Pietro Shakarian’s Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin Reviewed

The first contribution comes from Shakarian’s discovery and analysis of new unique archival records, some also based on Mikoyan’s personal communications as well as those from the family’s archives. Shakarian’s impressively responsible treatment of his sources, with cross-verification between the Russian, Armenian, and Western archives and various translations of the same documents, culminate his undisputed command of the topic and crisp analysis. Through his examination of the hard to obtain drafts of some of Mikoyan’s most momentous public addresses, the author leads us on developing a full picture of those little-noticed microscopic circumstances that went on to shape one grand political decision after another. And in Mikoyan’s tenure in the Soviet political elite, he oversaw some of the foundational aspects of Soviet social, political, and economic management. Shakarian is one of the first, if not the first, to discuss these events leveraging his familiarity with the archival documentation.

It was Mikoyan who, as the Soviet foreign trade commissar in the 1930s, procured new technology in the Soviet agricultural and industrial sectors. It was Mikoyan who during the Cuban Missile Crisis led the diplomatic effort on the Soviet side of preventing a nuclear catastrophe. It was Mikoyan who would take on a leading role in de-Stalinization during the Thaw period of 1953-1964. But it was also Anastas Mikoyan, an “Armenian in the Kremlin,” who would become the main reformer on the questions of nationality in the Soviet Union, expressly advocating for the preservation and support of the authentic diversity of the big country’s multitude of ethnicities.

And that brings us to the second, and probably the most important, contribution of the book. Namely, it is the author’s ability, by merging “Armenian” and “Kremlin” in the book’s title, to bring into focus the age-old problem of the role of a personality in shaping the nations’ destinies. Indeed, as the book insists from page one, it was Anastas Mikoyan’s Armenian origin that determined much of his nuanced approach toward policymaking in those areas to which he was entrusted, impacting the Soviet Union and reverberating far beyond its boundaries. Mikoyan’s first-hand knowledge of the sufferings experienced by the Armenian people, the memories of the 1915 genocide and historic persecutions, guided him in articulating a balanced decentralized nationalities program in the Khrushchev’s Kremlin, as Shakarian explains.

The book is organized into six chapters with separate introductory and concluding sections. To understand Mikoyan’s significant influence on the nationalities question, Shakarian argues, it is important to understand the pre-1950s period, the most difficult part of that being the time of the 1930s Great Purge. This first chapter sets the tone for what the reader discovers in the subsequent parts of the book: a narrative based on scrupulous archival work that is impossible to eclipse by any approximation.

The book then moves on to discuss Anastas Mikoyan’s speech in Yerevan, Armenia on March 11, 1954 where he sets the political and intellectual background for the process of de-Stalinization and the necessity for an adaptable policy toward Soviet nationalities—the two prerogatives, as Shakarian states, that “preoccupied [Mikoyan] for the remainder of his life and career.” It is this chapter that Shakarian wants the reader to interpret as the cornerstone to the dialectical complexity of Mikoyan’s figure in the Soviet politics.

The third chapter, entitled “Apricot Patronage,” deals with some intricate details of Mikoyan’s initiatives in promoting Armenia’s economic development. Through the narrative, based entirely on archival data, documents, and memoirs, we learn about Mikoyan’s continuous encouragement of the political leadership of the Armenian SSR to work through the Soviet administrative red-tape and solicit support for new industrial development projects. Mikoyan, in his formal Supreme Soviet consultative role to the republic, would guide his less experienced and more reserved compatriots in properly drafting budget proposals and articulating the need to build textile factories, agricultural processors, and even the transportation and industrial infrastructures of entire cities. It was Mikoyan who advised Yerevan to entertain Nikita Khrushchev on a boat on Lake Sevan during the latter’s official visit to the republic, to convince him to allocate the necessary funding for the Arpa-Sevan canal, thus preventing one of the nature’s wonders, Lake Sevan, from drying out.