Aghasi Khanjian - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Aghasi Khanjian, also Aghasi Khanchian or Agasi Khandzhan (January 30, 1901—July 6, 1936), was First Secretary of the Communist Party of Armenia from May 1930 to July 1936.

Khanjian was born in the city of Van

Van, Turkey

Van is a city in southeastern Turkey and the seat of the Kurdish-majority Van Province, and is located on the eastern shore of Lake Van. The city's official population in 2010 was 367,419, but many estimates put this as much higher with a 1996 estimate stating 500,000 and former Mayor Burhan...

, Ottoman Empire

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...

(today eastern Turkey

Turkey

Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...

). With the onslaught of the Armenian Genocide

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide—also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the Armenian Massacres and, by Armenians, as the Great Crime—refers to the deliberate and systematic destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during and just after World War I...

, his family emigrated from the city in 1915 and settled in Russian Armenia

Russian Armenia

Russian Armenia is the period of Armenia's history under Russian rule beginning from 1829, when Eastern Armenia became part of the Russian Empire to the declaration of the Democratic Republic of Armenia in 1918...

. In 1917-19, he was one of the organizers of Spartak, the Marxist student's union of Armenia. He later served as the secretary of the Armenian Bolshevik

Bolshevik

The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....

underground committee.

In 1920, Khanjian became secretary of the Yerevan

Yerevan

Yerevan is the capital and largest city of Armenia and one of the world's oldest continuously-inhabited cities. Situated along the Hrazdan River, Yerevan is the administrative, cultural, and industrial center of the country...

city committee and in 1930, the first secretary of the Armenian Communist Party. He proved to be a charismatic Soviet politician and was very popular among the Armenian populace. He was a friend and supporter of many Armenian intellectuals, including Yeghishe Charents

Yeghishe Charents

Yeghishe Charents was an Armenian poet, writer and public activist. Charents was an outstanding poet of the twentieth century, touching upon a multitude of topics that ranged from his experiences in the First World War, socialism, and, more prominently, on Armenia and Armenians.An early champion...

(who dedicated a poem to him), Axel Bakunts

Axel Bakunts

Aksel Bakunts was an Armenian prose writer, film-writer, translator and public activist.-Biography:Aksel Bakunts was born in 1899 in Goris and educated at the Gevorkian Seminary in Echmiadzin. Always outspoken, his first publication, a satirical account of the mayor of Goris, earned him a stint...

and Gurgen Mahari

Gurgen Mahari

Gurgen Mahari was an Armenian writer and poet.- Biography :In 1915 during the Armenian genocide Gurgen's family emigrated to Russia. His first book, Titanic was published in 1924...

. Khanjian also tried unsuccessfully to have Moscow reunite Nagorno-Karabakh

Nagorno-Karabakh

Nagorno-Karabakh is a landlocked region in the South Caucasus, lying between Lower Karabakh and Zangezur and covering the southeastern range of the Lesser Caucasus mountains...

with Armenia. He was arrested in 1936 and died while being interrogated. Richard G. Hovannisian

Richard G. Hovannisian

Richard G. Hovannisian is an American historian and scholar. He was born and raised in Tulare, California. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from University of California, Los Angeles. He was also Associate Professor of History at...

describes the circumstances of his death as follows:

But by the mid-1930s Khanjian had come into conflict with the most powerful party leader in Transcaucasia, Lavrenti Beria, a Georgian close to Stalin. Early in July 1936 Khanjian was called to Tiflis. Suddenly and unexpectedly it was announced that the Armenian party chief had committed suicide. Though the circumstances of his death are murky, it is believed that Beria had ordered Khanjian's death to remove a threat to his own monopoly of power.

Along with an entire generation of intellectual Armenian communist leaders (such as Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan

Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan

Vagarshak Arutyunovich Ter-Vaganyan was an Armenian communist party leader who was one of the first victims of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. Ter-Vaganyan was one of sixteen Soviet intellectuals who stood as defendants during the Moscow Show Trials...

), Khanjian fell victim to Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...

's Great Purge

Great Purge

The Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938...

See also