About Ria Taze

Ria Taze

Ria Taze was a Kurdish-language newspaper published in Yerevan, Armenia, and one of the most remarkable minority newspapers of the twentieth century. Its name, more commonly transliterated Ria Taza and also spelled Rya Teze or Riya Teze, means New Path. Founded in March 1930 as the organ of the Kurdish section of the Communist Party of Armenia, it became the longest-running Kurdish newspaper of its era, the centre of Kurdish literary and educational life in the Soviet Union, and a publication read by Kurds far beyond Armenia's borders. It published, with one long interruption, for seventy-three years, issuing some 4,800 numbers before economic problems closed it in 2003. Its story cannot be told apart from the story of Armenia's Kurdish and Yezidi communities, for whom Yerevan — improbably, to outsiders — was for decades one of the capitals of Kurdish print culture. This profile uses the batch-record name Ria Taze in its headline while noting the standard scholarly spelling, Ria Taza, throughout; both refer to the same newspaper.

Founding in 1930: A Latin Alphabet for Kurmanji

The newspaper was founded in March 1930, and its first issue was published on 25 March 1930. It was printed in Kurmanji Kurdish using a newly designed Latin alphabet created by Isahak Marogulov and Ereb Shemo, the Kurdish writer known in Armenian as Arab Shamo. The alphabet itself was part of the story: Shemo had published the first Kurdish book in the new Latin alphabet, a self-instruction manual for Kurmanji, in 1928, and the newspaper put that script into regular mass use. At its launch Ria Taza was a four-page newspaper published twice a week with a circulation of about 600 copies. It was produced under the auspices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia and the Supreme Council and Council of Ministers of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, and it served formally as the organ of the party's Kurdish section. That official sponsorship came with Soviet ideological content, as the University of Exeter's special collections research on the paper frankly notes — material on Kurdish culture itself could be sparse beside the required politics — but it also gave a small minority a printing press, a budget and a distribution system that no Kurdish community elsewhere in the region then possessed.

The Golden Age of Kurdish Culture in Soviet Armenia

Ria Taza appeared at the start of an extraordinary cultural flowering. Between 1930 and 1937 almost thirty Kurdish schools were established in Armenia, children were taught to read and write in Kurdish, and a regular stream of Kurdish-language books appeared each year. Shemo's novel The Kurdish Shepherd came out in 1935, followed by his anthology of Kurdish folklore; a Kurdish authors' section was founded within the Armenian Writers' Union in 1932; an education institute trained Kurdish-language teachers; and in 1934 Yerevan hosted the first pan-Soviet congress of Kurdology, which called for a Kurdish dictionary and historical grammar. The newspaper stood at the centre of this system as its regular public voice. Its first managers were, strikingly, three Armenians born in Western Armenia who knew Kurdish — Kevork Paris, Hrachya Kochar and the literary critic Harutyun Mkrtchyan — before the Kurdish linguist and author Cerdoye Genco took over as editor in 1934. The Damascus-based Kurdish journal Hawar, itself a landmark of Kurdish publishing, acknowledged Ria Taza's importance as early as 1932. Publication of lists of the Kurdish press counts its first Latin-script run at 612 issues between 1930 and 1938.

Suppression and Silence, 1937 to 1955

The flowering ended with the Stalinist turn against national cultures. Publication of Ria Taza was discontinued in 1937 — some accounts date the final pre-war issues to 1938 — Kurdish book publishing ceased, the Latin alphabet was abandoned for Cyrillic, and Kurdish intellectuals, Shemo among them, were sent into exile. Kurdish cultural care dissolved further during and after the Second World War. For eighteen years the newspaper did not exist, and its absence is as much a part of its biography as its presence: the community it had taught to read in its own language lost its newspaper, its schools' momentum and many of its teachers. Any account that presents Ria Taza as an unbroken publication from 1930 onward is mistaken, and this profile corrects the occasional directory shorthand that describes the post-1955 paper without noting either the pre-war run or the long silence between them.

Revival in Cyrillic, 1955 Onward

Publication resumed in 1955, after Stalin's death, with Miroyi Asad as editor — now in Cyrillic script, in line with the Soviet policy that had replaced the Latin alphabet. The revived paper rebuilt its audience steadily. By the early 1970s it was published semiweekly with a circulation of about 2,800; by 1976 circulation had reached about 5,000. In the 1980s it appeared weekly with a circulation of around 4,000 and was read by Kurds across the entire Soviet Union, with a smaller readership among Kurds in Europe, whose publications in Germany and Sweden sometimes adopted material from it. The editorship passed in 1989 to Tital Muradov and in 1991 to Emirike Serdar. Long-serving editor Amarik Sardarian, a Yezidi journalist who joined the paper in 1952 as a translator and rose through journalist, deputy editor and editor to chief editor, embodied its institutional memory; interviewed in 1998 and again in 2004, he described Riya Taza as one of the oldest Kurdish newspapers in the world and the longest-surviving. In the paper's middle decades it functioned, as in the 1930s, as more than news: a standard-setter for written Kurmanji, a training ground for Kurdish journalists and writers, and the printed meeting place of a community scattered across the Soviet Union.

Independence and Financial Struggle

The disintegration of the Soviet Union removed the state support on which Ria Taza had always depended, and the paper's final decade was a struggle for survival in an independent Armenia itself enduring economic collapse. It survived — converted into a monthly with a circulation of about 500 — and in 2000 it changed its script back to the Latin alphabet, closing a seventy-year circle that had run from Latin to Cyrillic and back to Latin. Sardarian's later interviews describe the reality behind that endurance: periods of up to six months in which no edition could be published for lack of finance, small donations of ten, twenty or fifty dollars from individuals, money sent by community members working in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, computers provided by the Soros foundations, and single issues sponsored by the French embassy and the United Nations Development Programme. Kurdish political organisations, he noted pointedly, did not support the paper financially. The detail matters because it explains the ending: a newspaper built for a subsidised Soviet minority-publishing system could not find a sustainable model in a poor post-Soviet market of a few hundred potential subscribers.

Closure in 2003

Ria Taza was shut down in 2003 because of economic problems. In total, about 4,800 issues had been published between 1930 and 2003. This profile is therefore written in the past tense throughout, and any directory or list that presents the newspaper as a currently publishing biweekly — or that dates it simply from 1955 — misstates the record in both directions at once. The correct summary is a three-act history: a Latin-script Soviet Kurdish newspaper of 1930–1937, a suppressed title during the Stalin and war years, and a Cyrillic-script, later again Latin-script, newspaper of 1955–2003 serving first the Soviet Union's Kurds and finally independent Armenia's Kurdish and Yezidi community. Its closure ended the world's longest-running Kurdish newspaper tradition rooted in a single city, and no successor Kurdish newspaper in Armenia has matched its longevity or reach.

Language, Script and Community

Few newspapers anywhere carry three alphabets in their biography, and Ria Taza's scripts are a compact history of Soviet nationality policy: Latinisation in the 1920s and 1930s, when new Latin alphabets were promoted for the USSR's peoples; Cyrillisation from the late 1930s, when those experiments were reversed; and a voluntary return to Latin in 2000, aligning the paper with the Latin-based standard used by most Kurmanji publishing internationally. Its language was Kurmanji, the northern Kurdish variety spoken by Armenia's Kurds and Yezidis. The community it served is often described in Armenian sources as Kurdish and Yezidi together; many of Armenia's Yezidis speak Kurmanji while identifying as Yezidi rather than Kurdish, a distinction the paper's own long-serving Yezidi editor embodied and discussed openly, noting the painful division within the community in Armenia even as both groups read the same language in his pages. Headquarters throughout was Yerevan, where the Kurdish section of the Writers' Union, Kurdish radio broadcasting and the newspaper together made the Armenian capital, for much of the twentieth century, one of the few places on earth where Kurdish was a language of daily institutional print.

Legacy

Ria Taza's legacy is disproportionate to its circulations, which never exceeded about 5,000. It proved that a Kurdish newspaper could publish continuously, train generations of writers and standardise a literary language at a time when Kurdish publishing was banned or marginal in the Kurdish homeland's states. Its alumni and its model fed Kurdish journalism in Europe; its issues preserve seventy years of Kurmanji prose, folklore and community record; and its archive is a primary source for scholars of Kurdish studies, Soviet nationality policy and Armenian minority history alike. The University of Exeter's preservation of its first issue, the attention of Kurdish media historians, and the testimony of its last editors all point the same way: when Ria Taza closed in Yerevan in 2003, Kurdish journalism lost one of its founding institutions, and Armenia lost the most internationally significant minority newspaper it ever published.