MIDDLE EAST: Favorite Child

The winds of power politics blow good to some. Last week the beneficiary, long persecuted in the Moslem world, was Christianity’s eldest daughter, Armenia.* The benefactor was atheist Russia.

Two fast Russian ships, packed tight as troop transports with tens of thousands of Armenians, have been shuttling for the last three months from Mediterranean ports through the Dardanelles toward Russia. One of the ships, the former Italian liner Saturnia (rechristened Rossia), brought gasps from disconsolate Turkish citizens on Istanbul’s docks: it was the biggest vessel ever to pass through the Bosporus.

Russian consulates throughout the Middle East had opened their doors to Armenian refugees, promised them homes near Erivan, capital of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic. Workers, poor students, intellectuals responded quickly: by the end of 1945, 20,000 had applied in Iran, 35,000 in Syria and Lebanon, thousands more in Greece, Egypt and Palestine.

The Balance of the Dead. Invaded and trampled by successive hordes of Greeks, Arabs, Saracens, Mongols, Persians, Tartars and Turks, the Armenians after World War I had turned tired but hopeful eyes to the Western powers to support their plea for a sovereign, free Armenian nation. But at Versailles their dream faded, while the Turks “regulated the Armenian question” by killing over 1,000,000.

Russia grabbed the chance the West had fumbled. In Soviet Armenia, population has increased faster than in any other Soviet Republic; industrial progress has been so swift that Armenia came to be called Moscow’s “favorite child.” Russia’s armies today include 300,000 Armenian soldiers, 50 Armenian generals. And Moscow has publicly blessed Armenian patriots’ claim to the Kars and Ardahan districts of eastern Turkey.

Last week, Turkey’s eastern frontier with the Armenian Republic was quiet except for the thrashing of the narrow Arax River against the 7,000-foot mountain gorges. From this remote, rarely visited area, TIME Correspondent Harry Zinder cabled:

“The Russian and Turkish soldiers who man their common frontier have evolved even in this ticklish period a code of ethics. As they march along either side of the river, the Russian soldiers turn their backs when the Turkish soldiers pass, and the Turks do the same when the Russians pass. Some of the more boisterous Turks yell across to the Russians. But the Russians stolidly, silently continue their way.”

To whom do the .districts rightfully belong? Zinder told of an unlettered but wily Turkish mayor of Erzurum, largest town in the region, who just before World War I tried to give a convincing answer to a British investigating committee. The old mayor was bored by a day-long statistical and ethnical analysis of the Turkish and Armenian cases. Brusquely he cut short the discussion and led the delegates to the local Armenian cemetery. Then he showed them a much larger Turkish cemetery. “Figures like these,” he said, “do not lie.”

Uneasy Turks, watching the ships carry Armenians, their old victims, toward Turkey’s Russian border last week, needed no reminder that Russian armies had invaded eastern Turkey five times in the last 125 years. If a sixth came, Turks would fight to hold Kars and Ardahan, might at least even the balance of Armenian and Turkish dead in Erzurum’s cemeteries.

* The Legend: King Tiridates III of Armenia (287-337 A.D.) agreed with Roman Emperor Diocletian that Hripsime (pronounced Kuhrip-simeh), an aristocratic young woman of stirring beauty, was wasted as a nun. The Emperor’s attentions had caused Hripsime to flee from Rome to Vagharshapat, Tiridates’ capital. When Tiridates made a royal wrestler’s pass at her, Hripsime hurled him to the ground and fled. She was caught, tortured, butchered. As punishment for his lust, Tiridates was turned into a wild boar, a sobering experience. His sister Khosrovitoukhd, a Christian, prayed fervently for his redemption, and enlisted the prayerful aid of St. Gregory the Illuminator, whom she released from a deep snake pit where Tiridates had cast him 15 years before. Thanks to these prayers, Tiridates ceased to be a boar, and in 305 A.D., eight years before Constantine made Christianity the religion of Roman officialdom, he became the first monarch to adopt Christianity as the state religion. St. Gregory baptized 4,000,000 Armenians in seven days.