Armenian Hero ‘Imprisoned’ by New Life in U.S.

In Hollywood, Paruir Airikyan lives quietly, just another Armenian immigrant with a wife and three children to feed. Hollywood is a long way from the Soviet Union, where for more than 30 years authorities had considered him Armenia’s most dangerous dissident.

Here the man who has spent 17 of his 39 years in Soviet prisons or in internal exile says he feels more isolated than ever. Long revered as a hero in the forefront of the Soviet Armenian community’s drive for independence, Airikyan is seen as something of an anachronism by many Los Angeles Armenians. Cut off from his country, he faces the possibility that he may never be allowed to return.

It has been four months since Armenia’s best-known dissident was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union. Since his arrival here, the Armenian community in Southern California--at more than 250,000 the largest in the world outside of Soviet Armenia--has treated Airikyan and his cause as an idea whose time has passed. In Armenia, he is almost a mythic figure. But in Los Angeles, Airikyan is in limbo, trying desperately to go back home and living in a dark, sparsely furnished apartment on the outskirts of a community that doesn’t have a place for him among its leaders.

“Even the most anti-Soviet organizations here have been careful not to adopt him,” said R. Hrair Dekmejian, chairman of the department of political science at USC. “In these days of (Soviet) perestroika and glasnost the more radical message is not what the community thinks is called for.”

Revolutionary Agenda

For more than 20 years, Airikyan has pursued a revolutionary agenda--organizing from prison cells and scribbling poetry on scraps smuggled out of work camps. He built a dedicated following and played a prominent role in the ethnic and political protests that have shaken the Soviet republics this year. His subsequent arrest and expulsion caused a stir in the Soviet Union and around the world, signaling as it did a tough new Soviet government position on the threat of renewed Armenian unrest.

After the massacre of Armenians in the city of Sumgait in February, the ideas Airikyan espouses became more accepted in the Soviet Union. Among Armenians in the Diaspora, though, who fear the hostile designs of the countries that would surround a free Armenian state, independence is still a dangerous word.

“You know, we have suffered so much, any thought of losing this little homeland that we have gives us a lot of worry,” said Artin Segherian, a leader of an Armenian political party here. “Despite the problems there today, at least it survives.”

While Los Angeles Armenians have long been known as a diverse group with volatile political differences, a consensus has been emerging recently that independence is not a practical or desired course for Soviet Armenia at this time. For these Armenians, the lesson of their homeland’s tragic history is that an independent state may be too weak to withstand outside attacks.

“There has developed, I think, in recent months, a consensus among Armenians here regarding independence,” said Gerard Libaridian, director of the Zoryan Institute, a contemporary Armenian research center in Boston. “And I think Airikyan remains out of that consensus.”

First arrested when he was 20 years old and in trouble with Soviet authorities ever since, Airikyan has known little else as an adult than the life of a prisoner. His detractors contend that in America, free to say whatever he wants, Airikyan has been removed from his position as a powerful symbol of dissent.

Strategy ‘Worked’

“He doesn’t have any role right now,” said Osheen Keshishian, the editor of the Armenian Observer, a Hollywood-based journal. “I’m sure he would do much better in Armenia for his cause. . . . They (the Soviets) expelled him in order to make him less dangerous. It has so far worked.”

Sitting in the shabby living room of an apartment on Normandie Avenue, found for him by friends, Airikyan recently spoke through an interpreter of his life here. It is, he says, a jail without walls.

“Ever since I left my homeland my only desire is to return,” he said. “I am now living in a prison. I must go back. I have an organization there that I formed, and there I have my people. And my people believe in me.”

Airikyan’s desire to return to his homeland contrasts sharply with the motivations of the more than 12,000 Armenians who fled Soviet Armenia for the United States this year. His experience also contrasts with that of established Los Angeles Armenians, many of whom came to the United States a generation ago or more, fleeing hard lives in Middle Eastern countries for the economic opportunities here.

Resemblance to Lenin

But money is not on Airikyan’s agenda. He is out to change his world.

A quiet, commanding man, dark and bearded with an intense gaze, Airikyan bears a slightly eerie resemblance to V. I. Lenin, the man whose political system he has spent his life fighting. Airikyan has been known to remove Lenin’s portrait from courtrooms and classrooms in his defiance of Soviet rule.

When Airikyan was a fourth-grader in Soviet Armenia in 1957, he noticed on a map that Mt. Ararat--the Biblical peak that is a universal symbol of the Armenian people--lay outside the borders of the Soviet republic.

He asked his teacher how that could be. He said he never forgot her reply.

“She answered, not at all distressed, that this was just the way it is,” Airikyan said. “I was deeply moved not only that it was outside the borders, but that the teacher took that in stride.”

Nine years later Airikyan formed the underground National Unity Party, publishing a series of journals passed hand to hand. Since then he has devoted his life to spreading the message of independence and his dream of recreating the Armenia of Biblical times.

Granted Amnesty

Jailed twice on charges of anti-Soviet activity and once on a charge of bribing a government official, Airikyan was freed last year under an amnesty for political prisoners. But in April, he was jailed again on charges of defaming the Soviet state. On July 21, Soviet officials stripped Airikyan of his citizenship and put him on a flight to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The United States accepted him as a political refugee three weeks later.

Airikyan’s wife and children joined him here in September. Their expenses are being paid for by the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit refugee resettlement agency. But at some point, if the Airikyans stay in this country, they will have to support themselves--or go on welfare.

In Los Angeles, Airikyan has lived a sort of double life. On the one hand, he has traveled to New York, Washington and Europe, his expenses paid by Armenian groups that want to hear him speak. He has met with President Reagan. The most recent issue of a magazine published by his underground organization--smuggled out of Soviet Armenia by American visitors--emphasizes that he remains the group’s leader and authorizes him to speak for the group wherever he is. In September, he met privately in Washington with Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze. He pleaded to be allowed to return home.

On the other hand, on the streets of Los Angeles, he is not recognized.

Shut out of decision-making at Armenian organizations here since his arrival in August, Airikyan last month formed an organization advocating Armenian independence. The first meeting of the group drew hundreds of Soviet Armenian emigres, enticed by Airikyan’s reputation.

But outside of the community of recent emigres, that reputation will work against him, Armenian scholars say. He is a revolutionary martyr, they say, at a time when most Armenians are drifting away from dreams of revolution.

“I really don’t think he’s going anywhere now,” said Libaridian of the Zoryan Institute. “He will probably sit down and write his memoirs someday, and he may develop a following in the Soviet Armenian emigre community. But that community tends to be isolated and incestuous. He has yet to develop a set of principles that is realistically acceptable to the larger Armenian community.”

Libaridian’s views are typical of the those expressed in interviews with dozens of Los Angeles Armenian community leaders.

Jewish Wife

At their apartment recently, Airikyan’s wife, Yelena, quieted the baby and prepared coffee from a meager stock while her husband talked above the din. Yelena Airikyan, a Russian Jewish dissident from Moscow, met Airikyan through her father and was engaged to him in 1973. Airikyan was arrested again soon after, and for 11 years, from the time they were engaged until they were married in 1984, she saw her fiance only once, for two hours.

Within a community suspicious of outsiders and deeply immersed in its culture, Airikyan’s marriage to a non-Armenian and a Jew has caused gossip. His detractors ask why a man who has devoted his life to the revival of the Armenian nation married someone who dreams not of Ararat but of Jerusalem.

Airikyan dismisses such questions, saying his wife has suffered more for his cause than his critics--moving to Siberia to be with him in exile, taking a room next to his prison camp in the Ural Mountains and giving up her dream of settling in Israel.

Airikyan talks about writing a book and about producing an album of songs he wrote while in prison. But when asked directly what he plans to do with the rest of his life, he grimaces and gazes past the questioner.

“If I have to stay here, I’ll survive,” he said. “I’ll live somehow.”