FAMILY

From the article

PETROSYANS: THE ROAD OF LIFE IN A CENTURY AND A HALF

Newspaper Noah's Ark, Marina and Hamlet Mirzoyan, No. 2 (232) February (1-15) 2014

Kagyzman - Erivan - Moscow - Yerevan

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GEVORG PETROSYAN

Gevorg Petrosyan, the patriarch of the family from which our story begins, was born in the middle of the 19th century in the town of Kagyzman in Western Armenia. It is known about his son Petros Petrosyan that he was born in 1897 in Erivan, rose to the rank of an officer in the tsarist army, having an education as a financier. With the birth of the First Republic of Armenia, he puts his knowledge at the service of its armed forces. Fate brings Petros to Margarita, the daughter of the priest Garegin Ter-Tumanyan from Ganja. God gives them a son Grant, the main character of our story. At the end of the past year, he would have turned 90 and he could celebrate this date with his close-knit family.

With the end of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, the Kars region of the Caucasian governorship of the Russian Empire was formed from the regions occupied by Russian troops. She also absorbed the town of Kagyzman (Kagyzvan). Following the outflow of the Muslim population and the influx of Christians from the regions of Western Armenia and Transcaucasia, the proportion of Armenians in the region has increased markedly. If in 1887 38 thousand souls of Armenians lived in the region, then by 1897 there were already 73 thousand of them. Wishing to strengthen its position in this region, the tsarist government also settled these lands with 20,000 Russians.

GEVORG AND HOSANNA

The year 1885 turned out to be fruitful for black grapes in Kagyzman. They rowed and thought about where to put him, and his father advised Gevorg, who knew a lot about wine, to bring the entire crop - sun-drenched bunches in wicker baskets - to Erivan (the center of the province of the same name of the Russian Empire), to the winery of a family friend. Having borrowed four more carts from their neighbors, Gevorg and his wife Hosanna set off on their journey.

For the first 27 versts they moved along the Kagyzman-Igdyr road, still staying in their native Kars region. Relatively quickly we reached the village of Kults in the Erivan province, then there were country bumps and ruts. Completely tired of the shaking, we finally reached Erivan, a once powerful fortress, stormed by Russian troops and nicknamed by Emperor Nicholas I "clay pot". September Erivan met them with the hubbub of merchants and the roar of donkeys loaded with vegetables and fruits.

Gevorg told long-time friends of the family about the beauties of Kagyzman and, oddly enough, was proud that in his free time from field work he and his father went to the swamp closest to the village, where they caught leeches for sale to healers and healers. The money from the sale of leeches was barely enough to cover the damage caused to the farm by two lean years, drought and hail. In good times, the Petrosyans gathered a good harvest of winter wheat and spring barley from their two small plots of land, since the mild, warm climate allowed this. The family also grew rice, lentils, millet and corn, and invariably sowed a piece of land with the best varieties of tobacco - Samsun and Trapsund.

After listening to his stories, the owner of the factory, who went along with Gevorg's father as Russian guides in the last Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878, suggested that the young couple stay to work for him. Fortunately, Gevorg knew a lot about winemaking. On reflection, he agreed.

The owner-winemaker settled Gevorg with Hosanna in his house, and since then they have only been doing that they brought grapes to him, now from all the vineyards of Kagyzman. Gevorg sold the surplus at the Erivan bazaar, where Russian buyers changed his name in their own way: they called him Yegor.

Excellent wine was in great demand, the owner was pleased with his workers, and in the family of Gevorg and Hosanna, children went one after another - four sons and two daughters. The last time Gevorg's wife gave birth to twins. Hosanna was still in demolition when the owner gave them a small house with a garden. Now they could host their relatives. Brother Harutyun and his wife Zalo were the first to come. They had no children, and somehow Harutyun said at dinner:

- Gevorg, as I see it, our daughter-in-law will give twins, but God has bypassed us with his mercy.

To which Gevorg joked:

- If I really have twins, I swear to God, I will give you one.

Twins were born - two brothers. A week later, God took one of them to heaven, but true to this word, Gevorg and Hosanna gave the second to their brother's childless family.

Having adopted the boy, Harutyun baptized him in the church of St. Petros and Poghos (Saints Peter and Paul) in Erivan. In the metric book for 1897, the baby was listed as Petros, the son of Harutyun Petrosyan.

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Excellent wine was in great demand, the owner was pleased with his workers, and in the family of Gevorg and Hosanna, children went one after another - four sons and two daughters. The last time Gevorg's wife gave birth to twins. Hosanna was still in demolition when the owner gave them a small house with a garden. Now they could host their relatives. Brother Harutyun and his wife Zalo were the first to come. They had no children, and somehow Harutyun said at dinner:

- Gevorg, as I see it, our daughter-in-law will give twins, but God has bypassed us with his mercy.

To which Gevorg joked:

- If I really have twins, I swear to God, I will give you one.

Twins were born - two brothers. A week later, God took one of them to heaven, but true to this word, Gevorg and Hosanna gave the second to their brother's childless family.

Having adopted the boy, Harutyun baptized him in the church of St. Petros and Poghos (Saints Peter and Paul) in Erivan. In the metric book for 1897, the baby was listed as Petros, the son of Harutyun Petrosyan.

PETROS AND MARGARITE

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Оригинал

Birth certificate, Petros 1897

Оригинал

Accountant's certificate, 1915

The biography of Petros Petrosyan fits into a couple of pages. Behind the mean lines are whole segments of a life full of trials.

After graduating from the Mikhailovsky Financial School of the Ministry of Trade and Industry of the Russian Empire in Baku in 1915 and having worked for a year in his specialty, Petros Arutyunovich, aka Pyotr Artemyevich, was called up to serve in the tsarist army. Fights on the Turkish front of the First World War. In June 1918, an officer who gained combat experience enlisted in the army of the Republic of Armenia. It falls to him to make war with the Turks, the instigators of the Armenian genocide, and here. But irreversible events are taking place on the world map. The power of the Soviets in late November - early December 1920 comes to Armenia.

Since the government of Soviet Armenia had not yet been finally formed, most of the organizational functions were taken over by the command of the XI Red Army. We learn about how it reacted to the officers of the army of the First Republic from the petition of six Armenian officers addressed to the governor of the city of Ryazan. Their letter begins with the words:

“After the Sovietization of Armenia, the commander of the XI Red Army, Comrade Gekker, arrived in Erivan and ... offered to send up to 10 persons of the command staff of the Main Staff to the headquarters of the XI Army to study the case and return to Armenia in order to instruct the rest of the command staff of the headquarters.”

Leaving Yerevan on December 14, 1920, they arrived on December 21 in Baku, at the headquarters of the XI Red Army. The officers write that in the first days upon arrival they were treated politely, as "with seconded persons of a friendly allied power." But the very next day they were taken into custody, "for the time of filtration." On January 1, 1921, they were taken under escort to the station, where the commandant of the Special Department of the XI Army stated that the Armenians were "sent to the disposal of the Ryazan Provincial Committee for appointment as a specialty in the units of the Red Army." However, upon arrival in Ryazan, they all ended up in a forced labor concentration camp. They were given to understand that they were now prisoners of war.

The petition of six officers ended with a request - "to send their case to Moscow for release and return to the Red Army of Armenia."

The mass expulsion of officers of the army of the First Republic began on January 24, 1921. By order of the Cheka and the military authorities of Soviet Armenia, on that day, all the officers of the old army were invited to the assembly points for re-registration. All of them naively believed that these were ordinary fees. But on the spot they were explained that they must urgently, directly from the place of assembly, leave for Baku to continue their further service in the Red Army. Since the railway was still in the hands of the Turks, they had to go to Baku on foot, through the Sevan (Semenovsky) pass (Yerevan - Dilijan - Ijevan) to Akstafa. From there by train to Baku.

The name of Petros Petrosyants is found in the “List of former officers who registered in the building of the Vagharshapat garrison club, according to the order of the Pre-Chek of Armenia No. 3” on a letterhead with the heading “S. S. R. A. Politburo of the Echmiadzin district. The list signed "Chairman of the Cheka SSR of Armenia" is dated January 24, 1921 and includes 102 names. Petros Petrosyants is listed under

No. 76 as the staff captain of the headquarters of the 2nd division of the rifle brigade.

He also had to pass the route Yerevan - Dilijan - Ijevan - Akstafa - Baku. But providence wanted him to fall ill and end up in the infirmary in Dilijan. And already on February 18, the “Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland”, under the leadership of the last Prime Minister of the First Republic, Simon Vratsyan, took power in Yerevan into their own hands. The Soviet leadership sought salvation in Dilijan. The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Soviet Armenia, Gevorg Alikhanyan, also ends up in the same infirmary. There he and Petrosyan became friends.

* * *

After the failure of the uprising in early April, Simon Vratsyan, with forces loyal to him and a significant part of the intelligentsia, left the borders of Bolshevik Armenia and went to Zangezur, where the Soviets were still annoyed by the fighting detachments of Garegin Nzhdeh.

The leadership of Soviet Armenia, which included Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee Sarkis Kasyan, Secretary of the Revolutionary Committee Askanaz Mravyan, Commissar of Foreign Affairs Alexander Bekzadyan, First Secretary of the Central Committee Gevorg Alikhanyan and Plenipotentiary Representative of Armenia in the RSFSR Sahak Ter-Gabrielyan, immediately returned to Yerevan from Dilijan. Alikhanyan managed to persuade Petrosyan to go with him: he guaranteed him complete safety.

At the end of April, the First Armenian Cavalry Regiment, which took part in the Sovietization of Georgia, also returned to Armenia. They quartered him in Ashtarak and began to prepare him for shipment to the recalcitrant Zangezur.

Petros Petrosyan, sent to the regiment, together with the officers of the headquarters, zealously took up the combat skills of the cavalrymen. The regiment was commanded by Colonel Alexander Mirimanyan, the chief of staff was Artem Aharonyan, a former staff captain. Both of them served in the army of the First Republic and in the old days knew Staff Captain Petros Petrosyan as a true patriot. By May 14, 1921, the number of ranks of the Army of the Republic was 6,669 people, of which 2,899 were part of the Armenian 1st Rifle Brigade, created on the basis of the First Cavalry Regiment.

There was a clear shortage of regular officers in the army. Even at the height of the events described in Soviet historiography as the "February adventure of the Dashnaks", on March 26, 1921, the Comindel of the Republic Alexander Bekzadyan sent a message to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (copies to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin), a message stating that in three months the existence of Soviet power in Armenia, 1,400 officers of the Armenian army were arrested (including 20 generals, 30 colonels). Bekzadyan considered the head of the Cheka of the Armenian SSR, Georgy Atarbekov, to be the main culprit of these mass repressions. “At a meeting of the Revolutionary Committee and the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party, Atarbekov,” writes Bekzadyan, “referring to the instruction of the Cheka, demanded the hasty and unconditional expulsion from Armenia of all former officers (both serving and not serving in the Red Army).”

It would seem that Bekzadyan's message should have contributed to the return of intelligent specialists to Armenia. But some dark forces, about which little is known so far, have made every effort to prevent their return.

Already a career officer of the Red Army, Petros Petrosyan accidentally learned that the Georgians managed to return the officers who served in the army of the Menshevik Georgia from Ryazan to their homeland almost without loss. Why didn't the same thing happen to the Armenian officers, he wondered. He did not leave the feeling that Lukashin, a stranger on Armenian soil, had a hand in this black deed.

In fact, that's how it was. Unlike the leaders of Georgia and Azerbaijan - Makharadze and Narimanov, the Armenian Sergey Lukashin (Srapionyan), a native of Nor-Nakhichevan-on-Don, never once raised the question of the fate of the imprisoned officers of the army of the First Republic. He knew neither the language nor the customs of his people, he believed only in the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the government of Soviet Russia, he considered the deportation of officers a necessary measure.

* * *

Pyotr Artemyevich in 1922 marries a twenty-year-old Bolshevik Margarita Tumanyan. All three of her brothers - Arsen, Tigran and Garegin - graduated from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. In 1928, having lived with a man of a rather difficult fate for six years, perhaps under the influence of long confidential conversations by candlelight, Margarita Gareginovna decided, citing family circumstances, to ask the party to withdraw her from its ranks. No one in the family dared to go into the details of such an act.

At that time, the young Soviet Republic was in dire need of experienced specialists. Petr Artemyevich, a financier by education, conscientiously works where he is sent. In the 1950s, Petrosyan headed the financial service at the Ararat wine and brandy factory, in the 1960s he was the chief accountant of the Ministry of Culture of the republic.

There is such a page in his biography. The head of Osoaviakhim Semyon Budyonny, hero of the Civil War, marshal of the Soviet Union, on December 11, 1945, awards Pyotr Petrosyan, chairman of the primary organization of Osoaviakhim Ararat Trust, with a certificate of honor "in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Armenian SSR and for the successful completion of tasks for the preparation of reserves for Red Army".

Although Pyotr Artemyevich was not blue-blooded, he was a man of rare endurance and good manners. In 1969, he died. The grandson of Pyotr Artemyevich, Gevorg Grantovich, recalls:

- If at the table the grandfather, addressing his son Grant, uttered the phrase “Be kind enough to give me salt!” - this could only mean that the grandfather was dissatisfied with something in the behavior of his son. And although this rarely happened, lunch or dinner continued in silence.

* * *

Petros's brothers, Abgar and Tigran, before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, owned a butcher's shop known throughout Yerevan, located on the site of the current Moskva cinema. They lived side by side - in two halves of the house at the intersection of Abovyan and Tumanyan streets. Sausages and frankfurters of the Petrosyan brothers were in great demand. They did not share the secrets of the taste of their products with anyone.

Gevorg Grantovich recalls:

- For family celebrations, our uncles prepared their own branded sausages. And they were eating. I remember that in 1973, when Ararat Yerevan won the USSR Cup, which coincided with the 80th birthday of Uncle Abgar, he shook the old days and surprised everyone not only with juicy sausages and sausages, but also with dogwood wine, which we have never tried. When the 20-liter cylinder was empty by the evening, Uncle Abgar silently went down to the basement and put out a stash to his numerous nephews. I think no one has ever said so many toasts in one evening to Ararat and the common favorite of Ishtoyan.

At the jubilee, Abgar Petrosyan also visited the minister of meat and dairy industry of the republic. He begged him to share the recipe for the delicacy. A day later, the minister sent a car for him and he went to the meat factory. After staying with the technologist for 15 minutes, Abgar flew out of him in extreme excitement and completely upset. The minister did it: what's the matter? It turned out that the technologist repeatedly offered Abgar to replace the ingredients with cheaper ones, referring to the impossibility of sustaining the recipe under production conditions.

Having told this story, Gevorg grinned and said:

- Miracles, and nothing more. With their small shop, Uncle Abgar and his brother Tigran could afford it, but the giant plant is powerless.

* * *

Muscovite Laura Gegamovna, daughter of Gegham Petrosyan, the elder brother of Pyotr Artemyevich, told us that she lost her father at the age of 10 in March 1940. At the Yerevan Machine Tool Plant named after Dzerzhinsky, he was the head of the shop. Hearing about the Pact between the USSR and Germany, he had the imprudence to drop: “All this is in vain. Germany, history will confirm this once again, will attack us anyway. The next day they came for him. And only in 1956, when her father was rehabilitated, she learned that in 1943 he had disappeared in the Altai Territory. A participant in the First World War, Gegham Petrosyan was awarded the St. George Cross, before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, he owned the Apollo cinema in the center of Yerevan. And his son Eduard, who completed the Patriotic War in Austria, was a participant in the Victory Parade in Moscow.

Оригинал

Diploma of the Voroshilov shooter and appropriation of personal weapons

Оригинал

Diploma issued by Semyon Budyonny, 1945

Leaving Yerevan on December 14, 1920, they arrived on December 21 in Baku, at the headquarters of the XI Red Army. The officers write that in the first days upon arrival they were treated politely, as "with seconded persons of a friendly allied power." But the very next day they were taken into custody, "for the time of filtration." On January 1, 1921, they were taken under escort to the station, where the commandant of the Special Department of the XI Army stated that the Armenians were "sent to the disposal of the Ryazan Provincial Committee for appointment as a specialty in the units of the Red Army." However, upon arrival in Ryazan, they all ended up in a forced labor concentration camp. They were given to understand that they were now prisoners of war.

The petition of six officers ended with a request - their "case is to be sent to Moscow for release and return to the Red Army of Armenia."

The mass expulsion of officers of the army of the First Republic began on January 24, 1921. By order of the Cheka and the military authorities of Soviet Armenia, on that day, all the officers of the old army were invited to the assembly points for re-registration. All of them naively believed that these were ordinary fees. But on the spot they were explained that they must urgently, directly from the place of assembly, leave for Baku to continue their further service in the Red Army. Since the railway was still in the hands of the Turks, they had to go to Baku on foot, through the Sevan (Semenovsky) pass (Yerevan - Dilijan - Ijevan) to Akstafa. From there by train to Baku.

The name of Petros Petrosyants is found in the “List of former officers who registered in the building of the Vagharshapat garrison club, according to the order of the Pre-Chek of Armenia No. 3” on a letterhead with the heading “S. S. R. A. Politburo of the Echmiadzin district. The list signed "Chairman of the Cheka SSR of Armenia" is dated January 24, 1921 and includes 102 names. Petros Petrosyants is listed under

No. 76 as the staff captain of the headquarters of the 2nd division of the rifle brigade.

He also had to pass the route Yerevan - Dilijan - Ijevan - Akstafa - Baku. But providence wanted him to fall ill and end up in the infirmary in Dilijan. And already on February 18, the “Committee for the Salvation of the Motherland”, under the leadership of the last Prime Minister of the First Republic, Simon Vratsyan, took power in Yerevan into their own hands. The Soviet leadership sought salvation in Dilijan. The first secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party of Soviet Armenia, Gevorg Alikhanyan, also ends up in the same infirmary. There he and Petrosyan became friends.

* * *

After the failure of the uprising in early April, Simon Vratsyan, with forces loyal to him and a significant part of the intelligentsia, left the borders of Bolshevik Armenia and went to Zangezur, where the Soviets were still annoyed by the fighting detachments of Garegin Nzhdeh.

The leadership of Soviet Armenia, which included Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee Sarkis Kasyan, Secretary of the Revolutionary Committee Askanaz Mravyan, Commissar of Foreign Affairs Alexander Bekzadyan, First Secretary of the Central Committee Gevorg Alikhanyan and Plenipotentiary Representative of Armenia in the RSFSR Sahak Ter-Gabrielyan, immediately returned to Yerevan from Dilijan. Alikhanyan managed to persuade Petrosyan to go with him: he guaranteed him complete safety.

At the end of April, the First Armenian Cavalry Regiment, which took part in the Sovietization of Georgia, also returned to Armenia. They quartered him in Ashtarak and began to prepare him for shipment to the recalcitrant Zangezur.

Petros Petrosyan, sent to the regiment, together with the officers of the headquarters, zealously took up the combat skills of the cavalrymen. The regiment was commanded by Colonel Alexander Mirimanyan, the chief of staff was Artem Aharonyan, a former staff captain. Both of them served in the army of the First Republic and in the old days knew Captain Petros Petrosyan as a true patriot. By May 14, 1921, the number of ranks of the Army of the Republic was 6,669 people, of which 2,899 were part of the Armenian 1st Rifle Brigade, created on the basis of the First Cavalry Regiment.

There was a clear shortage of regular officers in the army. Even in the midst of the events described in Soviet historiography as the "February adventure of the Dashnaks", on March 26, 1921, the Comindel of the Republic Alexander Bekzadyan sent a message to the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (copies to Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin), which said that in three months the existence of Soviet power in Armenia, 1,400 officers of the Armenian army were arrested (including 20 generals, 30 colonels). Bekzadyan considered the head of the Cheka of the Armenian SSR, Georgy Atarbekov, to be the main culprit of these mass repressions. “At a meeting of the Revolutionary Committee and the Central Committee of the Armenian Communist Party, Atarbekov,” writes Bekzadyan, “referring to the instructions of the Cheka, demanded the hasty and unconditional expulsion from Armenia of all former officers (both serving and not serving in the Red Army).”

It would seem that Bekzadyan's message should have contributed to the return of intelligent specialists to Armenia. But some dark forces, about which little is known so far, have made every effort to prevent their return.

Already a career officer of the Red Army, Petros Petrosyan accidentally learned that the Georgians managed to return the officers who served in the army of Menshevik Georgia from Ryazan to their homeland almost without loss. Why didn't the same thing happen to the Armenian officers, he wondered. He did not leave the feeling that Lukashin, a stranger on Armenian soil, had a hand in this black deed.

In fact, that's how it was. Unlike the leaders of Georgia and Azerbaijan - Makharadze and Narimanov, the Armenian Sergey Lukashin (Srapionyan), a native of Nor-Nakhichevan-on-Don, never once raised the question of the fate of the imprisoned officers of the army of the First Republic. He knew neither the language nor the customs of his people, he believed only in the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and the government of Soviet Russia, he considered the deportation of officers a necessary measure.

* * *

Pyotr Artemyevich in 1922 marries a twenty-year-old Bolshevik Margarita Tumanyan. All three of her brothers - Arsen, Tigran and Garegin - graduated from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow. In 1928, having lived with a man of a rather difficult fate for six years, perhaps under the influence of long confidential conversations by candlelight, Margarita Gareginovna decided, citing family circumstances, to ask the party to withdraw her from its ranks. No one in the family dared to go into the details of such an act.

At that time, the young Soviet Republic was in dire need of experienced specialists. Petr Artemyevich, a financier by education, conscientiously works where he is sent. In the 1950s, Petrosyan headed the financial service at the Ararat wine and brandy factory, in the 1960s he was the chief accountant of the Ministry of Culture of the republic.

There is such a page in his biography. The head of Osoaviakhim Semyon Budyonny, hero of the Civil War, marshal of the Soviet Union, on December 11, 1945, awards Pyotr Petrosyan, chairman of the primary organization of Osoaviakhim Ararat Trust, with a certificate of honor "in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Armenian SSR and for the successful completion of assignments for the preparation of reserves for Red Army".

Although Pyotr Artemyevich was not blue-blooded, he was a man of rare endurance and good manners. In 1969, he died. The grandson of Pyotr Artemyevich, Gevorg Grantovich, recalls:

- If at the table the grandfather, addressing his son Grant, uttered the phrase “Be kind enough to give me salt!” - this could only mean that the grandfather was dissatisfied with something in the behavior of his son. And although this rarely happened, lunch or dinner continued in silence.

* * *

Petros's brothers, Abgar and Tigran, before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, owned a butcher's shop known throughout Yerevan, located on the site of the current Moskva cinema. They lived side by side - in two halves of the house at the intersection of Abovyan and Tumanyan streets. Sausages and frankfurters of the Petrosyan brothers were in great demand. They did not share the secrets of the taste of their products with anyone.

Gevorg Grantovich recalls:

- For family celebrations, our uncles prepared their own branded sausages. And they were eating. I remember that in 1973, when Ararat Yerevan won the USSR Cup, which coincided with the 80th birthday of Uncle Abgar, he shook the old days and surprised everyone not only with juicy sausages and sausages, but also with cornelian wine, which we have never tried. When the 20-liter cylinder was empty by the evening, Uncle Abgar silently went down to the basement and put out a stash to his numerous nephews. I think no one has ever said so many toasts in one evening to Ararat and the common favorite of Ishtoyan.

At the jubilee, Abgar Petrosyan also visited the minister of meat and dairy industry of the republic. He begged him to share the recipe for the delicacy. A day later, the minister sent a car for him and he went to the meat factory. After staying with the technologist for 15 minutes, Abgar flew out of him in extreme excitement and completely upset. The minister did it: what's the matter? It turned out that the technologist continually offered Abgar to replace the ingredients with cheaper ones, referring to the impossibility of sustaining the recipe under production conditions.

Having told this story, Gevorg grinned and said:

- Miracles, and nothing more. With their small shop, Uncle Abgar and his brother Tigran could afford it, but the giant plant is powerless.

* * *

Muscovite Laura Gegamovna, daughter of Gegham Petrosyan, the elder brother of Pyotr Artemyevich, told us that she lost her father at the age of 10 in March 1940. At the Yerevan Machine Tool Plant named after Dzerzhinsky, he was the head of the shop. Hearing about the Pact between the USSR and Germany, he had the imprudence to drop: “All this is in vain. Germany, history will confirm this once again, will attack us anyway. The next day they came for him. And only in 1956, when her father was rehabilitated, she learned that in 1943 he had disappeared in the Altai Territory. A participant in the First World War, Gegham Petrosyan was awarded the St. George Cross, before the arrival of the Bolsheviks, he owned the Apollo cinema in the center of Yerevan. And his son Eduard, who completed the Patriotic War in Austria, was a participant in the Victory Parade in Moscow.

GRANT AND ANNA

Grant Petrovich Petrosyan, a child of love, was born in December 1923 and grew up in warmth and cold. In the family archive we found three impression stories about Grant, lovingly sewn into a congratulatory folder for his 40th birthday.

Petr Artemyevich called his essay about his son "Grant's First Flight". It describes the childish delight of a 9-year-old boy who first took to the air in 1932 on a two-seat U-2 airplane. The pilot of the Yerevan flying club Penyaev, a master of figure aerobatics, gave his father and son a bird's-eye view of Yerevan with its suburbs. The flight on the U-2 was a success, already on the ground, an experienced pilot, having patted Grant on the shoulder, approvingly said: "The guy will make an excellent pilot." And so it happened. Grant spent days and nights on the airfield of the flying club, learning to fly. And when the Great Patriotic War broke out, the skills gained at the Yerevan Aero Club helped him train young pilots.

Remembering her son, Grant's mother Margarita Gareginovna described a seemingly unimaginable incident. When the baby was five, she took him to her parents in Kirovabad (the name of the city of Ganja from 1935 to 1991). While the adults were drinking tea with dogwood jam on the balcony, the kid climbed a fig tree to pick the ripest figs for his mother. Climbed to the very top of the tree, fell off and flew down. To the cries of his mother and her relatives, Grant's even voice was heard from under the bush: “Do not be afraid! It was me who went down in the plane.”

When Grant turned 13, his parents let him go alone for the summer holidays to relatives in Moscow and Leningrad. And they were very surprised when they received a letter from Vyborg from their son. It turned out that at the Finland Station, Grant accidentally met a colonel of the Red Army, who was traveling with his family to Vyborg. He begged me to take him with me as a member of the family. Not too lazy to walk around Vyborg with a teenager, the officer put Grant on an evening train to Leningrad.

"About the family at any hour
Remember, Grantik, dear.
In every meeting with you
Hearts joy, peace.

So on the 40th anniversary of her husband, Anna Ivanovna splashed out her feelings for him, his wife, nee Fedchenko, a native of Chernihiv region. They signed in the midst of the war in November 1943. In 1948, the son Gevorg (Gurik) was born, named after his great-great-grandfather. His brother, Karen, was born seven years later.

* * *

Anna Ivanovna, Grant Petrovich's faithful friend and life partner, was born the seventh child in a large peasant family. On the night before dispossession, one of the farm laborers warned the father of the family about the impending arrest and exile, and the whole family, having loaded their simple belongings on a wagon, departed into the unknown. They recovered from their fears and settled in the Rostov region.

Anna's older brother ran a flight school in the Transcaucasian Military District. There, the sister met her betrothed, the Armenian pilot Grant Petrosyan. Her husband's family adopted her as their own. There is only one entry in her work book: “Teacher of the Russian language and literature at school No. A.S. Pushkin in Yerevan. Behind shoulders 45 years of work.

That her husband, that his friends did not look for souls in her: she would welcome Anya cordially, and serve luxurious Armenian dishes on the table, and sing for the company, and drink together with everyone.

On the anniversary of her husband's memory, Anna Ivanovna will say: “I can consider myself a truly happy person. I got into a wonderful family. I had a wonderful father-in-law and mother-in-law, a wonderful husband. I don't have them. But I have wonderful sons and grandchildren, who from the first days, when fate took my husband away from me, surrounded me with great attention, care and love. I'm happy".

* * *

From the autobiography of Grant Petrosyan:

“In 1941 he graduated from the flying club without interruption from his studies, voluntarily joined the Red Army, until 1943 he was a cadet of the Tsnoris (Tsnoris-Tskali railway station in Georgia) aviation school. Upon graduation, he received the title of Jr. lieutenant and worked as an instructor pilot. From 1944 to June 1946 he was a senior pilot of the 25th Red Banner Fighter Aviation Regiment.

Evening school Grant graduated after demobilization. In 1952 he graduated from the Armenian Agricultural Institute, having managed to work for a couple of months as the secretary of the party organization of his native "alma mater", later he became the secretary of the district party committee. But he didn't stay there. Perhaps, mindful of the exit of the mother from the ranks of the CPSU (b). And he plunged headlong into science.

Grant Petrosyan writes in his autobiography:

“In 1956, after graduating from graduate school, he worked as an assistant at the department of general agriculture, and then from May 1958 as dean of the agrochemical faculty. From September 1958 he was appointed director of the Research Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry.

Since then, his whole life has been connected with the problems of land reclamation and the development of saline-alkaline and waterlogged soils.

Salt marshes are like bald spots on the green grace of the Ararat valley. Once, having traveled with journalists to these saline lands, Petrosyan remarked: “Saline marshes are death for everything that grows, that stretches upwards, lives. They destroyed Mesopotamia, one of the ancient civilizations."

Organizing visits for his foreign colleagues, and there were more than three hundred such trips, Petrosyan, bringing them to plots of land that looked like paradise, would certainly lead them to a small patch of soil covered with a white-gray film, and, pointing his finger, said: “From this we started." And again he led the guests to the emerald fields of juicy alfalfa, to the pink geranium and said: "This is the same land." Then he accompanied them to the vineyards, where tight, sun-drenched clusters gleamed golden in the carved foliage. “And this is the same land,” he argued.

The writer-soil scientist Boris Mozhaev, concerned about the fate of the land and the peasant share, on May 15, 1985 in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, in the essay "Independent and Unconditional", discusses how to manage the economy. And backed up with a concrete example:

“But there are examples within our Fatherland of how you can get rid of both paperwork and spoilage with one simple decision. Here is one such example for you: the director of the Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry of the Armenian SSR, Grant Petrosovich Petrosyan, obtained an order according to which land reclamators are obliged to hand over to the institute not certain types of work, that is, dug channels, laid drainage or pickled salt marshes, but the whole work in its entirety, in finished form : sown wheat on former salt marshes.

“Dear land reclamators,” Petrosyan tells them, “you have pickled the salt marshes, which is good. And now, if you please, sow wheat on this site: and when it rises to its full height, then we will see the quality of your work. Wheat sprouted exactly on the whole field - we sign the acceptance certificate. If there are bald spots in the middle of the field, if you please, redo it, bring it to the standard.

So the Armenian land reclamators cannot rent another field for four years. How much because of this noise! The minister himself came and tried to break this system. It didn't work out. And imagine, they remake, bring to this very condition.

But Petrosyan has more than two hundred hectares of wonderful fields and orchards in the middle of the saline desert.

And the yields are extremely high. And in the neighboring state farms, even a cursory examination shows huge bald patches of empty land among the wheat. Here you have the contrasts in the work of the same ministry. I talked with the meliorators: they are angry with Petrosyan. And he is just a scientist and director, independent in the full sense, endowed with the rights of the owner by law.

12 years after the publication of Boris Mozhaev's essay, the well-known publicist Yuri Chernichenko wrote in the article "Lessons of Armenia" published in Izvestia (09/30/1997):

“The national resource of life, Sevan, was drained predatorily, as before the end of the world: in a matter of five years, the supply of water accumulated since the time of Urartu was unwound. Swamps and reed thickets arose in the Ararat valley. Groundwater lifted salt outward, destroying fertility.

I knew a scientist who was literally unable to breathe. Dr. Grant Petrosyan, a soil scientist and philosopher of agriculture, hosted (on the landing sites of Noah, as he joked) soil scientists from all continents: regular seminars were paid for by UNESCO. With chemistry and patience, Captain Grant healed the whites from the salt of the desert, turning them into paradises...

Grant Petrosovich died (he died in October 1987? - Auth.) from the disease of the yearning: cancer. He died not long before the Council of Ministers of independent Hayastan quietly and casually introduced a fee for irrigation and thus created the need to conserve water. Nothing tricky: water is a commodity. There are wholesale and retail prices. Do you need to water the vineyard or the alfalfa? Prepare six drams per cubic meter...

There was a sense to stop salinization - an automatically operating national sense. Sevan is given once, it is not a drain tank in a rooming house for the homeless, and the economy of the economy begins simply: to stop the fall of a mountain lake.

An observer with 25 years of experience, I can testify: the swamps-lakes in the Noah Valley have disappeared, there are almost no reeds. But about the "rehabilitation" they said exactly: the arable land, like a political prisoner, must be released and justified, on tens of thousands of hectares the level of groundwater is still so high that you cannot bury a dead man. How the valiant "Captain Grant" would be needed now.

A complete picture of Hrant Petrosyan’s scientific achievement and his undoubted merits is given by the statements and assessments of foreign colleagues of his work and the achievements of the institute he heads, now the Scientific Center for Soil Science, Agrochemistry and Land Reclamation of the Republic of Armenia, which bears his name.

Prof. M. Elgabali, Minister of Agriculture of Egypt:

“What I saw both on the field and in the laboratories, carried out by Armenian soil scientists, is exemplary and at a high level.”

On behalf of the Americas, Prof. Amro Zavaleta, Peru:

“What we have learned here is the latest advances in this area of scientific knowledge.”

Dr. Leon Hyatt, US Environmental Protection Agency:

"Your experimental station is one of the best in the world, which you can be proud of, and you are doing a great job for your people and country."

D. Blackburn and S. Karnish, Australia:

“We think that the Armenian Republic, as well as peoples in various parts of the USSR and all over the world, should be interested in the excellent scientific and technical work of the Institute of Soil Science on the reclamation of saline lands, which has been brought to high yields of high quality. This complete approach to solving the problem is great.”

Prof. Novica Vučić, Corresponding Member Academy of Sciences of Vojvodina, Yugoslavia:

"It will be right and useful if this institute is turned into an International Center for training personnel - specialists in saline soil reclamation."

I. Rabochev, Academician of the All-Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Academy of Sciences of Turkmenistan:

“Armenia, the cradle of the most ancient civilization in the Caucasus, has many remarkable monuments to the history of its development. The staff of the institute erected a unique monument of science about the modern culture of irrigated agriculture, which had not previously existed either in Egypt, or in Mesopotamia, or in Carthage ... "

Here it is appropriate to quote from an article by Grant Petrosyan himself - Reclamation of land reclamation is different. How the land pays”, published in the newspaper “Pravda” (08/30/1981):

“Each hectare of yesterday still barren land now yields 45–50 centners of winter wheat, 120–130 centners of dry alfalfa hay, the same amount of grapes, 180–200 centners of early potatoes, 250–300 centners of pink geraniums, watermelons and fruits ... To the lands of the Ararat Valley, and even each renovated hectare worked with full efficiency, it is necessary to seriously improve the activities of all services responsible for the preparation and operation of the field. It’s time to orient them towards high end results.”

Four years will pass, and Grant Petrosyan will proudly inform the all-Union reader (“Rural Life”,

08/21/1985):

“In Armenia, in just four years of this five-year plan, 23,000 renewed hectares have been developed and transferred to farms. Another 7,000 will be added this year. Tens of thousands of hectares of mountain pastures have been ennobled. Five reservoirs have been put into operation, which will additionally provide moisture to over 30,000 hectares.”

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The Armenian Research Institute of Soil Science and its founder and permanent director took an active part in the international exhibitions EXPO-74 and EXPO-77 in Spokane and Los Angeles (USA), Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Canada, India, Syria, were adequately represented at the International fairs in Czechoslovakia and Germany. Petrosyan headed the Scientific and Technical Society of Agriculture of the Republic and the Armenian branch of the Society of Soil Scientists of the USSR for 20 years. Hrant Petrosyan's merits to the Fatherland were marked by two Orders of the Red Banner of Labour, the Order of the Badge of Honor, the Order of Friendship of Peoples, he was elected a deputy of the Supreme Council of the Armenian SSR.

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Family congratulations on 40 years of Grant