Paper short abstract:

This paper is focused on the question how silenced memory of the Armenian expulsion in 1915 has been articulated in the Soviet past and received a new meaning and materiality after the postsocialist change.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is focused on the question how silenced memory of the Armenian expulsion in 1915 has been articulated in the Soviet past and received a new meaning and materiality after the postsocialist change. In spite of erecting the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan in the mid of the 60s during Khrushchev's political thaw there was no crucial change in social and political order of remembering. A radical shift from forgotten to visible Armenian loss has occurred in postsocialist Armenia with creating a new moral universe and re-establishment of proper memorialization regarding the Armenian yeghern (grief and mourning) in terms of global morality. The Soviet memorial in its typical abstract monumental style has been successfully incorporated by the new ideology in the Armenian post-conflict society, whereby the cult of death is intensified through global aesthetics of loss and a new politics of unrecognized bad death in the language of Christian suffering. To illustrate this change, I concentrate on the area surrounding the Yerevan memorial and museum of the Armenian Genocide on the Tsitsernakaberd hill.