Bureaucratic, Scholarly, and Vernacular Thesaurus of the Deportation of Armenians in 1949

The article analyzes the deportation of Armenians during the Soviet operation “Wave” in June 1949, which resulted in the exile of about 19,000 people from the Armenian SSR, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Black Sea coast to Siberia. The author sees this case as a phenomenon that does not fit existing classifications of Soviet repressive practices and explores how bureaucratic, scholarly, and vernacular languages shaped the perception and representation of this trauma. It is shown that the categories defining deportee “contingency” (“Dashnaks,” “legionnaires,” “repatriates,” etc.) had not only administrative but also ideological functions, while for the deportees these designations were often unclear or rejected. The article explores how such labels were transformed in personal narratives, oral histories, and family archives, and how commemorative practices developed around the deportation. Based on field materials-in-terviews and visual sources collected within the Armenia Total(itar)is project-the article traces gendered differences in memory narratives, attitudes toward the past, and practices of preservation. In the absence of an official memory policy, commemoration was typically initiated by the repressed and their descendants. Through analysis of how memory was preserved, narrated, and visually framed, the article shows how the memory of the 1949 deportation integrates into Armenia’s broader memorial landscape, alongside memories of the Armenian Genocide and the Great Patriotic War, borrowing their symbolic language and representational forms. It demonstrates how the deportation experience and its representations reflect not only individual and family strategies of coping with trauma but also political and cultural shifts in post-Soviet Armenian society. The author declares no conflict of interests.

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