Assyrians Ring In Year 6750

"Aturai!" cries the black-haired woman in military garb, standing beneath a garland of blinking, colored lights. The festively dressed crowd freezes. Everyone understands the word: In their native language - closely related to Aramaic - Aturai means "Assyrians." And its use here means that "Hab-Nisan," the Assyrian New Year, celebrated on the night of March 31, was upon us again.


And this March 31, Assyrians in Russia and around the world rang in the year 6750.


As the pipes and drums begin to play, dancers in folk dress - red trousers and shirts adorned with geometrical designs, brown hats with red-and-white feathers - move rhythmically, jumping and shuffling to the beat. The movement is contagious, and the crowd, men and women, link arms and follow along in a line.


"The first wave of Assyrians came to Russia in 1827," says Leonid, a cobbler who seems to know Assyrian history from time immemorial. All week he works away in his street stall waiting for Saturday, when Assyrian radio comes on the air for a single hour.


"But most Assyrians came to Russia from Turkey after 1915, when the genocide of the Armenians began there," he goes on. "As Assyrians belong to the Orthodox Church, they were persecuted then also. Nicholas II let Assyrians move here because during World War I they were on the Russian side, joined with the Russian Cossack military forces. There were even special Assyrian battalions."


There were also Assyrians from Iran, who settled in the Cossacks' traditional Kuban heartland. Since they came from the Urmia valley in Iran, the Assyrians called their new village Urmia, which means cradle of waters in Aramaic.


Yevgenia Davitashvili, or Dzhuna, whose father came to Russia from Urmia, became famous in the Soviet Union and abroad for her folk medicine cures. Her patients were high Soviet officials: Central Committee members, General Staff officers - and Leonid Brezhnev. She still likes to wear the military uniform given to her by the General Staff. Even now, Dzhuna is good friends with top military brass - like Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev.


Dzhuna, who was born in the Kuban, and worked as a barmaid in Tbilisi in her youth, now has her private office in the center of Moscow, in the Old Arbat. She's fiercely proud of her Assyrian origins. She says the language, Aramaic, has not changed since ancient times, and was one of the three languages spoken by Jesus - who, Dzhuna figures, was himself an Assyrian.


But the Assyrians' sojourn in Russia has not always been so glorious or picturesque. In 1949, they were declared a "repressed nation of the Soviet Union" (like the Chechens), and were forcibly removed by Stalin from Azerbaijan and Georgia and sent to Siberia and Kazakhstan. They began returning only during Nikita Krushchev's reign. "Families wrote requests to Soviet officials," says Leonid, who was born in exile in Tomsk, "and then they were allowed to come back."


Despite their tribulations, Russia's Assyrians have survived. They still maintain their ancient Aramaic language and culture. For example, Leonid's daughter takes a special Aramaic class at the Assyrian Church on Sharikopodshipnikovaya Ulitsa. Assyrians publish books in their own language, and usually marry within the community, to preserve their ethnic identity.


In the last official census, carried out in the 1970s, there were 27,000 Assyrians in the Soviet Union. But Badri Chugianov, head of the Assyrian Khajata (rebirth) Association, says there were a lot of "hidden" Assyrians then, who kept their ethnic background secret. He estimates that today there are between 25,000 and 40,000 Assyrians in Russia alone.


Whether a cobbler, academic or casino owner, Russian Assyrians believe they are still the same people who arose in Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent at the dawn of recorded time, and built there one of the world's first great civilizations. Even today, they say, the tongues of the Tigris and the Euphrates still flow through the streets of the Arbat.