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The Repatriate:
Love, Basketball, and the KGB

Tom Mooradian

In the early months of 1947, eighteen-year-old Tom Mooradian had everything—good looks, high academic ranking in his high school class, and recognition as one of the finest basketball talents in Michigan.

Before the end of that year, however, he would find himself standing in long, unruly bread lines and fighting daily for survival in the Soviet Union. This nightmare was one that he and 150 other Armenian Americans willingly, though unknowingly, entered when they repatriated to Soviet Armenia under Stalin's rule. Mooradian had lost his freedom, yet his basketball prowess captured the hearts of the Soviet people and saved his life.

Mooradian, today a retired journalist, is one of the few repatriates to tell his story. For thirteen years behind the Iron Curtain, he had the opportunity to see what no foreign correspondent or diplomat was permitted to see: the Soviet Union as the Soviet people knew it. His story gives key insight into the repatriation movement and its legacy, one of the important untold chapters of 20th-century Armenian history.

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November 12, 2009

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The National Association for Armenian Studies and Research (NAASR)