BY BEKA KOBAKHIDZE
The greatest historian of the Caucasus, the founding father of the historiography of the first republics of Transcaucasia, Richard Hovannisian, has passed away. He was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles.
His grandfather, Hovannis Gavroyan, who was from Bazmashen, a village in Kharpert vilayet, died during the genocide in 1915. His 13 to 14-year-old father, Kaspar Gavroyan, managed to escape and made the long journey to California. Arriving in America, he changed his last name to Hovannisian in honor of his tragically deceased father. Richard was born in 1932 and grew up in a farming area near Tulare, California. He entered the Faculty of History. He did not know Armenian.
This is how he remembered this period: “At the end of every book, I opened the index pages and looked for Armenia if it was mentioned, but I couldn’t find it anywhere; I barely saw ten books where my historical homeland was mentioned. I had a dream that Armenia would become independent and I would be its foreign minister. When I was in New York, I used to go to the UN headquarters and dreamed of seeing the Armenian flag there.” Thus, he decided to write his doctoral dissertation on the foreign policy of the First Republic of Armenia. For this he needed to learn Armenian. He moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where the Armenian political emigration took refuge. He studied Armenian and every day spoke with Simon Vratsyan, the last Prime-Minister of the First Republic of Armenia, the commander-in-chief of the Armenian army Drastamak Kanayan (General Dro) and other migrants.
His love for the Armenian republic was growing, but while writing his dissertation, he realized that not only could he not include the history of two years of independence in one book, but he could not even reach the declaration of independence. Therefore, the title of his dissertation and the first book published in 1967 became “Armenia on Road to Independence,” which covered the period until May 1918. After that, he researched the history of the republic for another 30 years and published the four-volume set of “The Republic of Armenia.” He would often joke and say, “I was studying two years of independence during 35 years.“ When he undertook this project, he visited several continents, dozens of countries, and even more archives. He also learned new languages for the same purpose. At the end of this long journey the USSR collapsed and he was admitted to the Soviet archives. He did not become the foreign minister, but he still fulfilled his dream—his son, the first foreign minister of independent Armenia, Raffi Hovannisian, raised the flag of an independent Armenia at the UN headquarters in New York.
In addition to researching the Republic, Richard took advantage of his American citizenship and traveled throughout Turkey, describing the Armenian footprint in every important city and region, while it still existed. Following his travels, he published 16 volumes on the “Turkish Armenia.”
One may think that 90 years is long enough life, but for Prof. Hovannisian, 120 years would be too little, because he never retired. He wrote and researched until the end of his life. In 2021, “Armenian Communities of Persia/Iran” was published under his editorship. A two-volume textbook, “The Armenian People from Ancient Times to Modern Times,” was also published under his editorship, which my students know well, because I use it as a textbook for the history of the Caucasus.
Those books, which Richard mentioned when discussing the beginning of his career, turned into hundreds of monographs. During my scholarly journeys to the United States, I met Richard’s students and mentees, now over 70 years old, who have staffed the best universities in America. They have become professors, and they have written several books. His legacy is limitless. Now the number of books written about Armenia in Western historiography is comparable to that of other great nations.
Hovannisian’s research style was encyclopedic and thoroughly precise. One of his friends joked, while editing the monograph—he argued for half an hour about one of the commas, whether it should be put there or not. He wrote within a wide, regional and transnational context. He wrote about the foreign policy of the First Republic of Georgia much more than Georgian historians had done, until very recently. Although he was a patriot of Armenia, his judgments about not only Georgia, but also about the First Republic of Azerbaijan, were unbiased and well-balanced. He wrote honestly about the arguments of the Georgians during the Armenian-Georgian war and about the arguments of the Azerbaijanis in relation to Karabakh, but he himself, of course, was an Armenian patriot. “Patriotism is good,” he would say, “but you should also always present the arguments of the other side.”
With his entire career, writing style, and scholarly interests, Richard was, is, and will remain a role model for me. Last year, in one of his interviews, he mentioned that there is a generation of historians in Georgia who will become “Georgia’s Richard Hovannisians.” When I heard that, I walked around with a smile on my face for a week. Yes, we, the Georgian historians, have to follow Richard’s path. We are decades late, but we need a school of historiography similar to the one Richard founded for Armenians, and our students should publish their books at Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Berkeley, like Richard’s students have already done.
I met Prof. Hovannisian in 2013. That year, we won a summer school grant and held a one-week summer school, titled “The First Republic of Georgia,” at the National Archives of Georgia. At that time, my young friends and I were broadly unknown people, but we managed to invite important international guests. The most important guest we had was Hovannisian. We became friends, and soon after he stood by my side like a grandfather would to a grandson. We have exchanged hundreds of letters, and any time I was traveling abroad, he would send a letter to his academic friends at one or two universities to the effect of: “My boy is coming and you should see him.”
In 2018, I invited him to Georgia two more times. On May 29, an event dedicated to the centennial of the republics was held in Ilia State University. The speakers were Richard Hovannisian and Stephen Jones (currently Director of Georgian Program at Harvard), and I was privileged to be moderating a discussion between the two major scholars of the South Caucasus republics. Richard did not hesitate to come from California to Tbilisi again just three weeks later for the conference and summer school dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the republics. Based on the reports of this forum, a comprehensive collected volume was published, authored by Steven Jones, Ronald Suny, Winfried Baumgart, Charlotte Alston, Irada Bagirova, Eric Lee, Andrew Andersen, Haji Murad Danogo, Adrian Brisku and Georgian historians of the First Republic—of the old and new generation. Richard wrote the foreword for this book and entitled it as “Unfinished Symphony.” So far, it is his only Georgian publication, which is worth the read.
In 2019, I was at the ASEEES conference in San Francisco. He told me that I should go to Los Angeles, that UCLA would purchase tickets for me, I would be accommodated at the UCLA guest house, and I would be paid a honorarium for delivering a lecture at UCLA. It so happened that the only possible time to deliver a lecture was a day before Thanksgiving. He told me that I should go straight to his home to have dinner with his family. Due to the fact that it was Thanksgiving Day, I was unable to leave the airport for more than three hours. It was 11 p.m. and I had to go straight to the hotel. Then, an 87-year-old man came to see me, with food and a beverage, at almost midnight. “You must be hungry now, and where would you buy food here?” Hovannisian said to me. Those little things are very telling and revealing of Prof. Hovannisian’s personality and character, and to how a legendary man treated a young and unknown scholar.
Anyone who knows America well enough will know that Thanksgiving is a holiday that is just as significant as Christmas or New Year. It is simply impossible to bring someone to the university, and especially to listen to a lecture, a day before the holiday, but who could turn down Richard’s request?! He gathered the Dean, administration leadership, students, and he himself came with his family and made those poor people listen to me. Then he asked his friends to show me around Los Angeles and, at the end of the day, he took me out to dinner with his students.
That is where I learned even more about the Professor. Richard’s wife, Vartiter Kotcholosian, had dementia. In the past, she was a well-known doctor of medical sciences, but dementia turns a person into a small child. Richard took her everywhere we went and I will never forget how he took care of her, constantly talked to her, and looked at her with the most loving eyes. Last year, after the passing of Vartiter, he kept reiterating, to me, that he could not accept and would never accept the fact that she was no longer alive.
Richard left behind not only books, but also his family. His children and grandchildren are all successful individuals: writers, directors, politicians, attorneies, and so on.
While I was in America, I called him every week and “reported” the progress of my work, shared my opinions, and asked for his advice. I will always regret the fact that he did not see my book on the foreign policy of the First Republic of Georgia published; A book that he had been supporting for 10 years and which I wrote with the guidance of his books and through his invaluable counsel. It will be published next year, but Richard will not see it. I also regret that I could not introduce this epochal person to my students.
He lived a glorious and impressive life, but he refused to write memoirs. He claimed that he felt uncomfortable with writing about himself, and that it should be done by others. That is why I decided to write this text, because everyone should talk about the impact that Prof. Richard Hovannisian had.
Any nation would be proud, and richer, for having an individual like Hovannisian take part in its preservation and growth. I express my most sincere condolences to the Hovannisian family, the Armenian community in the U.S., and the Armenian nation as a whole.
Beka Kobakhidze is the co-chair of the MA Program of the Modern History of Georgia at Ilia State University, and Professor and Georgian Studies Fellow at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
This heavy loss is felt by academic friends from Georgia that I shared with Richard, and they join me in expressing condolences: Stephen Jones, Dimitri Silakadze, Adrian Brisku, Alexander Mikaberidze, Giorgi Astamadze, Irakli Khvadagiani, David Khvadagiani, Sarah Slye, Lasha Bakradze, Dimitri Shvelidze, Otar Janelidze, and Mikheil Bakhtadze.
