ABSTRACT
Soviet Armenia, one of the 15 republics that constitute the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, is the present national homeland of the Armenians. (Only some 60,000 remain in Turkey, concentrated for the most part in Istanbul.) However, due especially to the Turkish deportations in the first World War, as well as a number of other factors such as earlier deportations by the Byzantines and Iranians, Armenians presently find themselves living in a host of different countries. There are, for example, Armenian communities today in such disparate states as the Soviet Union (4,100,000), the United States (800,000), France (400,000), Iran (180,000), and Lebanon (150,000). In addition smaller Armenian communities exist in Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, Greece, India, Iraq, Romania, Syria, and the United Kingdom, among others. Thus out of the roughly six million Armenians living in the world today, approximately two-thirds of them live in the Soviet Union, while the remaining one-third are scattered around the world and are, therefore, subject to being assimilated, a situation referred to by some Armenians as the “white genocide.”
