In 2010, the Factum NGO and Versus studio began to conduct research on the Great Repatriation, with the aim of shedding light on the history of Soviet Armenia during the 1940s and 1950s.

More than sixty eye-witness testimonies were video recorded in Armenia, the United States, Lebanon, France and the Altai region of Russia. A large amount of archival material was amassed – personal documents, family photographs, etc.

Due to the research conducted at the National Archive of Armenia, it was possible to supplement all this with official government documents, letters and correspondence.

By 2012, the first website devoted to the Great Repatriation and the documentary film “My Unfamiliar Fatherland” were ready. The film was shown in Armenia, the U.S., Russia and France, provoking intense discussion and debate.

“My Unfamiliar Fatherland” is the first of a trilogy entitled “Back to the Point”.  The other two films will deal, in succession, with the integration of repatriates in Armenian reality, the maltreatment (exile, persecution) they faced during the Stalinist era, and their eventual exodus from the homeland.   

This website, made possible with financial support by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is essentially a depository of personal experiences, memoirs and archival documents which affords the opportunity to take a multi-faceted approach to learning about the Great Repatriation and to freely utilize information heretofore unknown, unpublished and uncollated.

The website also has a closed cache of data where website users can, via a free internet search, find their relatives and friends who repatriated. There are also data banks of repatriates who were arrested and deported. These too are closed and can only be accessed only via an internet search.