A July 1951 French diplomatic report provides further evidence of outside interference in Armenian affairs. The French consul general in Aleppo reported that, on a recent visit to Antilias, Bishop Zareh Payaslian conferred with a “Soviet delegation comprising Bishop Vahan Kostanian and Professor Ashot Abrahamian,” who “had expressed a desire to meet him.”26 The consul affirmed that the “Soviets’” central concern at this time was the question “of who was to succeed the current Catholicos of Antilias,” and that they wanted to “sound out Bishop Zareh about his intentions in this matter because they were alarmed by the possibility that certain dioceses might leave the Catholicosate of E[ch]miadzin for the Catholicosate of Antilias if the pro-Soviet incumbent of the latter Catholicosate was eventually replaced by a prelate hostile to the USSR.”27 The 1952-1956 period, in which one interim Catholicos after another ran the day-to-day business of the Catholicosate of Cilicia, brought manipulations on a much larger scale. No legitimate Armenian religious authority was able to prevent this meddling in Armenian affairs, which made the 1956-1958 explosion of violence among Armenians in Syria and Lebanon all but inevitable. According to the scant information at our disposal, the AGBU kept its distance from the warring factions, profoundly dismayed by these fratricidal clashes. The reallocation of its subsidies to the “national schools” in the 1950s nevertheless shows (see the chapter on this important question below) that it drew the appropriate lessons from the new balance of power in the period, which had turned to the advantage of the “anti-Soviets”: it was in these years that Alex Manoogian began promoting the broad-scale creation of Armenian ... Read all
The Presidency of Alex Manoogian in the Cold War Context
Alex Manoogian greeted on his 1959 visit to Paris by Nurhan Fringhian and Zareh Nubar (seated) (Arch. B. Nubar/Paris).