Hamazasp Srwandzjan

Hamazasp Srwandzjan

Hamazasp Srwandzjan ( Armenian Համազասպ Սրուանձտեան Hamasasp Srvandsian ; * 1873 in Van , Ottoman Empire ; † February 18, 1921 in Yerevan , Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic ) was an Armenian commander of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation , who was known for his leading role in the massacres of Azerbaijanis at the beginning of the 20th century is known. He himself fell victim to a Soviet murder plot.

Career

After his school career, Srwandzjan began training as a watchmaker and jewelry maker. But with the weakening of the Ottoman Empire and the growth of revolutionary moods at the end of the 19th century, he soon joined the Armenian national movement. To this end, he first joined the liberal Armenakan Party and later the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) and participated in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the Azerbaijani and Armenians in 1905-1906.

In 1908 Srwandzjan was arrested along with other leading figures of Taschnaks ( Daschnaksütjun - Armenian name for ARF) and exiled to Siberia for 15 years . In 1913 he managed to escape. He initially moved to Istanbul . After the Dashnaks were amnestied by the Russian Tsar Nicholas II , Srwandzjan returned to the Caucasus . With the beginning of the First World War he took over the command of the 3rd Armenian Volunteer Unit in Eastern Anatolia and took part in the battles for Van, Bitlis and Chizan .

March events 1918

Srwandzjan and his Armenian combat units became particularly notorious during the March events in Azerbaijan in 1918 . According to the German historian and Caucasus researcher Jörg Baberowski , the militias commanded by Srwandzjan killed the civilians in a particularly cruel way directly on the street. His unit of 2,000 men was murdered and plundered across entire towns from Baku to Quba . Baberowski claims that Srwandzjan carried out the orders of Stepan Shahumyan and Grigory Korganov , the two communist leaders of the Baku Commune , to “teach the counter-revolutionary forces a lesson”. When Srwandzjan arrived in Quba, he is said to have told the townspeople that he had been sent to "avenge the massacres of the Turks on his compatriots and to destroy all Muslims from the coast of the sea to Mount Şahdağ". In just one day, his unit massacred 2,000 civilians and destroyed everything in their way. According to Baberowski, up to 150 homes were destroyed in the city of Quba alone and 122 Azerbaijani villages were "reduced to rubble" across the province.

In 1918 Srwandzjan worked unsuccessfully in the Battle of Baku on the side of Bolshevik- Dashnaken against the Ottoman- Azerbaijani troops. Before the city was liberated in September 1918, Srwandzjan gave up his defensive positions and fled to Persia . After the end of the First World War he returned to the Democratic Republic of Armenia and was appointed commander of the Armenian army units in the region of Nor Bejaset (now Gawar ). However, with the establishment of Soviet power in Armenia, Srwandzjan was arrested and killed by communists in a prison in Yerevan in February 1921 .

Literature and individual references

1. ↑ Баберовски Й .: Враг есть везде. Сталинизм на Кавказе . Российская политическая энциклопедия. Фонд "Президентский центр Б. Н. Ельцина", Москва 2010, ISBN 978-5-8243-1435-9 .
2. ↑ А.В. Чернышов: Срванцтян Амазасп. Биография. Retrieved January 6, 2020 (Russian). 
3. ↑ Jörg Baberowski: The enemy is everywhere. Stalinism in the Caucasus . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-421-05622-6 , pp. 141 .
4. ^ Y. Gasparyan: Encyclopedia “The Armenian Issue” . Yerevan 1996.