Soviet Armenians Recall Massacre of 1915

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians from throughout the Transcaucasian republic and abroad observed an official day of mourning Tuesday to mark the 1915 massacre of more than 1 million Armenians by Turks.

Soviet television showed massive throngs of people moving slowly through the Armenian capital of Yerevan as rain fell on the 75th anniversary of the tragedy and laying flowers at an eternal flame to the victims of the genocide directed by Sultan Abd al Hamid II in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire.

Patriarch Vazgyen I, head of the Armenian Church, and other black-frocked clergymen wearing large wooden crosses around their necks led the huge procession in Yerevan.

Western estimates of the death toll in the massacre range from 1 million to 2 million.

Moscow-based foreign correspondents were prohibited from going to Armenia to cover the ceremonies, and Soviet news reports did not say exactly how many Armenians participated.

But the official Izvestia government newspaper said that residents of cities, towns and villages across Armenia marked the day of mourning in the republic of 3.3 million people.

Radio Moscow’s Interfax news service said mourners also gathered in Nagorno-Karabakh, the mainly Armenian enclave of the Azerbaijan republic that has been the source of bitter strife between the two ethnic groups since February, 1988.

Interfax said “no excesses were reported” in Nagorno-Karabakh, but the official Soviet news agency Tass reported violence in the ethnic conflict that is tied to the mountainous enclave’s disputed status.

Tass said an Interior Ministry soldier, part of a large Soviet contingent based in the Caucasus to try to maintain order, died during a shoot-out with gunmen who attacked the Armenian border village of Nyuvadi, which is inhabited mostly by Azerbaijanis.

Several hundred people have died in the regional strife in the past two years. Azerbaijani-led pogroms against Armenians in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku forced Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev to order troops to storm the city on Jan. 20 in a military crackdown that left scores more dead.

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