Ivan Bagramyan - Interwar Years

Interwar Years

Three years after the toppling of the Provisional Government by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, the Red Army invaded the southern Caucasus republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. In May 1920, Bagramyan, upset with the country's social and political conditions, participated in a failed rebellion against the Dashnak-led government of Armenia. He was jailed and sent to work in the fields for several months but was allowed to rejoin the military with the outbreak of the Turkish–Armenian War. But in December 1920, Armenia was sovietized and the national army was subsequently disbanded. Bagramyan, however, chose to join the 11th Soviet Army and was appointed a cavalry regiment commander.

As life in Armenia grew relatively more stable under Soviet rule, Bagramyan sought to locate a woman he had met several years earlier, Tamara Hamayakovna. Tamara, who was at this time living in Nakhichevan with her family, had been married to an Armenian officer who had been killed during the Turkish-Armenian war, leaving her with their one-year-old son, Movses. Bagramyan visited her and the two decided to get married at the end of 1922. In addition to their son Movses, who went on to become a painter, they had a daughter, Margarit, who later became a doctor. Tamara remained at Bagramyan's side until her death in 1973.

In 1923, Bagramyan was appointed commander of the Alexandropol Cavalry Regiment, a position he held until 1931. Two years later, Bagramyan graduated from the Leningrad Cavalry School and, in 1934, from the Frunze Military Academy. In his memoirs, Pyotr Grigorenko, a Ukrainian commander who attended Frunze, recalled how Bagramyan was expelled from the academy by his superiors after they had learned that he had been a secret member of the banned Dashnak Armenian nationalist party for more than a decade. Pending his arrest, Grigorenko described Bagramyan "deeply depressed, saying he only wished they'd arrest him soon so that he could get it over with." Grigorenko advised that he appeal the arrest warrant which Bagramyan reluctantly did and, with the help of Armenian politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, the arrest warrant was revoked and he accepted to be "rehabilitated." From 1934 to 1936, he served as the chief of staff of the 5th Cavalry Division, and from 1938, he worked as a senior instructor and lecturer at the Military Academy of the Soviet General Staff. Concurrently, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had purged much of the Soviet officer corps of its veteran commanders. While fellow students from the military academy, Andrei Yeremenko and Georgy Zhukov, had seen their careers rise, Bagramyan's had remained stagnant.

In 1940, when General Zhukov was promoted to commander of the Kiev Military District in the Ukraine, Bagramyan wrote a letter asking to serve under his command. Zhukov agreed, and in December asked for his help writing a paper to be presented to the commanders of the Soviet Military Districts. Bagramyan's paper, Conducting a Contemporary Offensive Operation, apparently impressed Zhukov, as he promoted Bagramyan to become the head of Operations for the Soviet 12th Army based in the Ukraine. Within three months however, Bagramyan, then a colonel, was appointed deputy chief of staff of the Southwestern Front, headquartered in Kiev.