The
last Prime Minister of the first Republic of Armenia, Simon Vratzian,
was born in 1882, in the village of Medz Sala, near
Nakhichevan-on-the-Don (today Rostov-on Don, in the northern Caucasus).
He studied in the local Armenian and Russian schools, and in 1900 he was
admitted in the Kevorkian Lyceum of Etchmiadzin, of which he was a
brilliant graduate in 1906. By that time, he was already a member of the
Armenian Revolutionary Federation. He had participated in the protests
against the confiscation of the properties of the Armenian Church by the
imperial regime (1903-1905), in the first Russian Revolution (1905),
and in the Armenian self-defense during the Armeno-Tatar conflict of
1905-1906.
He
was a representative of the A.R.F. Student Union to the fourth General
Assembly of the party (Vienna, 1907), which would have a decisive
importance in its ideological orientation. He later went to St.
Petersburg, where he studied law, agronomy, and pedagogy at the
university. In 1910, when the persecution against the A.R.F. had peaked
in the Russian Empire, he went to Karin (Erzerum), where Rostom, one of
the founders of the party, had settled, gathering around him many
experienced and promising members in order to dedicate himself to the
development of Western Armenians in the country itself.
Vratzian edited the A.R.F. organ Harach in Karin for a year (1910-1911), and then, by Rostom’s recommendation, he was sent to Boston, where he edited Hairenik,
then a biweekly, until 1914. He returned to Karin and participated in
the crucial eighth General Assembly of the A.R.F., where he was elected a
member of the Bureau and left for Tiflis, in the Caucasus. There, he
took the editorship of the party daily Horizon and was elected member of the Armenian National Council, which dedicated itself to the organization of the volunteer movement.
After
the independence of Armenia, Vratzian moved to Yerevan, where he was
elected member of the Parliament and collaborated with the governments
of Hovhannes Kachaznuni and Alexander Khatisian. In May 1920, when Hamo
Ohanjanian became prime minister, Vratzian took the position of Minister
of Labor and Agriculture, until the fall of the government in November
1920. As prime minister from November 24 to December 2, 1920, he would
become the witness of the final agony of the independence after the
defeat in the Armeno-Turkish war, which would force the sovietization of
the country to escape destruction. He signed the agreement to transfer
power to the Revolutionary Committee of the Bolsheviks, and he also
became the president of the Committee of Salvation of the Homeland,
which led Armenia after the rebellion of February 18, 1921.
After
the re-establishment of Soviet power in April 1921, Vratzian took the
road of exile and settled in Paris, where in 1924 he became the editor
of Droshak, the A.R.F. central organ, until its demise in 1933. He wrote his monumental work, The Republic of Armenia,
which he published in 1928, with a second, revised edition published in
1958. He was a prolific writer on political, historical, and literary
subjects, and published and edited a journal of history and culture, Vem, between 1933 and 1939.
During
the war, he moved to the United States, where he was one of the
founders of the Armenian National Committee in 1945 and participated in
the lobbying for the Armenian Cause during the founding meetings of the
United Nations in San Francisco. In 1952, after the death of writer
Levon Shant, Vratzian succeeded him as principal of the Nshan Palandjian
Lyceum of Hamazkayin in Beirut, a position that he maintained until his
death. He worked actively to consolidate the economic foundations of
the Lyceum and continued the publishing of books, including a revised
edition of The Republic of Armenia in 1958 and his memoirs in six volumes, “On the Path of Life."
He
had written: “The regimes are a temporary phenomenon. The leaders are
temporary. Nations and fatherlands, the people sitting in their
homeland, are eternal. The freedom-loving Armenian people, which had
trampled death with death, forged the independence of the fatherland.
The Republic of Armenia continues to live in the heart of the Armenian
people as a burning reminder of the past and a lively hope of the
future.” He was far from imagining that Armenia would become an
independent country less than a quarter of a century after his death in
Beirut on May 21, 1969.
