Death of Ashot Navasardian (November 3, 1997)

Ashot Navasardian was a Soviet Armenian dissident who founded the Republican Party of Armenia on the eve of the second independence of Armenia.  

He was born in Yerevan on March 28, 1950, and graduated from the Faculty of Law of Yerevan State University. In 1968 he became a member of the underground National Unity Party, which advocated for the secession of Armenia from the Soviet Union. He was imprisoned three times for his criticism of the Soviet regime and the promotion of his ideas and sentenced to a total of 17 years of prison and 5 years of exile, of which he spent 12 years in prison and exile, having been released before the sentence terms of his second and third imprisonments. He was finally freed in 1987, and he continued his activities as a member of the council of the Union for National-Self Determination (1988-1989). The Supreme Court of Armenia exonerated him in 1990 for lack of evidence of a crime.  

Navasardian was an advocate of the ideas of Garegin Nzhdeh, Armenian military leader and nationalist thinker. In the wake of the Karabagh movement in 1988 and the independence movement, he founded the Army of Independence with other members of the Union for National Self-Determination. This armed group, of which he was the supreme commander, engaged in violent clashes with Azerbaijani forces on the border with Azerbaijan and in Artsakh during the first war of 1990-1994. In 1990, Navasardian founded the Republican Party of Armenia, which he led until his death. He was elected to the Supreme Soviet of Armenia in 1990 and to the National Assembly of Armenia in 1995. 

He died of a heart attack on November 3, 1997, and was buried at the Yerablur military cemetery in Yerevan.