“THE PIRMALAK CASE” (1941-1942) – 2017-1

One fragment of Stalinist repressions

Summary

Artavazd G. Darbinyan

Key words – “The case of Pirmalak”, 1937, Stalin’s repressions, arrest, fear, threat, execution, exile, exculpation.

In Soviet historiography, the dominant opinion is that, after the Nazi Germany attack, political violence in the Soviet Union practically ceased, but it is not true. After the attack, the trains continued to deliver tens of thousands of victims of political repressions to labor camps. At the first stage of the war, in 1941, a concrete example of political violence in Armenia was the arrest and exile of 15 people (mostly youth) of the Talin region and the village Pirmalak of the same region. The case was based on the indictment numbered “investigation file 9265”, which we will conditionally call the “Pirmalak Case”. According to the decision taken by the special committee by NKVD on December 23, 1942 (of course, the trial was not conducted), one of the members of the group – Gevorg Mirakyan (according to the indictment, he was the leader of the anti-revolutionary Dashnak organization) was sentenced to maximum punishment – еxecution by firing squad with the confiscation of personal property, and the other members of the group were sentenced to 10 years in prison.

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