Catholicos and Commissar: The Armenian Church Under the Soviet Regime

Felix Corley's new study, Catholicos and Commissar (London: Gomidas Institute, 2025) offers one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of relations between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Soviet state, drawing on newly accessible archives from Moscow, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. Corley traces the Church's arc from early post-revolutionary repression - confiscated churches, banned religious education, arrested clergy, and the 1938 NKVD murder of Catholicos Khoren I - through its partial rehabilitation under Stalin's wartime religious recalibration, to the long pontificate of Catholicos Vazgen I (1955-1994), who pursued cautious accommodation while restoring Ejmiatsin's symbolic global centrality. This talk situates Corley's findings within the historiography of Soviet religious policy, examining how the world's oldest Christian national church survived militant state atheism and re-emerged as a pivotal institution in Armenia's transition to independence.