Stepan Zatikyan

Stepan Seghbosi Zatikyan (Armenian: Ստեփան Սեղբոսի Զատիկյան; June 20, 1946 - January, 1979) was a Soviet dissident and one of the founders of the Armenian NUP (National United Party).

Early life Zatikyan was born on June 20, 1946, in Yerevan to a family of craftsmen; his parents were refugees from the Western Armenia. He received his primary education at the Mikayel Nalbandian Secondary School in Yerevan, graduating in 1963 with a gold medal. In the same year he entered the Faculty of Chemistry of the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute. Zatikyan's life was marked by the mass demonstration on April 24, 1965 in Lenin (now the Republic) Square; the protestors condemned the 1915 Armenian Genocide and raised the issue of the return of Armenian lands. Encouraged by these ideas, the next day Zatikyan went to the city pantheon to lay flowers at the grave of the Armenian composer Komitas. He was arrested by police near the grave and detained for fifteen days. There he met Haykaz Khachatryan, who was also arrested near Komitas's grave.

National United Party Eventually Zatikyan and Haykaz Khachatryan agreed to work together on a common ideological basis. Some time later, they were joined by another young man, Shahen Harutyunyan (Shant Harutyunyan's father); the three of them formed the National United Party (NUP) on April 24, 1966. The organization was headed by Khachatryan and the governing body of the party was the General Council, one of whose members was Zatikyan.

The first members of the organization took an oath of allegiance to the party's ideas at the Armenian Genocide Memorial in Yerevan. In April 1967, on genocide commemoration day, the NUP distributed its first leaflet entitled Paros (lighthouse in Armenian), and on October 19–20 of the same year, it also distributed the four-page Paros newspaper with the following articles: "The new ones are coming out", "To the Armenian people", "Armenia under the yoke", "The Armenian question", "The international situation today", "The facts are ruthless", "What is the language of the nation", "A couple of words." In addition, Zatikyan had written critical articles on the reality of life in the Soviet Union, such as "The Essence of the Soviet Economy" or "On the other side of the curtain"․ The articles were about Armenian independence from the Soviet Union and about the annexation of Armenia by Russia.

The structure of the organization also included a youth branch. Within the NUP it was called "Shant" (lightning in Armenian). Khachatryan and Zatikyan put seventeen-year-old Paruyr Hayrikyan at the head of this cell. Several members of the NUP would later go on to assume more public profiles: Movses Gorgisyan, RPA founder Ashot Navasardyan, Prime Minister of Armenia Andranik Margaryan, Azat Arshakyan, and others.

First arrest The existence of the NUP was known everywhere where the anti-Soviet movement began to gain momentum. The newspaper was banned and declared anti-Soviet. Not only the authors of Paros but also the readers were persecuted. The NUP members managed to publish only two issues of the newspaper.

Arrests of NUP leaders began on July 9, 1968; Stepan Zatikyan was in his fifth year at the university at that time. During the interrogation on July 10, Stepan Zatikyan informed the investigator that he began a hunger strike due to his opposition of the detention conditions. In November 1971, Zatikyan, along with other political prisoners, went on a hunger strike in Vladimir prison. They protested against the KGB's practice of collecting information on political prisoners, as well as the submission of prisoners' statements to state bodies as anti-Soviet documents, criminalizing them and blackmailing them. He also added: “In the whole 15 months I didn’t say a word to them".

On 1 February 1979 the Moscow Helsinki Group’s Document No. 81 questioned the legality and impartiality of the verdict due to the absence of the public.

From the point of view of the KGB, it was very reasonable to choose the Armenian National Movement, as Armenia was the only state in the USSR where there was a party that had set itself the goal of leaving the USSR. This facilitated the discrediting of the Armenian national movement within and outside the USSR by presenting it as a force using terrorist methods.