in Russian – https://aga-tribunal.info/olyunina-1-11-2021

Source: Azbarez.com

Valeria Olyunina is Editor-In-Chief of Nasha Sreda and an employee of the Public Institute of Political and Social Research of the Black Sea-Caspian Region named after V.B. Artsruni.

Today we once again raise the issue of the destruction of Christian monuments in Nagorno-Karabakh, set before the international community by the new barbarians, who came to us from yesterday’s Soviet Republic, destroying not only the heritage of Armenians, but also that of the other ethnic groups of the Caucasus: Lezgins, Talyshes, Udins, and more. Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev and his authoritarian regime is equally biased toward destroying both Christian Armenian churches, as well as monuments to the heroes of the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) and heroes of socialist labour of Armenian origin. 

The practice of destroying churches, Armenian cemeteries—like the cemetery of medieval khachkars (cross-stones) in Nakhchivan—with the blatant complicity by UNESCO is a continuation of the Armenian Genocide. These fascist barbarians want not only to wipe Armenian’s off the face of the earth, to kill and torture prisoners in violation of international conventions, but also to destroy their cultural heritage and, above all, sacred sites.

Of course, Azerbaijan does not hesitate to use various methods. It not only attacks, but also retreats, maneuvers, puts up a democratic front in this sorry business. Thus, in 2020 with the celebration of the Great Victory over fascism approaching, the Aliyev regime reported that Azerbaijan fully shared the memory of the war and the fallen heroes. Azerbaijanis participated in the Victory Parade. However, Victory May ended, and a completely different war began—for Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh)—and Baku’s propaganda machine showed all that it was capable of. It could easily call the Armenian Christian church a “bathroom” on national television, insulting the entire Christian world; the Azerbaijan’s hired propaganda hack, the false historian Oleg Kuznetsov was allowed to slander the fighters of the Taman division… The list goes on.

As far as we understand, if it is possible for Azerbaijan’s propaganda to desecrate the memory of the soldiers of the Red Army, the men who had reached the Reichstag and danced the victorious Kochari, why not strike at the talented architects of the Soviet era? Admittedly, in this context we are not talking about those architects of Armenian origin who built the cities of Azerbaijan itself. It is not yet clear to us whether the Baku masterpieces of Nikolai Bayev, an ethnic Armenian, will be destroyed.

Today, Azerbaijan’s propaganda machine is fighting not only the already deceased heroes, the marshals of Victory, completely destroying the village of Chardakhlu, the birthplace of the USSR Marshal Ivan Bagramyan and Marshal of Armored Troops Hamazasp Babadzhanian, 12 generals and seven Heroes of the Soviet Union. Baku is also at war with eminent personalities in the sphere of art, science, and culture who lived both in the USSR and in the Russian Empire, combining hatred of them with the falsification of history in its devious experiments.

Armenians and those who are involved in the misinformation campaign, observing the facts of blatant cultural genocide in the media and academic science (although there is no such thing as “Azerbaijani science” in the international community), have already grown accustomed to such facts as the destruction of the Narimanov cemetery in Baku or the demolition of the domes of the Kanach Zham (John the Baptist) Church in Shushi in Nagorno-Karabakh. In recent months, Azerbaijanis have begun selecting prominent personalities of Armenian origin, previously “inviolable.” This new round of propaganda war looks especially paradoxical when it comes to public slander of such outstanding architects as Karo Halabyan or Alexander Tamanyan in the media. Of course, you will not see any links to a source, historical or cultural, in these informational “throw-ins.” The reason being that these sources do not exist. It all boils down to the same Armenophobic rhetoric of the lowest market grade. 

The outstanding architect Karo Semyonovich Halabyan (1897–1959), the creator of remarkable architectural masterpieces, has been targeted by Baku hacks for several years. The fact is that Halabyan had not only built, for example, the Sochi marine passenger terminal (together with Leonid Kalik), led the development of the General Plan for the restoration of Stalingrad, and designed the building of the Central Academic Theatre of the Russian Army (together with Vasily Simbirtsev), but also headed various organizations. During the Great Patriotic War, he directed the work of the Union of Architects and the Academy of Architecture and headed a special workshop of the Academy, where plans were developed to mask the most important industrial and defensive structures. He was a member of the Commission for the Registration and Protection of Monuments of Art, chairman of the Commission for Reconstruction of the Union of Architects of the Soviet Union, and vice-president of the USSR Academy of Architecture.

And this track record is already enough for Azerbaijani pseudo-culturologists to label Karo Semyonovich’s an “informant.” They allege that in the intervals between doing architectural sketches while restoring the cities destroyed by the Nazis (Kyiv, Voronezh, Stalingrad), Karo Semyonovich found time for libel against his colleagues.And all this marginal heresy is inflicted not only on a talented architect, but also on the person with convictions that he was not afraid to defend even in a dispute with Lavrentiy Beria, for which he suffered and miraculously escaped repressions—owing to Anastas Mikoyan’s support.

In August 2020, a few weeks before the start of the war in Artsakh, the news.myseldon.com website published an article by Zülfüqar Ibrahimov expressing Azerbaijan’s displeasure with an initiative spearheaded by Valeria Olyunina, an employee of the Institute of Political and Social Research of the Black Sea-Caspian Region named after V.B. Artsruni, to install a memorial plaque in Moscow in honor of Alexander Tamanyan. The poorly educated author (his name is not known in the architectural circles of Russia and, presumably, Azerbaijan) draws out bizarre argumentation, developing anti-Tamanyan rhetoric and questioning the installation of the plaque.

“In the Black Sea-Caspian Region, he is better known as the destroyer of historical Irevan, an Azerbaijani city transferred to the Armenians in 1918 as the capital of Armenia, which was somehow cobbled together from other peoples’ lands,” Ibrahimov wrote. “Tamanyan made no significant contribution to the architecture of Russia, but he rendered an invaluable service to his compatriots, masterfully wiping out all traces of Azerbaijani and Muslim culture and civilization from the face of the earth. The 1936 plan for the reconstruction of Yerevan is a large-scale act of vandalism, incomparable with anything in the degree of cynicism. Thanks to Tamanyan, the Armenianized Yerevan did not retain any signs of a historical city, which, however, greatly complicated the task of the Armenian side when preparing the celebrations on the occasion of the fake anniversary of the capital. In addition, the capital of Armenia was designed taking into account the view of Mount Agri Dag, so that subsequent generations of Armenians could contemplate the object of the unattainable fantasies of the Armenian nation and constantly feed on hate. Everything is planned, everything is taken into account.”

First of all, Zülfüqar Ibrahimov is a little too late. A memorial plaque, right on the facade of Tamanyan’s masterpiece of a mansion (Tenement House) of Prince Shcherbatov at Novinsky Boulevard, 11 in Moscow, already exists. The building project was awarded first place and earned a gold medal in a “best buildings” competition, held by the local government in 1914. The results of this competition were reported on the pages of the Russkiye Vedomosti newspaper on April 4, 1914 (March 22, 1914).

My idea was to install a plaque on Vera Firsanova’s Tenement House on Prechistenka, 32/1. Tamanyan reconstructed this building at the behest of a renowned landlady and philanthropist. During the reconstruction in 1915, Tamanyan changed the interiors of the second floor and the facades. The recreation hall once more became a concert hall; a stage in the form of a Greek portico was arranged in it. The space between the windows on the second floor was decorated with caryatids. The ceremonial hall, 16.10 by 9.50 m in size and 7.30 m high, was designed by Tamanyan in the neoclassical style. The portico in front of the stage with a pediment on double columns, pilasters, niches, and walls were revetted with yellowish marble. The engineering system of the building also underwent radical reconstruction. Stoves were dismantled, central water heating was installed, the lobby and the central staircase were redesigned.

Tamanyan also built a stone fence, from which only a part of the lattice gate is said to have survived to this day. There are a large number of memorial plaques on the facade of the house. Here, the children of Leo Tolstoy, the chess genius Alexander Alekhine, the outstanding philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, poets and translators Valery Bryusov and Andrei Bely attended the Polivanov gymnasium – and the latter two figures of the Silver Age of Russian literature were friends of the Armenian people, so there is no contradiction here, and the level of Tamanyan’s talent more than measures up to these personages.

Secondly, Zülfüqar Ibrahimov is trying to belittle the genius of Tamanyan by claiming he had built “only two houses” in Moscow. Unfortunately, the quantitative approach is played up here. During his Moscow and Moscow Oblast period, he built or reconstructed the House on Novinsky Boulevard, Firsanova’s mansion, and built a garden city in Zhukovsky (Kratovo), together with Vladimir Semyonov, by direct order of Baron Nikolai Karlovich von Meck. We are talking about a great number of houses, structures, the Kazan railway, whose owner was von Meck, and even a bridge over the picturesque Khripanka River, which was added to the coat of arms of the settlement of Kratovo. This period was also marked by Tamanyan working on a project, to build a women’s gymnasium, in Volokolamsk.

The Yaroslavl and St. Petersburg periods of architecture are much better represented. This is understandable, because the architect himself studied and lived in St. Petersburg. His teacher at the Academy of Arts was Alexander Pomerantsev. I hope that Nikanorovich’s name is beyond questioning by Ibrahimov, as well as the fact that Tamanyan had made significant contributions to the architecture of Russia. In our country, which is rich in architects and engineers, gold medals are not simply handed out. Neither are diamond pins like the one Nicholas II gave Tamanyan when he thanked him for the construction of an exhibition in honor of the 300th anniversary of the House of Romanov in 1913 in the shortest possible time (2 months!).

Thirdly, linking Tamanyan’s name to the Black Sea-Caspian Region is not justified, since the Black Sea-Caspian Region is a geopolitical discourse, not a cultural one, let alone an architectural one.

Fourthly, “the Azerbaijani city of Irevan” does not exist, since the Azerbaijanis as an ethnic group appeared only in 1936 on the instructions of Stalin, who also awarded Tamanyan (posthumously) the Stalin Prize for the construction of a square and an Opera House.

Tamanyan built a new, Soviet Yerevan. His masterpiece was singled out not only by the Armenians of Soviet Armenia, but also by architectural historians who came from the capital of the USSR, Moscow, to admire his genius. David Yefimovich Arkin (1899–1957) left a voluminous article about Tamanyan’s outstanding work, putting Tamanyan on the list of the five most talented Soviet architects. Moreover, four of them, such as Ivan Zholtovsky and Ivan Fomin, had studied the world architectural heritage in world centers of culture, but Tamanyan had never been to Italy or Greece and learned a lot on his own, by tuning into his creative intuition.

Now, on the subject of “erasing the traces of Muslim civilization,” which Ibrahimov tearfully tells us about. This is a lie, since Tamanyan demolished dilapidated, derelict houses in downtown Yerevan, for which he was harassed by Armenians who would end up living in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the city of pink tuff, because people are always reluctant to move. Tamanyan had, of course, erased the camel tracks, but left the Iranian Blue Mosque. So, the Muslim civilization in terms of Persian culture has been preserved in the capital of Armenia.

As to the occasion of the “fake anniversary of the capital,” Zülfüqar Ibrahimov hints at the celebration of the 2,750th anniversary of Yerevan in 1968. Since the presence at this holiday of many government delegations, professors of the Moscow University, the Hero of the Soviet Union, cosmonaut pilot Vitaly Sevastyanov, who examined the citadel of Erebuni and the objects found at the excavations, would not have made any impression on Zülfüqar, we will attempt to impress his imagination with the record of the first Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan Heydar Aliyev. He visited Erebuni with the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Georgia, Vasil Mzhavanadze, in November 1969 and left a memorable entry in the guest book: “We admired the greatest monument of antiquity – the glorious stones of Erebuni. The people who left this amazing creation to their descendants, the nation of builders, evoke in all Soviet people a feeling of deep respect and pride.”

And, finally, Zülfüqar should clarify the fact that the biblical Mount Ararat is called Agri Dag, according to ancient historians and geographers. Neither their traces nor those of camel caravans can be found in this area, but unlike the latter, they had left objects that might appear strange to Zülfüqar, which are called “books.”