The Great Repatriation: Armenia's Post-WWII Soviet Homecoming

The Story of Armenia: Survival Through Empires and Genocide — Fexingo History · Jul 22, 2026 · 5m · transcript

In 1945, the Soviet Union launched an unprecedented campaign to bring the Armenian diaspora home. Over the next three years, some 100,000 Armenians from Syria, Lebanon, France, the United States, and elsewhere boarded ships and trains bound for Soviet Armenia — their ancestral homeland, now under Stalinist rule. Known as the Nerkaght (repatriation), this state-sponsored project was a mix of national longing, Cold War geopolitics, and Soviet demographic engineering. The campaign was promoted by the Armenian Apostolic Church and diaspora organizations, but the reality that awaited repatriates…