Ashot Johannissyan (his last name is spelled differently in various transliterations, such as Hovhannisyan, Ioannisyan, Johannissyants. He himself chose the German spelling – Johannissyan) is a historian and political figure. His scholarship consistently and dynamically intertwines care towards the material, factual precision and theoretical rigor with partisanship. His historical scholarship critically positions Armenians as active subjects entangled in a complex web of international struggles for liberation with the capacity of generating their own future.
Ashot Johannissyan was born in the town of Shushi in 1887. He receives his initial education in the town’s community school before continuing it in the local Realian College in 1897. In 1903-1904 he is a member of the Caucasian Armenian student union under the auspices of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation. In 1906-1907, likely inspired by his elder brother Hakob Johannissyan, he joins the Social Democratic Armenian Workers’ Organization (SDAWO) (“the specifics”) and is also ideologically influenced by the SDAWO’s founder Alexander Tsaturyan (Rubeni). While in college, in 1905, in the context of the Russian together with his schoolmates he organizes a major strike. In 1906-1913 Ashot Johannissyan studies history, economy and philosophy in various universities in Germany under the supervision of Karl Theodor von Heigel, Johann Gustav Ferdinand Droysen, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Lujo Brentano and attends classes with Willhelm Wundt, Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Eucken, amongst others. In 1906 Johannissyan joins the organizations of Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party at a time when the two party wings – the “Bolsheviks” and the “Mensheviks” are united. Johannissyan is specifically affiliated with the Bolshevik student group. While studying in Germany he is engaged in the country’s political life in the context of the social-democratic movement. In 1914-1917 he teaches Latin, German, political economy and history at Edjmiatsin’s Gevorgian seminary where he organizes a Marxist underground circle. Johannissyan is amongst the founders of Soviet Armenia, its first People’s Commissar of Enlightenment (1921-1922) and the first elected General Secretary of the Central Committee of Armenia’s Communist Party (1922-1927). He plays a key role in a number of endeavors in the 1920s, which included the foundation of Yerevan State University, the establishment of Armenian as an official language and the foundation of post-graduate education in Soviet Armenia. Surviving exile (1937-1954), he is actively engaged in scholarly work until the end of his life, at times confronting unsurpassable obstacles such as the disruption of the publication of his last book Outlines of Eastern Armenian Social-Political Thought of Second Half of the 19th Century. Johannissyan dies in 1972 at the age of 85. Together with his life partner, sculptor Aytsemik Urartu (1899-1974) he is buried in the city pantheon of Yerevan.
Johannissyan is a practical thinker while the scholarship he pursues can be described as active historiography. Here both politics and scholarship are productive activities. In this sense, he belongs to a constellation of twentieth century Marxist theorists and political figures such as György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. From the perspective of the international Marxist movement, Johannissyan is one of the few historians who, as early as in the beginning of 1910s, instead of endorsing vulgar economism, or employing mere political rhetoric, directs Marxist historiography towards a meticulous examination of primary sources, and perhaps most importantly, to the study of the active role ideas and desires play in historical reality. The active power of wishes and desires is perhaps embodied in the main subject of his scholarly interest, in the history of liberation thought. Johannissyan orients the study of Armenian history from examining facts to examining the events that make up facts: the relations of production and power, class antagonisms, wishes and visions. In Johannissyan’s work Armenian history appears in its “sharp edges” where the scholar positions and perceives himself as an active subject of the same historical process riddled with contradictions. Johannissyan conceives of history as the process of inevitable being of what has been and where the agents born out of concrete social relations perform “flights of imagination” in order to overcome and transcend their present brought about by the irreversible advance of time. In this sense, Johannissyan discovers the Armenian “political imagination” as a subject for his historical study where the summit of the wishes for liberation is conceived as a possibility of universal justice based on the productive relations of contradictions.
Already in mid 1920s Johannissyan is overtly charged for nationalism; in 1937 he is sentenced with the same charge and exiled. He survives his exile, and still throughout the exile, in Stalin’s lifetime, persists on the historical approach characteristic of his scholarship as well as on his views of national-communism as much as possible. This amounted to a local resistance against the Stalinist system of politically sanctioning the Russian imperial domination from above through a communist rhetoric. Johannissyan’s conception of the future-oriented international revolutionary project driven from local needs already belonged to the past, but through Johannissyan himself it continued its embodied existence in the present. As a result, owing to Johannissyan and his scholarly practice, the project with an ambition to build a future in the present has acquired a mnemonic dimension and a historical body. But this body was already punctured by a life marked with complex and perilous contradictions, and it both carried and presented their full force as a being that becomes what it is through those very contradictions. Johannissyan is an author who is formed through contradictions, and it is here that the active, practical character of his entire figure is revealed. He was someone who always thought of himself as an active subject of his people’s history, one who studies and reveals the complex contradictions between a small and oppressed people’s reality and its desires. He conceives of these contradictions as both productive and destructive forces that are formative for the history itself. This way, Johannissyan opened paths towards the complexities of confronting the present historically, and this is what makes him our contemporary.