YEREVAN — Zori Balayan, an Armenian novelist, journalist, activist, sports doctor, traveler and sports expert, passed away on April 6 at the age of 91.
Born on February 10, 1935, in Stepanakert, then part of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region, he graduated from Ryazan State Medical University in 1963. He worked as a doctor in Kamchatka from 1963 to 1973. In 1973 he traversed the Kamchatka and Chokotskaya tundras on dogsled, traveling as far as the North Sea. In his book Ojakh [Hearth], published during the pre-perestroika era, he tried to demonstrate the Armenian identity of Nagorno-Karabakh and identified Nakhichevan as historically belonging to Armenia.
Balayan was co-president of the Baikal Movement, an ecological international organization, in the late 1980s.
Balayan became a leader of the Karabakh movement. In 1988 he and Armenian poet Silva Kaputikyan were received by Mikhail Gorbachev and discussed the absence of Armenian-language television programs and textbooks in Nagorno-Karabakh schools as well as other concerns of Karabakh’s majority-Armenian population. From September 20 to 29, 1990, he conducted a hunger strike in Moscow demanding the restoration of the constitutional rights of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region.
From 1989 to 1992, Balayan was a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. In October 1993, he signed the “Letter of Forty-Two” along with other Russian intellectuals in connection with the 1993 Russian constitutional crisis.
From 1992 to 1995, he was a deputy of the Supreme Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic.
