Yerevan State University
PhD in History, Associate Professor
Yerevan/Armenia
gor.margaryan@ysu.am
Abstract
The paper examines the transformation of the representation of the Mongol–Tatar period in Armenian historiography under the influence of the Russian imperial and, especially, Soviet academic environment, treating this case as a model of a broader process that affected historical writing across the Caucasus.
For six centuries Armenian historical thought interpreted the Tatars within an autonomous biblical-genealogical paradigm. Building on Movses Khorenatsi’s conception of Armenia as the “House of Torgom,” thirteenth-century authors (Vardan Areveltsi, Grigor Aknertsi) derived the Tatars from the same lineage of Togarmah; colophons of 1411 and 1437 still styled rulers “Torgom-born,” and the Mekhitarist scholars Mikayel Chamchian and Ghevond Alishan recorded oral traditions in which the Tatars called the Armenians “emioglu” (cousins). As late as 1913, Gevorg Altunyan’s doctoral dissertation treated the Mongol invasions as a pan-regional catastrophe that struck the neighbouring countries “in equal or even greater measure,” without any reference to Russia — a notable fact after a century of Russian rule.
The Soviet period brought a radical rupture. Analysis of university textbooks and monographs (H. Zhamkochyan et al., 1975; L. Babayan; H. Manandyan; V. Voskanyan, 1989; G. Stepanyan, 1990) reveals a stable rhetorical scheme: the Armenian — and, more broadly, Transcaucasian — experience of Mongol rule is legitimised through the Russian one. A quotation from Marx on the Tatar yoke in Russia is regularly followed by the formula “these words apply equally to Armenia.” Quantitative lexical analysis demonstrates direct calquing of Russian historiographical clichés — “yoke,” “horde,” “predatory bands,” “heroic struggle” — vocabulary absent from Armenian dictionaries before the mid-twentieth century. Even titles were copied: G. Stepanyan’s The Struggle of the Armenian People against the Tatar-Mongol Yoke (1990) reproduces V. Shevyakov’s The Feat of the Russian People in the Struggle against the Tatar-Mongol Invaders (1961). The case of L. Babayan, who systematically compares Armenian and Russian census and taxation practices without ideological references, indicates that the operative factor was the Russian historiographical tradition itself rather than Marxist ideology alone.
The paper also traces the genesis of the composite term “Mongol-Tatars” in Russian publications of the 1790s–1820s and raises a comparative question of direct relevance to Caucasus studies: to what extent did Georgian and other South Caucasian Soviet historiographies undergo an analogous restructuring, and what did the region’s historical memory lose with the displacement of its own interpretative traditions.
Keywords: Armenian historiography; Soviet historiography; Mongol invasions; Caucasus; Russian influence; historiographical terminology; historical memory