If it wasn’t for the Armenian military commanders, the Turks would have undoubtedly taken away the whole territory of Armenia with the help of the Bolsheviks. Despite the difficult conditions, the Armenian warriors managed to organize effective resistance. Most of the Armenian commanders would be then either killed or exiled by the Bolsheviks.
Such commanders as Garegin Nzhdeh, Drastamat Kanayan (better known as Dro), Andranik Ozanyan, and many others still frighten both the Turks and the Russians who are carrying out their false propaganda that defames the true heroes of Armenia who had essentially saved the Armenian nation from complete extermination. Today’s Armenia is the fruit of their heroism.
And knowing that the Armenian commanders have been the core of the Armenian national identity, the Soviets attempted to eliminate them from the political arena of Armenia to weaken its sovereignty.
Telegram of People’s Commissar for Foreign Relations of RSFSR Chicherin to the authorized representative in Angora P. Mdivani about the territorial claims of the Turks on Armenia under the pretext of “mutual interests” between Turkey and RSFSR
March 4, 1921
The Turkish delegation talks a lot about their revolutionary ambitions and the mutuality of their interests with ours against imperialism, but in reality, they put forward unreasonable claims: in the first place, in regard to the national pact and the Treaty of Alexandropol, which factually suggests the partly obvious and partly covert transfer of whole Armenia and Batum to Turkey.
From the article of a member of the Committee of Propaganda and Operation of Peoples of East A. Skachko representing the position of the Bolshevik leadership of Russia in regard to the Soviet-Turkish conference in Moscow
March 4, 1921
Armenia will undoubtedly have to go by the Leninist principles for greatest national sacrifices. They will have to abandon not only the imperialistic ambitions of the dashnaks towards Greater Armenia but also possibly their more modest desires to reunite the lands that had been always called Armenian.
Source: Барсегов Ю.Г. Нагорный Карабах Documents 659 & 660, pages 618-619.
