Armenia’s Soviet Past: the View of Historians and Anthropologists

Abstract

On June 13–15, 2023, the international conference «The Soviet Experience in Armenia and its Legacy — 2» was held in Yerevan. The main aim of the conference was to reflect on the consequences of the seventy years of Soviet rule in Armenia between 1920 and 1991 and the impact that the Soviet past has on Armenia now. An important part of the format of the conference was to use Armenia as a kind of «laboratory of the Soviet» and to see which concepts work for Armenian material and which ones fail and therefore need to be rethought. The conference had several sections: 1) Soviet Language and Speech; 2) In and out of Armenia; Soviet policies and diaspora; 3) Post / the Echoes of Soviet Policy; 4) Soviet Propaganda: Advocacy as resistance; 5) Post/Soviet Schooling; 6) Religious Minorities in Post/Soviet Armenia; 7) The Image of the Soviet City and Citizen in Art; 8) Post/Soviet De/urbanization; 9) Post/Soviet Architecture. The conference once again showed that social anthropologists and historians are moving towards each other. Anthropology is undergoing an archival shift, as a result of which archival collections are intended to complement field materials, while historians are influenced by the anthropological turn and are beginning to conduct field research. The papers presented at the conference vividly show that this convergence enriches both sides both methodologically and factually.