ABSTRACT
April 24 1965 not only marked the 50th commemoration date of the Armenian Genocide, but it also was a borderline event, truly resurrecting a question presumed to be dead and buried. However, to understand the explosive nature of the events on that day in the capital of Soviet Armenia, one needs to get familiar with the background of the Armenian question and its genesis as a political matter on the international arena. This chapter offers a retrospect to the emergence of the Armenian question as part of the Eastern question at the end of the nineteenth century, eventually resulting in the genocide during WWI. The study looks into the handling of the committed errors, the attempted rectification and its abandoning for the sake of realpolitik consideration, giving birth to the epithet of “the forgotten genocide.” However, the genocide was not entirely forgotten and came to play a significant role in the definition of the term genocide and its codification into international law. Nonetheless it was the events on April 24 1965 in Yerevan which played a significant role in the politics of memory of the Armenian genocide, described here through highly revealing archival material.
