June 14 in Armenia at the state level, on the initiative of the «Dashnaktsutyun» party, was proclaimed the Day of Protection of the Rights of Innocently Convicted Persons.
This memorable date was established in memory of tens of thousands of repressed Armenians during the years of the Bolshevik dictatorship, when the deportation of peoples was one of the forms of political repression in the USSR.
Back in 1939, Armenians were resettled from Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan, and in the 1940s they were evicted en masse from Crimea and from the territory of Soviet Armenia. Then tens of thousands of Armenians were deported, including indigenous residents of Armenia.
It was on the night of June 13-14, 1949 that one of the largest mass relocations of — thousand Armenian families began, not only from the Armenian SSR, but also from other Armenian-populated territories of the Union, and were deported to the Altai Territory. According to various sources, in the summer of 1949, 15-17 trains with internally displaced persons arrived in the Altai Territory.
Armenians were deported without any evidence of guilt in anything, and not only repatriates, former participants in the national liberation struggle and former prisoners of war fell under repression, but also simply intellectuals and ordinary workers who were deported as «anti-Soviet elements», « parasites», «national evaders», etc.
Among the victims of repression were such prominent cultural figures as the poet Yeghishe Charents, Bakunts, and the sons of the poet Hovhannes Tumanyan.
Today on this day commemorative and solemn events take place.