Historians have mixed evaluations of his term, both as a perpetrator of brutal policies against starving Kazakhs and the man who oversaw the nation's recovery.

As Secretary of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, he was the successor of Filipp Goloshchyokin during the last year of the Soviet-imposed Kazakh Famine of 1930–1933, also known as the 'Goloshchyokin genocide' by some scholars.

[6] In one instance under Mirzoyan's rule, a plenipotentiary shoved food aid documents into his pocket and had a wedding celebration instead of transferring them for a whole month while hundreds of Kazakhs starved.

[4] Historian Sarah Cameron describes it in an interview with Harvard University's Davis Center, "[in] a strategy explicitly modeled upon a technique that was used against starving Ukrainians, several regions of Kazakhstan were blacklisted.

"[7] Mirzoyan's tenure benefited "ultimately, from good luck",[8] as there was excellent weather alongside a large harvest in 1934 which marked the end of the famine.

In 1938, Mirzoyan sent a telegram to Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov, in which he expressed his disagreement with the decision to move the Koreans deported to Kazakhstan in 1936 from Primorye, in the southern part of the republic, to the north, where they could not engage in rice cultivation.