Soviet history's unknown: Anastas Mikoyan

New archival evidence aside, this book completely changes the established view about Anastas Mikoyan and his role in the social and economic development of the former Soviet nations.

Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin, by Pietro Shakarian, Bloomington, In, USA, Indiana University Press, 2025, 350 pp., $50.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9780253073556, $49.99 (e-book), ISBN: 9780253073563, $110.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780253073549

A lot has been written about the former Soviet Union since its inception in 1922 and even more so since its collapse in 1991. The scholarly effort, studying the Soviet Union in all its nuance, has focused on an immensely wide and diverse set of research problems: from historical analysis to arts, culture, socio-economic research, to political commentary, and more. Popular within this literature has also been the story of some of the prominent Soviet leaders. With varying flavors of critique, these studies tend to focus either exclusively on their protagonists’ lifestyles or on their impact in the country they helped build and across the world. Others try to merge both the personal and professional aspects of their chosen character’s life, some focusing on absolute trivialities and some on more serious topics.

In that latter category, most publications center on six easily recognizable names: Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Iosif Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Such attention is warranted as the protagonists of those hefty tomes, often in several volumes and multiple editions, have either influenced or directly presided over much of the Soviet history.

One would be forgiven for concluding that anything that could be said about that difficult period has already been said and multiple times over.

So, it is at this juncture that a new monograph, impeccable in its factual analysis and ease of prose, comes to our attention today. The book by Pietro Shakarian entitled Anastas Mikoyan: An Armenian Reformer in Khrushchev’s Kremlin successfully and, in some ways, courageously rivets our attention towards new evidence in the subject that for all appearances has long been studied and set aside: the complicated history of the former Soviet Union and the role of one of its political figures in that historic context.

The book’s focus is on the Soviet statesman and Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan who, as the author suggests, “is perhaps best known in both the West and the post-Soviet space as a political survivor, weathering every Soviet leader ‘from Il’ich to Il’ich, without heart attack and paralysis’” (the reference here is to the times in office from Vladimir Il’ich Lenin to Leonid Il’ich Brezhnev).

This book is not a simple retelling of Mikoyan’s biographical details or a presentation of his political impact on the country. Instead, the author leads his reader on a masterful and unexpected analytical discovery of Mikoyan’s significance in every detail of Soviet history as a true believer in the socialist ideals. And in that, Shakarian’s contribution to our already saturated knowledge of the Soviet epoch is a breakthrough and it comes in two parts.

The first contribution comes from Shakarian’s discovery and analysis of new unique archival records, some also based on Mikoyan’s personal communications as well as those from the family’s archives. Shakarian’s impressively responsible treatment of his sources, with cross-verification between the Russian, Armenian, and Western archives and various translations of the same documents, culminate his undisputed command of the topic and crisp analysis. Through his examination of the hard to obtain drafts of some of Mikoyan’s most momentous public addresses, the author leads us on developing a full picture of those little-noticed microscopic circumstances that went on to shape one grand political decision after another. And in Mikoyan’s tenure in the Soviet political elite, he oversaw some of the foundational aspects of Soviet social, political, and economic management. Shakarian is one of the first, if not the first, to discuss these events leveraging his familiarity with the archival documentation.

It was Mikoyan who, as the Soviet foreign trade commissar in the 1930s, procured new technology in the Soviet agricultural and industrial sectors. It was Mikoyan who during the Cuban Missile Crisis led the diplomatic effort on the Soviet side of preventing a nuclear catastrophe. It was Mikoyan who would take on a leading role in de-Stalinization during the Thaw period of 1953-1964. But it was also Anastas Mikoyan, an “Armenian in the Kremlin,” who would become the main reformer on the questions of nationality in the Soviet Union, expressly advocating for the preservation and support of the authentic diversity of the big country’s multitude of ethnicities.

And that brings us to the second, and probably the most important, contribution of the book. Namely, it is the author’s ability, by merging “Armenian” and “Kremlin” in the book’s title, to bring into focus the age-old problem of the role of a personality in shaping the nations’ destinies. Indeed, as the book insists from page one, it was Anastas Mikoyan’s Armenian origin that determined much of his nuanced approach toward policymaking in those areas to which he was entrusted, impacting the Soviet Union and reverberating far beyond its boundaries. Mikoyan’s first-hand knowledge of the sufferings experienced by the Armenian people, the memories of the 1915 genocide and historic persecutions, guided him in articulating a balanced decentralized nationalities program in the Khrushchev’s Kremlin, as Shakarian explains.

The Soviet Caucasus 1957-1964, as appears in the Anastas Mikoyan book by Pietro Shakarian

The book is organized into six chapters with separate introductory and concluding sections. To understand Mikoyan’s significant influence on the nationalities question, Shakarian argues, it is important to understand the pre-1950s period, the most difficult part of that being the time of the 1930s Great Purge. This first chapter sets the tone for what the reader discovers in the subsequent parts of the book: a narrative based on scrupulous archival work that is impossible to eclipse by any approximation.

The book then moves on to discuss Anastas Mikoyan’s speech in Yerevan, Armenia on March 11, 1954 where he sets the political and intellectual background for the process of de-Stalinization and the necessity for an adaptable policy toward Soviet nationalities—the two prerogatives, as Shakarian states, that “preoccupied [Mikoyan] for the remainder of his life and career.” It is this chapter that Shakarian wants the reader to interpret as the cornerstone to the dialectical complexity of Mikoyan’s figure in the Soviet politics.

The third chapter, entitled “Apricot Patronage,” deals with some intricate details of Mikoyan’s initiatives in promoting Armenia’s economic development. Through the narrative, based entirely on archival data, documents, and memoirs, we learn about Mikoyan’s continuous encouragement of the political leadership of the Armenian SSR to work through the Soviet administrative red-tape and solicit support for new industrial development projects. Mikoyan, in his formal Supreme Soviet consultative role to the republic, would guide his less experienced and more reserved compatriots in properly drafting budget proposals and articulating the need to build textile factories, agricultural processors, and even the transportation and industrial infrastructures of entire cities. It was Mikoyan who advised Yerevan to entertain Nikita Khrushchev on a boat on Lake Sevan during the latter’s official visit to the republic, to convince him to allocate the necessary funding for the Arpa-Sevan canal, thus preventing one of the nature’s wonders, Lake Sevan, from drying out.

Lake Sevan from the Berdkunq Fortress in Armenia (Oct 2025)

Well in tune with developments in his homeland, Mikoyan leveraged that experience in his work across all Soviet republics. He believed, according to Shakarian’s records, that it was through economic prosperity that the diverse multi-ethnic Soviet Union could achieve long-lasting and enriching socio-economic and political stability. And in Chapter 4, the author addresses one of Mikoyan’s lasting commitments to the principles of druzhba narodov (the friendship of peoples), transitioning then in Chapter 5 to detailing Mikoyan’s efforts in the North Caucasus. Here, Shakarian convincingly argues that, yet again, thanks to Mikoyan’s Armenian origin and his familiarity with the multi-ethnic complexity of the Caucasus region and his sincere appreciation for one’s homeland, he became the most ardent political leader at the vanguard bravely advocating for the return of the Chechens, Ingush, and other peoples in the 1950s from their forced exile in Central Asia back to the historic homelands in the North Caucasus.

In the final chapter 6, the author reflects on Mikoyan’s work on the nationality platform of the third CPSU program and the 1960s constitutional revisions. It would be Mikoyan’s delicate understanding, again dictated by his background, of the potential socio-economic strength of the multitude of ethnicities in a socialist balance, allowing him to influence nationality policy decisions during the difficult process of constitutional reform under Nikita Khrushchev.

While surely known to researchers in general, these facts (and here, just a high-level sample of what the book has to offer) are usually discussed in lump-sum frameworks of the bigger Soviet policy. Such approaches view an individual policy maker as important but, often, as subservient to the bigger system’s postulates. Perhaps that fate may not have entirely escaped Mikoyan either, who in his absolute belief in “socialist democracy” was not able to bring the final historical justice of self-determination to the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, an outcome of the 1920s pragmatic realpolitik ending in 2020-2023 with a humanitarian catastrophe and the forced expulsion of the native Karabakh Armenians.

But at the same time, differing from the established routine of “blame the system,” Shakarian adds to the Soviet literature his analytical reading of the archives unequivocally articulating Mikoyan’s personal and detailed involvement in every process where he could exert real influence. Here, the process of Chechen and Ingush resettlement or Mikoyan’s role in effectively building his native Armenia from the ground up—both facts little-known to non-specialists and hardly appreciated by the direct beneficiaries—come to mind.

Overall, Anastas Mikoyan by Pietro Shakarian is an incredible new highly analytical and well-researched testament to the troublesome and yet largely unknown Soviet past despite the vastness of the available research. Equally so the book is a testament to the Shakarian’s tenacity in uncovering the truth, whether sweet or bitter, as a scholar intellectually and emotionally tightly attached to his research subject. Through the book, Pietro Shakarian is talking to his reader in a convincing and informed style. This makes the book easy to follow, despite the abundance of technical end notes and references to various political events or protocols.

Anastas Mikoyan is a book that deserves to be not only on the shelves of today’s students of history, philosophy, and statesmanship, but also on the shelves of anyone seeking a well-rounded, objective understanding of Soviet history and twentieth century socialism.

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