denunciation of Stalin’s personality cult.
During this “silent de-Stalinization,” the rehabilitation of political prisoners had already begun. Historians now have this discussion about Beria – was he a reformer or not? Beria did a general amnesty of prisoners in 1953, but there was no real distinction made between general prisoners (that is to say, common criminals) and political prisoners. It was later, during 1954-55, that his distinction became much more important.
Already in 1953, after the arrest and execution of Beria, Mikoyan began to receive requests for rehabilitation from family members of the victims of Stalin’s repressions. By February 1954, he decided that something had to be done to signal that the state was now open to such a process. We should also consider that many of those appealing to Mikoyan were from his personal circle of Caucasian Old Bolsheviks.
So when Mikoyan came to Yerevan in March 1954 and uttered the name of [Yeghishe] Charents, this was seen as a signal that the state was ready for mass rehabilitations. Moreover, the name Charents would have been familiar to those Bolsheviks and Communists who knew Charents in the Caucasian context. This helped lay the groundwork for de-Stalinization.
In the Armenian and Russian archives, I also discovered documents indicating that one week after Mikoyan’s speech, the Armenian leadership already established a rehabilitation commission, officially a review (рассмотрение) commission, to deal with cases of repressed persons, in Mikoyan’s name. This commission was tasked with helping Mikoyan deal with the larger number of letters that he would be receiving related to the Armenian Republic. In fact, they were anticipating a large number of letters from relatives of the repressed. Moreover, Mikoyan himself was actively involved in this commission’s work. For instance, he was corresponding with Anton Kochinyan about these requests.
Returning to your initial question, Mikoyan’s speech was significant not only because it heralded the start of de-Stalinization in Soviet Armenia, but also because it helped with the broader process of de-Stalinization at the all-Union level. It opened the door for former political prisoners like Olga Shatunovskaya and Alexey Snegov to contribute to de-Stalinization. It was they who encouraged Khrushchev to denounce Stalin and his personality cult at the 20th Party Congress. Snegov in particular strongly urged Khrushchev to denounce Stalin, stating that “should you and Mikoyan fail to dethrone Stalin at this congress, then you will be remembered in history as his willing accomplices.” This was emphasized to me by Khrushchev’s son, Sergei, when I interviewed him in Cranston, Rhode Island.
Additionally, Lev Shahumyan, the son of Stepan Shahumyan, played a major role in this early stage of de-Stalinization. His apartment became a refuge for former political prisoners to meet with Mikoyan and to discuss the full extent of the horrors of the Gulag and the horrors of political repression.
Of course, it is important to note that while Mikoyan and Khrushchev were aware of the repressions, they were not aware of the full extent of what was happening to the political prisoners. In this respect, we can say that they received a real education from Gulag survivors like Snegov and Shatunovskaya. And so this was an eye-opening moment for them in the lead-up to the 20th Party Congress in 1956.
So, again, the speech that Mikoyan gave in Yerevan was two whole years before the 20th Party Congress. It really shows that Armenia actually played an important role in helping lay the groundwork for the larger process of de-Stalinization. In this regard, my work coincides with the new trend in the field of Russian and Soviet studies that we see today, of “decentering” Russian or Soviet history from Moscow and showing how other centers in the Soviet Union were involved in these larger all-Union developments.
From the book / Photos: Anastasia Karkot*ska
Gigantino: You mentioned in your talk that there’s a lot of misunderstandings about Mikoyan. There’s this idea that he didn’t have any connections with Armenia, that he renounced his Armenian identity, or that he politically didn’t have this connection. What did you make of these conclusions?
Shakarian: Frankly, I must admit that when I began this research, even I made that assumption! I assumed he was far from the affairs of the Armenian Republic and that he was mostly concerned with business in Moscow. A common question you often hear in Yerevan is “what did Mikoyan ever do for Armenia?” The answer is often implied to be “nothing.” But what I found in my research was quite the opposite! In fact, his role in Soviet Armenia was rather extensive. In this regard, the information that I uncovered in the Russian and Armenian archives, as well as in the Armenian-language memoirs of Soviet Armenian officials, proved to be quite revealing.
About ten years ago, an initiative to erect a statue of Mikoyan in Yerevan sparked a huge debate about his legacy in Armenia. What is incredible to me is that you have these published memoirs of major Soviet Armenian figures, like Anton Kochinyan or Yeghishe Astsatryan, in which they devoted entire chapters to Mikoyan’s role as a patron for Soviet Armenia. And these memoirs are in the Armenian language! In retrospect, I’m really quite stunned that nobody in Armenia discussed these materials at the time.
In any case, there were two sides of the debate: one that was basically talking about Mikoyan’s role in the Stalinist repressions and the other that was talking about his role in international diplomacy. But nobody was talking about his role in de-Stalinization, which was extremely important, not only in terms of all-Union Soviet history, but also for the start of the Thaw in the specific Armenian context. This “Thaw” was the process that led us to the Yerevan demonstrations of 1965, demanding recognition of the 1915 Genocide, and then to the Karabakh (Artsakh) movement of 1988.
By the way, when we speak of the Karabakh movement, it is important to underscore that this movement was fundamentally about democracy at its core. It was about the right of the Karabakh Armenians to self-determination. It wasn’t about national independence, a national army, or national territorial claims. Even today, many in the West like to speak of the Karabakh movement as a “nationalist movement.” There was a national or nationalist component, yes, but this didn’t define the movement. It was mainly focused on the democratic rights of the people of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh. One could even say that, fundamentally, it was based exactly on the Soviet values of socialist democracy, of what the Soviet Union should be, but was not in practice by 1984 or 1985. In other words, the idea was that if there was true socialism and true democracy in the USSR, then these people should have the right to determine their own future.
So, this whole process that led us to the Karabakh movement, that led us to the 1965 demonstrations, it all began with Yerevan in 1954, with Mikoyan’s speech. It’s almost like a “hidden chapter” of Armenian history that is difficult to explore because so much of the materials are in Moscow. In fact, this is why the Armenian debates on Mikoyan are actually not so well informed, because most of the materials related to Mikoyan’s role in Armenia are in the major Russian federal archives, like RGASPI, GARF, and RGANI. By the way, in Mikoyan’s files in RGASPI and GARF, you can even find entire dela in the Armenian language!
So, that’s one issue – the availability of the source material, although even here, in Yerevan, you can find quite a bit on Mikoyan’s role in Armenian affairs. For instance, there was even a film produced about Mikoyan’s 1962 visit to Armenia that is now available online from the Armenian Archives. However, the other issue at play is a lack of interest. Since the Soviet dissolution in 1991, Armenian society has become more focused on other topics of historical interest, like the First Republic of 1918-20, the Genocide of 1915, the Karabakh issue, etc. Personally, I think that the First Republic has been over-studied, especially when one considers that it was only four years in the entire Armenian history. By contrast, the Soviet era was 70 years and has arguably left a much greater imprint on Armenia. For instance, today’s Yerevan would not be what it is without the Soviet past and even without Mikoyan, because he actually advised Armenian leaders on many projects in the Armenian capital.
book’s launch at In Vino/ Left-hand photos by Anastasia Karkot*ska; right-hand ones from Pietro Shakarian’s FB page
Gigantino: You cannot study the Soviet Union without looking at the question of nationalities, nationality policy, and the national question. There are a lot of historians in the West and outside of the West who have written about this. The historiography, as you know very well, has developed over the past 15-20 years, with more access to more archives. And of course, with this tendency of “decentering” Soviet history, the national question has gained even greater relevance. So, how does your study of Mikoyan relate to aspects of the nationality policy and the relationships between different nationalities in the Soviet Union?
Shakarian: So, this question is quite interesting, because it gets to the core of how Westerners interpret Soviet nationality policy in the post-war period. Until my book, the dominant narrative in Western historiography was that, under Khrushchev, the USSR pursued an assimilationist policy toward nationalities, and that Khrushchev even announced this policy in his address about the new party program before the 22nd Party Congress in 1961.
However, Khrushchev’s speech on national policy has been misread and misinterpreted in the West. It has been presented as a policy of assimilation, as if the concept of assimilation of nations was being promoted by Khrushchev. This is a completely wrong interpretation, a misunderstanding of what he actually said, because in fact he was emphasizing the need for rapprochement (сближение) instead of assimilation (слияние).
And this is quite important when we talk about the role of Mikoyan. When we look at the nationality platform of the CPSU Third Party Program, it is strongly reminiscent of what Mikoyan was saying in his Yerevan address of March 1954.
Indeed, in addition to de-Stalinization, Mikoyan’s speech also played a substantial role in defining nationality policy in the Khrushchev era. Mikoyan stressed in his address that we must, you know, be more sensitive to nationalities. We should, of course, oppose national chauvinism, but we should equally oppose national nihilism, the indifference to national cultures. So the call to rehabilitate Charents was also made in the context of Mikoyan’s call to be more sensitive to national cultures, to republish not only Charents, but also Patkanyan and Raffi, and to revive the legacy of Aleksandr Myasnikyan. So, this idea of the rejection of national nihilism is something that later found expression in the nationality platform of the CPSU Third Party Program. And, as I found, this was not a coincidence.
When I began to work in the archives at GARF, I read Mikoyan’s comments on the Third Party Program, and discovered that the original language of the program was much more assimilationist. Khrushchev had a different and much more utopian approach. Khrushchev, being Khrushchev, wanted to achieve communism all in one go. He believed that national differences were no longer relevant. Mikoyan said “voch’” (“no” in Armenian). It was he who advised deleting all the provisions referring to “assimilation” or “merger” (слияние) and to replace this idea with that of “rapprochement” (сбилижение).
From the book / Photos: Anastasia Karkot*ska
His envisioned policy of rapprochement was based on the voluntary unification of peoples, in which national differences were also respected. Moreover, Mikoyan (and this is really quite interesting) was against the idea of defining Soviet national policy as “territorial.” Nationality policy, according to his approach, should also be based on individual rights. This might sound astonishing to a Western researcher. Essentially, Mikoyan is talking about the individual rights of, for example, Armenians in Krasnodar or Moscow, Georgians in Leningrad, Jews in Odessa, Russians in Riga, etc. The idea is that no matter where you live in the Soviet Union, you are guaranteed certain inalienable rights as a nationality: the right to speak your native language freely, the right to preserve your national culture, etc. Ultimately, this set the stage for the major constitutional reform initiative that began under Khrushchev in the 1960s. Indeed, it was no accident that Khrushchev appointed Mikoyan to lead the subcommittee on nationality policy reform for his new, more democratic constitution that was ultimately never realized.
The “assimilationist” Western narrative on all this actually began in the 1960s with Robert Conquest. Conquest wrote that Khrushchev was all about assimilating smaller nationalities. Soon, other Western scholars began picking up the Conquest thesis. They looked at the 1958 Soviet educational reform or the defeat of the Latvian national communists and they would say “well, these episodes prove the validity of what Conquest wrote.” But in reality, when we look at the case of the Latvian national communists or the dismissal of [Imam] Mustafayev in Azerbaijan, we see much more of a give-and-take. Ronald Grigor Suny and Valerie Kivelson defined this “tango” as a kind of a “tug of war” between the center and the republics over the extent of what was permissible in terms of local self-governance. Meanwhile, the reforms of the 1960s – the Third Party Program, the attempted constitutional reform, etc. – indicate that the general thrust was toward rejecting the assimilation of nationalities. Thus, the overall trend under Khrushchev was toward more, not less, decentralization.