The Leadership

Norat Ter-Grigoryants

President

Norat Ter-Grigoryants is the Founder and the President of the National Congress of Western Armenians. He is a retired Soviet and Armenian lieutenant-general who played a leading role in developing the Armed Forces of Armenia during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 1992-1995.

Ter-Grigoryants served as chief of staff for the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan and deputy chief of the Soviet Ground Forces’ main staff before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ter-Grigoryants took up the Armenian government’s invitation to take command of the Armenian Army in 1992. Ter-Grigoryants became the head of the general staff and the Armenian government’s first deputy minister of defense in 1992-1995. He served as an Acting Minister of Defense in 1993.

Ter-Grigoryants retired in 1995, shortly after the end of the war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 1994. He returned to the Russian Federation after his retirement in 1995 and is a member of the board of the Union of Armenians of Russia. Ter-Grigoryants is a president emeritus of the Council of Veterans of Russian Land Forces.

Karen Mikaelyan

Vice President

Karen Mikaelyan is the Founder and the Vice President of the National Congress of Western Armenians. Mikaelyan worked at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Vienna, Austria (1976-1981) and served as an acting Chairman of the Committee on Relations with Armenian Diaspora in the Government of Armenia (1991-1996).

In mid-1990’s, Mikaelyan put forward an initiative to convene delegates from the Armenian fellow-countryman associations around the world and establish a plenipotentiary representative body of Western Armenians. As the Executive Director of the International Organizing Committee, he led the efforts to convene the Third Congress and founded the National Congress of Western Armenians in 2011. Mikaelyan was an editor-in-chief of the political journals Armianskiy Vestnik and the Russian Grazhdanin where amongst other prominent scholars he published numerous articles on the Armenian Question and Russian politics.

Mikaelyan graduated from the Yerevan Polytechnic Institute and the Faculty of International Economics of the All-Union Academy of Foreign Trade.

Aram Gushchyan

Vice President

Aram Gushchyan is the Vice President of the National Congress of Western Armenians. He took leading roles in various Armenian community organizations and projects, including the business club and charity organization Friends of Artsakh, the association of young professionals SIVAM, the Moscow fellow-countryman Association of Western Armenians, and the Armenian Genocide commemoration project Armenia Futura. Gushchyan has a number of publications in the press and academic journals.

Gushchyan graduated from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration with M.S. degree in Finance and CQF Institute in London with Certificate in Quantitative Finance. Aram Gushchyan, Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst, is an investment manager at Raway Inc.

Vachagan Petrosyan

Secretary-General

Vachagan Petrosyan is the Founder and the Secretary-General of the National Congress of Western Armenians. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Integral Petroleum LLC, a company that conducts geological research of oil and gas in Armenia.

Petrosyan is the founder of the resumed historic political journals Grazhdanin (The Citizen) and Armyanskiy Vestnik (The Armenian Herald). He also published a series of books and historical archives related to the Armenian Question.

He graduated from the Moscow State Technological University Stankin with an M.S. in electromechanical engineering. He holds a number of patents.

Izabella Gushchyan

Public Relations

Izabella Gushchyan is the press secretary and communication director of the National Congress of Western Armenians and and manages public relations and communications with the media. She has a marketing management and banking background and works as a relationship banker at the largest U.S. bank. She is fluent in English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Armenian.

Izabella was involved in a number of charity organizations acting in Armenia, including the World Vision, and carried out fundraising activities for helping orphaned children in Armenia and around the world, including India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia.

Izabella Gushchyan graduated from the International University of Monaco; she also holds an MBA degree from the Moscow Institute of Touro and a Diploma in Bank Marketing and Management from the American Bankers Association.