From: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.mideast,talk.politics.soviet
Followup-To: soc.culture.turkish
Subject: Re: Bilingualism - a good cause!
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 93 20:00:18 EST
Reply-To: sera@zuma.UUCP (Serdar Argic)
Distribution: world

In article <1993Jan11.144156.19664@synapse.bms.com> henry@bms.com (Henry Mednikoff) writes:

>There were never large numbers of russians in Georgia or Armenia.

Perhaps. But, there were large numbers of Turks in x-Soviet Armenia.

Source: Hovannisian, Richard G.: Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918.
University of California Press (Berkeley and Los Angeles), 1967, p. 13.

"The addition of the Kars and Batum oblasts to the Empire increased the
 area of Transcaucasia to over 130,000 square miles. The estimated population
 of the entire region in 1886 was 4,700,000, of whom 940,000 (20 percent) were
 Armenian, 1,200,000 (25 percent) Georgian, and 2,220,000 (45 percent) Moslem.
 Of the latter group, 1,140,000 were Tatars. Paradoxically, barely one-third
 of Transcaucasia's Armenians lived in the Erevan guberniia, where the 
 Christians constituted a majority in only three of the seven uezds. Erevan
 uezd, the administrative center of the province, had only 44,000 Armenians
 as compared to 68,000 Moslems. By the time of the Russian Census of 1897,
 however, the Armenians had established a scant majority, 53 percent, in the
 guberniia; it had risen by 1916 to 60 percent, or 670,000 of the 1,120,000
 inhabitants. This impressive change in the province's ethnic character 
 notwithstanding, there was, on the eve of the creation of the Armenian 
 Republic, a solid block of 370,000 Tartars who continued to dominate the 
 southern districts, from the outskirts of Ereven to the border of Persia." 
 (See also Map 1. Historic Armenia and Map 4. Administrative subdivisions of 
 Transcaucasia).

In 1920, '0' percent Turk. 

"We closed the roads and mountain passes that might serve as 
 ways of escape for the Tartars and then proceeded in the work 
 of extermination. Our troops surrounded village after village. 
 Little resistance was offered. Our artillery knocked the huts 
 into heaps of stone and dust and when the villages became untenable 
 and inhabitants fled from them into fields, bullets and bayonets 
 completed the work. Some of the Tartars escaped of course. They 
 found refuge in the mountains or succeeded in crossing the border 
 into Turkey. The rest were killed. And so it is that the whole 
 length of the borderland of Russian Armenia from Nakhitchevan to 
 Akhalkalaki from the hot plains of Ararat to the cold mountain 
 plateau of the North were dotted with mute mournful ruins of 
 Tartar villages. They are quiet now, those villages, except for 
 howling of wolves and jackals that visit them to paw over the 
 scattered bones of the dead." 

                             Ohanus Appressian
                            "Men Are Like That"
                                   p. 202.


Serdar Argic

                           'We closed the roads and mountain passes that 
                            might serve as ways of escape for the Turks 
                            and then proceeded in the work of extermination.'
                                                       (Ohanus Appressian)
                           'In Soviet Armenia today there no longer exists 
                            a single Turkish soul.'    (Sahak Melkonian)


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