Hybrid book talk by Felix Corley.

This lecture is organized by the Richard Hovannisian Chair of Modern Armenian History at UCLA, and co-sponsored by the Promise Armenian Institute at UCLA and the UCLA Narekatsi Chair in Armenian Studies.

Thursday, May 14, 2026
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (Pacific Time)
Bunche Hall, Room 10383

Click here to RSVP for viewing via the Zoom Webinar Platform. 

Felix Corley's new study, Catholicos and Commissar (London: Gomidas Institute, 2025) offers one of the most comprehensive accounts to date of relations between the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Soviet state, drawing on newly accessible archives from Moscow, Yerevan, and Tbilisi. Corley traces the Church's arc from early post-revolutionary repression - confiscated churches, banned religious education, arrested clergy, and the 1938 NKVD murder of Catholicos Khoren I - through its partial rehabilitation under Stalin's wartime religious recalibration, to the long pontificate of Catholicos Vazgen I (1955-1994), who pursued cautious accommodation while restoring Ejmiatsin's symbolic global centrality. This talk situates Corley's findings within the historiography of Soviet religious policy, examining how the world's oldest Christian national church survived militant state atheism and re-emerged as a pivotal institution in Armenia's transition to independence.

Felix Corley studied modern languages (Russian and German) at the University of Bristol, including five months in Moscow in 1982. He first visited the South Caucasus - including Armenia - in 1981, and has spent much time there particularly in the early 1990s. Since the secret archives on religious communities in the Soviet Union opened up in the early 1990s, he has worked in the archives in Moscow, Yerevan, Tbilisi and elsewhere. In 1996 he published the book Religion in the Soviet Union: An Archival Reader. From 1985 he worked on freedom of religion or belief issues in the Soviet Union, and now works as editor of Forum 18 News Service.