Are there particular obstacles or issues that historians face when studying Armenian history or the Armenian genocide?
There are so many difficulties, especially for the Armenian Genocide. The main obstacle so far has been that, even though the Turkish government has announced that its archives are open for researchers, in fact they aren’t. Researchers have tried to access the archival material in Turkey but without much success. And I would estimate that somewhere between 50-75% of the Turkish documents directly related to the genocide — documents in which the perpetrators communicated their orders — have most likely been destroyed. I was just reading a book published in 1921 in which the author said that some of the documents were already being destroyed There are also difficulties researching Armenian history in general. In the twentieth century, some of the best research was done by historians in Soviet Armenia, but of course there were serious deficiencies in the literature. For example, they had no choice but to employ Marxist-Leninist terminology and methodology. They also didn’t have access t
