The History of Armenian Architecture 3

After the Soviets took control of the First Republic of Armenia, the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic ("Second Republic") was established in December 1920 and lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Soviet architecture

Armenia turned from a remote agricultural region into an important centre of industrial production, which required the creation of vocational schools and factories, some of which are still in use today.

Armenia's rapid success in the world of technology is due, in part, to the country's heritage as an educational center. Armenia has had the best schools since the Soviet Union's time, qualifying it to be the Soviet Union's scientific center, the center of its research, and the source of nearly half of the Soviet army's high-tech needs.

Educational renaissance

Yerevan State University (YSU) was first known as the National University of Armenia (NUA), which was the only Soviet-era institution still in operation. It was founded in 1919 by ministerial decree and followed a long tradition of higher learning kept alive by the church; it "renewed the ancient traditions of Armenian scholarship in language and history that, during 600 years of foreign occupation, had flourished only among the diaspora abroad."

Free education

Universities at that time were completely open to the public and free to attend. Technical and agricultural schools, along with workers' universities, began to transform into new professionally oriented institutes as early as the 1920s, concurrently with the Cultural Revolution reforms that swept the USSR like the Armenian State Pedagogic Institute in 1922 and the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute in 1933.

Following government directives, independent, career-focused institutes were established in 1930. These included the Yerevan Agriculture Institute, the Armenian Construction Institute, and the State Medical Institute. A significant increase in HE enrollment was seen in the 1970.