Pogrom: A Novel of Armenian History

By Aleksandr Shaginyan and Aleksandr Shaginian

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1883695007
• ISBN13: 9781883695002
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Edition Q
• Length: 165 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 0.5" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Tantalizing...

As the title suggests, this book is a historical novel drawing on current and contemporary Armenian experience. The `pogrom' however refers to the savage attacks and massacres of the Armenians of Sumgait, an industrial city near Baku, perpetrated by maraudering Azerbaijani gangs in February 1988.This is by no means a cool, detached, journalistic account of the three days of hell experienced by the Armenians of Sumgait. Shahinyan' s book is passionate and often dramatic and moving portrayal of the tragedy as it unfolds. It traces the policy of genocide that guided the Azerbaijani brutalities, from their inception at the highest levels of party and government authority in Baku and Moscow, as a conspiracy by anti-Perestroika forces to discredit and destroy Gorbachev by " teaching the too independently minded Armenians a good lesson" while at the same time "solving the Karabagh problem by keeping it for Azerbaijan." We meet the local Baku conspirators, the pampered and corrupt bureaucrats, at work planning their criminal deeds, working out the details of how where and when the massacrers should begin and, later still, the common street criminals who carry out the plan by cold-blooded murder, rape and looting.The novel's main hero is Aramais, the elderly hardworking shoe repairer who lives and works in Sumgait. He is a survivor from yet another genocide in another place: The 1915 Turkish Genocide of the Armenians! His life is vividly portrayed as the story unfolds; we get vivid and shocking flashbacks to his childhood memories of massacre and deportation in Western Armenia, of Turkish soldiers raping, killing and pillaging, while he is protecting a young Armenian girl from the intoxicated and hysterical Azeri mob. During various flashbacks we get to know his wife Susana and short glimpses of the bitter experience of deportation of both their parents and their death in exile in Bulgaria. We see him in action in the Second World War, earning a medal for bravery. Shahinyan is remarkably Solzhenitsin-like in his portrayal of life in Stalinist labor camps, its brutality, waste and sheer stupidity, as experienced by Aramais after the war. But again and again it is the flashbacks to 195 and Aramais's experiences of genocide then and now that draw the unmistakable parallel and similarities between the two events: That on both occasions they were planned state policy to massacre, pillage and deport the Armenians from their ancestral lands when they stood up for their rights and freedom -- the Pan-Turkist easy "solution to the Armenian problem" as applied to western Armenia in 1915 and to Karabagh now, in 1988!And we see some of the young protagonists of this resistance struggle for survival and freedom in the suffocatingly tense atmosphere of Sumgait: Aramais's son Arshik and his young sweetheart Bella, for example. We meet Dr. Mesropyan, Bella' s father and one of the top surgeons in Azerbaijan, in his vain endeavor to