Armenian victims of the Great Purge included Armenian intellectuals, writers, artists, Bolshevik and later Soviet statesmen, military commanders, and religious figures. Orchestrated by Joseph Stalin, the Great Purge was a campaign of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union against supposed "enemies of the people," including members of the Communist Party, the peasantry, writers and intellectuals, and other unaffiliated persons. The worst period, under NKVD head Nikolay Yezhov, was known as the Yezhovschina ('period of Yezhov'). In the years from 1936 to 1938, thousands of people suffered from Stalinist repressions in Soviet Armenia.
The start of the Great Purge in Armenia is usually dated to 9 July 1936, with the assassination of Armenian First Secretary Aghasi Khanjian by Lavrentiy Beria in Tiflis (Tbilisi). The death was the result of a political struggle between Beria and Khanjian. At first, Beria framed Khanjian's death as "suicide," but soon condemned him for abetting "rabid nationalist elements among the Armenian intelligentsia." After Khanjian's death, Beria promoted his loyalists in Armenia, Amatuni Amatuni as Armenian First Secretary and Khachik Mughdusi as chief of the Armenian NKVD. Under the command of Beria's allies, the campaign against "enemies" intensified. Many leading Armenian intellectuals were arrested, including Yeghishe Charents, Axel Bakunts, Vahan Totovents, Zabel Yesayan, Nersik Stepanyan , and others. According to Amatuni in a June 1937 letter to Stalin, 1,365 people were arrested in the ten months after the death of Khanjian, among them 900 "Dashnak-Trotskiites." The Armenian leadership of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast (NKAO) also suffered in the repressions. Under Azerbaijani First Secretary Mir Jafar Baghirov, several NKAO leaders were arrested, including local party chairman Suren Badamyan .
The death of Sahak Ter-Gabrielyan in August 1937 was a turning point in the repressions in Armenia. While being interrogated by Mughdusi's men, Ter-Gabrielyan "either jumped or was pushed from the third-floor window" of the NKVD building in Yerevan. Stalin was angered that Mughdusi and Amatuni neglected to inform him about the incident. In response, in September 1937, he sent Georgy Malenkov, Mikhail Litvin , and later Anastas Mikoyan to oversee a purge of the Communist Party of Armenia. During the trip, Mikoyan tried, but failed, to save one individual (Danush Shahverdyan) from the repressions. More than a thousand people were arrested and seven of nine members of the Armenian Politburo were sacked from office. The trip resulted in the appointment of a new Armenian Party leadership, headed by Grigory Arutinov, who was approved by Beria.
The Armenian Apostolic Church was not spared from the repressions. Soviet attacks against the Church under Stalin were known since 1929, but momentarily eased to improve the Soviet Union's relations with the Armenian diaspora. In 1932, Khoren I became Catholicos of All Armenians and assumed the leadership of the church. However, in the late 1930s, the Armenian NKVD, led by Mughdusi and his successor, Viktor Khvorostyan , renewed the attacks against the Church. These attacks culminated in the 1938 murder of Khoren and the closing of the Catholicate of Etchmiadzin, an act for which Beria is usually held responsible. However, the Church survived and was later revived when Stalin eased restrictions on religion at the end of World War II. In addition to the repression of the Church, thousands of Armenians were forcibly exiled to the Altai Krai in 1949. Many were repatriated Armenians who arrived from the Armenian diaspora.
After Stalin's death, Anastas Mikoyan called for the rehabilitation of Charents in a speech in Yerevan on 11 March 1954, beginning de-Stalinization and the Thaw in Armenia. Behind the scenes, Mikoyan personally assisted Armenian leaders in the rehabilitation of countless former "enemies" in the republic. Armenian party scholar Lev Shaumyan, the son of Stepan Shaumian, also played an influential role in assisting Mikoyan and Nikita Khrushchev on rehabilitations, in advance of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the 20th Party Congress in February 1956.
Below is the incomplete list of persons from the Armenian SSR, or persons of ethnic Armenian origin, who became victims of Stalinism and died during the Great Purge. This list does not include those individuals, such as Vahram Alazan, Gurgen Mahari, and Vagharshak Norents , who survived the repressions and the Gulag.