ABSTRACT
Uniquely among Eastern Christian Churches, the Armenian Apostolic Church – a member of the small Oriental Orthodox family of Churches – was not primarily concentrated during the Cold War in any one of the three traditional political loci where the other Eastern Churches were based: the Communist world, the Capitalist world, and the colonial and post-colonial Middle East. The Armenian Church straddled all three. The place of spiritual primacy – albeit embattled – was in the Soviet Union. The most numerous and devout concentration of believers (defined in the broadest sense) was in an impoverished Middle East with the second, third and fourth ranking spiritual centres. Finally, a smaller but richer set of communities was in North America, Europe and other scattered locations in the developed world. The Middle East remained the spiritual backbone, providing probably the overwhelming majority of clergy across the three loci, especially in the United States and, perhaps surprisingly, in the Soviet Union, including in Armenia itself. As an inward-looking Christian Church almost entirely made up of mem-
bers of one ethnicity, worshipping in a language that almost no outsiders could understand, in one of the smallest families of Christian Churches and in no country the dominant or traditional faith (except, arguably, in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (Armenian SSR), a small backwater in an anti-religious state), the Armenian Church remained isolated. Yet it precisely played on this isolation to survive across mutually hostile political dividing lines, appearing to endorse mutually hostile political structures and ideas and simultaneously to stay out of political battles. Ecumenically, it could duck in and out of inter-Church contacts as it chose to its advantage, holding cordial meetings with other denominations and making use of their educational facilities while retaining its distance. While professing a national and spiritual unity, however, internally the Church was divided into mutually accusatory camps – close to the anti-Soviet Dashnak party at one end of the spectrum, pro-Soviet at the other. This antagonism would last until the Soviet KGB had infiltrated the Dashnak party and sapped its anti-Soviet spirit, a newer generation of Dashnak activists emerged with different priorities; Armenians around the world began to accept the Soviet argument that the Armenian SSR was the nation’s “homeland” – at least until the mythologised “lost territories” of “Turkish Armenia” could be recovered. But such gradual lessening of the ideological divide failed to resolve the jurisdictional divide within the Church.
