Open letter to Mr. Armen Ashotyan, ex-minister and deputy of the Republic of Armenia
Dear Armen Gevorkovich!
Today, when you are no longer a deputy of the National Assembly, not the Minister of Education of the Republic of Armenia, not even a functionary of the parliamentary party, but just a regular person like me, and we are both in the same social status in our countries. I publish this open a letter to you to talk man-to-man. I decided to speak out in defense of the director of the Information and Press Department, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova, to whom you addressed in previous day with your open letter of a very impudent tone and ignorant content.
To begin with, I want to point out to you that an appeal by name to an official with a name and patronymic that are well known, and moreover towards a woman it is regarded as rudeness and lack of education in Russia. I will neither discuss your level of education nor the fact that you were the Minister of Education of the Republic of Armenia, and I will only say that you can hardly find response in front of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs after demonstrating such a clear disrespect. Especially after you have turned into a person in your own country without a certain official status, whose private opinion can be neglected in this situation.
I also want to remind you that the respected Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is an official representative of the Russian Foreign Ministry, that is, an official who, by virtue of her official status, is entrusted with the right to communicate to the general public and the press the official position of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the whole spectrum of issues. You are a person with experience of participation in public administration in Armenia, but, nevertheless, you must understand that any changes in the content of her assessments of the policy of Armenia on the heroization of the Nazi criminal Nzhdeh, who is considered to be a national hero in your country, are not by her private initiative, but by a reflection of a change in the attitude of the political leadership of my country to this issue. And the proposal that you expressed to her once again to visit Armenia will not change anything and cannot change, even if such a trip to her country happens again. Therefore, it was very ignorant of you to criticize the actions of an official only because she was professional and highly qualified in fulfilling her official duties. Such an emotional attack on her does not honour you as an ex-minister and ex-deputy, who must understand that such escapades can be forgiven if acted by an ignorant politician from the street, but not by you, who has some experience in public administration. In view of all this, I am more than sure that you will not receive any official response from Moscow to your open letter.
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Therefore, I took the initiative to give you a special answer and explain why and what particular transformations have recently occurred in the minds of the political class of Russia in respect of the state policy that glorify Nazism in Armenia. At the same time, I want to explain you why, as a citizen of Russia, I consider it necessary and important to spend years of my life studying the topic of collaboration Nzhdeh with the special services of Nazi Germany, which is why this unimpressed historical character in full accordance with the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg is a Nazi criminal.
You, as the ex-Minister of Education of Armenia and one of the functionaries of the Republican Party, cannot but know that the heroization of the Nazi criminal Nzhdeh in Armenia began to be carried out at the state level in 2000, and the National Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Armenia started this process. Then the Central Bank minted commemorative coins in honour of Nzhdeh, a medal of his name appeared in the Armed Forces of Armenia, postage stamps, envelopes, books, films began to be issued through various ministries of your country, then monuments of Nzhdeh appeared in Kapan and Gyumri, his name became called infrastructure objects in different cities and towns of Armenia (I personally counted 14 such renames). The apotheosis of this process was the opening of the Nzhdeh monument in Yerevan in May 2016. I have not forgotten anything? As a result, the Nzhdeh cult in modern Armenia became comparable to the personality cult of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union and almost came close to the personality cult of Kim Il Sung and his heirs in North Korea.
And all this time, the political elite and the scientific community of Armenia were well aware that Nzhdeh was a collaborator of the Third Reich and a Nazi criminal, since information about this after the collapse of the USSR was first published in Russian by non-Russian and non-Azerbaijani, namely Armenian authors - Vache Hovsepyan and Rafael Hambartsumyan. Only after them, based on their publications, first Azerbaijani and then Russian historians began to talk first about Nzhdeh’s cooperation with the Nazi regime as a whole, and only then specifically about his service in the SD - Hitler’s security service, recognized by the Nuremberg’s verdict tribunal criminal organization, one fact of belonging to which as a foreign agent turned a person into a Nazi criminal. From March 1940 to September 1944, he was a paid agent of the SD, as there are numerous documentary evidence in the archives of the Russian special services. Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia. Bulgaria, to deny the fact of the presence of which is senseless and useless. I don’t want to keep you like a negligent schoolboy with a nose into a copybook and list here the case numbers (with the funds and inventories) from the archive of the National Security Service of the Republic of Armenia and the numbers of sheets from these cases through which the relevant information has been recorded and you can easily find all this in the books of Hovsepyan and Hambartsumyan.
I will not dispute the truth of your words that Nzhdeh during the First World War did a lot of good for the Armenian people. At that time, representatives of so many warring parties were heroes of their countries and peoples. Let me remind you that Adolf Hitler was also distinguished by his personal courage on the battlefields of that war through which he was awarded the Iron Cross and several medals, but this did not save him from shameful death in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945. Hermann Goering was the best pilot and most successful ace of the First World War, who shot down most of the enemy’s aircraft, but this did not save him from the rope and the loop after sentence of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. It so happened that the hero of the First World War Nzhdeh was among the Nazi criminals during the Second World War, and his complicity in the war crimes of the Nazis erased all his previous services to humanity. Or is the will of the international community represented by the United Nations no longer a law for you?
And if you personally did not know all this, then this fact does not mean that others did not know about it, i.e. your recent direct superiors who made the decision to conduct the practice of heroizing the Nazi criminal Nzhdeh at the state level in Armenia. They precisely knew about all this and acted with a cold head.
The Russian Foreign Ministry, headed by its highest delegation, constantly demonstrated extra tolerance and loyalty towards official Yerevan, constantly pretending not to notice the socio-political transformations happening inside the country. Therefore, you in Yerevan have believed in your absolute impunity. However, other Russian departments at the same time made signs to you that you should not do what you are doing with your country and its people. Let me remind you that back in 2008, the Academy of the FSB of Russia published a collection of documents "State Security Agencies in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945", in one of which Nzhdeh was described as the organiser and leader of the "Armenian nationalist party, similar to Hitler’s", which he had previously created in Bulgaria. and a representative of the “National Socialist Armenian Group” on the Armenian National Committee of the Imperial Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories of Nazi Germany. In 2013, the Ministry of Defense of Russia in one of the of the encyclopedia “The Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945” publicly stated that in 1944, as part of an agent case on the Abvergrupp-114 (Dromedar), counterintelligence agents identified and arrested the former general the Dashnak army of the emigrant Ter-Harutyunyan, who served with the Germans under the pseudonym Nzhdeh. "
It is the same last phrase that you call "scandalous," which in the broader format the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev quoted in his speech at a meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the CIS in Ashgabat on October 10. However, he said nothing more than what the Russian Ministry of Defense published 5 years ago. Moreover, all these years in Armenia, they were well aware of the existence of this quote in the encyclopedia published under the editorial board of the Russian Minister of Defense, Army General S.K. Shoigu, since they used it in the text of an article about Nzhda in the free electronic encyclopedia Wikipedia. The President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev immediately brought this information to all his other colleagues in the CIS as soon as he learned from his assistants and speechwriters about its existence, especially since within the framework of this organization an agreement was already signed on the joint celebration of the 75th anniversary of Victory in World War II. And how to conduct such celebrations when a monument to the Nazi Nzhdeh still stands on one of the central squares of Yerevan? So, the speech of President Aliyev was not scandalous at all, but quite concrete and business-like: he outlined the barrier that needs to be broken as quickly as possible so that the countries and peoples of the CIS could celebrate this truly great anniversary together without the stench of Nazism from the territory of Armenia.
So, information about the fact that back in 2012 on the territory of the Armenian-Gregorian church in the city of Armavir in the Krasnodar Territory, a memorial sign Nzhdeh was installed along with signs to the true heroes of the Fatherland wars of Armenian nationality - to Marshals Baghramyan and Baghdasaryan. Such blatant blasphemy when the ideological enemy of the USSR Nzhdeh, who fought on the side of the Nazis in that war, was on a par with the Armenian commanders who defeated Nazism and Hitlerism. And then information was added to it that in 2017 in the same Armavir, local Armenians, by direct instruction from Yerevan, began to demand to erect a monument to this Nazi criminal in the city and rename one of the streets in his honor. Is the city of Armavir in the Krasnodar Territory of Russia still under autonomy of Yerevan, but not yet belong to Moscow?
Now, I hope, you understand why I consider it important and necessary to spend my time and efforts in order to counteract attempts to spread the heroism of Nazism from Armenia as far as to the territory of Russia. I do not want my children and grandchildren to live side by side with the bearers of the ideology of Armenian Nazism, which you personally undoubtedly relate to. During the Great Patriotic War, my ancestors fought, injured, died on the battlefield, fighting to the death with Nazism, not so that then their grandchildren and great-grandchildren could have a handful of fanatical Armenian nationalists called the Republican Party of Armenia who dictate their will and teach how to live according to their national laws.
While there lives a "multinational people of the Russian Federation" under a unique Constitution, where there is no division of people on the basis of ethnicity, origin and religion in Russia, there cannot be said about modern Armenia. And while you fooled your Nzhdeh cult to your fellow countrymen, nobody in Russia will care it. But personally, you and your like-minded people, who consider themselves tsekhamards (Nazi ideologist), decided to subordinate the Armenians of Russia to their ideological influence and thereby crossed all possible "red lines", starting to dictate their will to the citizens of a completely foreign country. And therefore, the glorification of Nazism in Armenia has ceased to be an internal affair of your country, turning into an international problem that you yourself have created on your own.
Of course, I clearly understand that you are personally ready to refuse to participate in your country in the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War, if only the cause of your life would not be harmed as a result - the glorification of the Nazi criminal Nzhdeh, on which you built your political career in Armenia. It is very painful for you now to see how the inevitable wave of complete collapse is approaching everything that you lived through all the years of your party-political and bureaucratic career. I dare to assure you that the denazification of Armenia is not far off, and this process will concern you first of all. And one should not blame Maria Zakharova, the official representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for the upcoming events. You are already a former politician and former official, and it seems to me, life has not taught you anything, so far. And if you do not give up your pro-Nazi views in the spirit of the theory of the workshop Nzhdeh, then tomorrow you will turn into a former man thrown to the sidelines of history.
And now I want to ask you the last question, completely in the spirit of the workshop theory of Garegin Nzhdeh: what is it like to feel the result of spending overnight in the eyes of society from a workshopman into a real tsekhamards?
translted by Elnur ENVEROGLU
