“The historical fallacy of a collaboration between the Dashnaks and the Red Army was created in our neighboring country, Azerbaijan. The basis for this myth was likely the fact that Enver Pasha was killed by Armenians in the Red Army in the forests of Turkestan,” Armenian Revolutionary Federation member and historian Bagrat Yesayan told Aravot in an interview regarding developments in the incident that took place on New Year’s.
In Karaganda, Kazakhstan, at the “Old Rome” restaurant, one man was killed as a result of fights that broke out, and three men were injured.
The incident was then used to create anti-Armenian sentiment in Kazakhstan. Azeri bloggers spread information across the internet accusing Armenians of anti-Turkism.
Hypotheses were published that the Dashnaks collaborated with the Red Army in 1918 in order to make Central Asian peoples comply with their demands. According to several counts, approximately 500,000 people died during this time from different nations.
Information also surfaced regarding arrests and shootings of Central Asian peoples by the head of Azerbaijan, and then the head of Kazakhstan, Levon Mirzoyan, in the 1930s. Levon Mirzoyan was then arrested and shot in 1939 by the order of Stalin.
According to Bagrat Yesayan, Azerbaijan used the event of Enver Pasha’s murder to create the myth that the Dashnaks collaborated with the Red Army. “This historical fallacy has been widely spread in Central Asia, especially in Uzbekistan. Now they are trying to spread it in Kazakhstan. There is no historical evidence or witnesses of the Dashnaks playing a role in those events. This is something formed from lies. I think that this is anti-Armenian propaganda, which needs to be debunked by historians, not by the Dashnaks. The Dashnaks are a political party, not a collection of historians. Of course, we have great historians, but we cannot only work on history,” Bagrat Yesayan said.
Nelly Grigoryan
