The revolt and its executed leaders were praised during the Soviet period from 1920 until the late 1980s, when the Karabakh movement began and anti-Soviet sentiment rose in Armenia.

[8] The Armenian Communist Party, operating in secrecy, was founded in January 1920 to fight against the "vilifying Allied Powers and their Dashnakist 'collaborators.

'"[9] The uprising was mainly carried out by Bolsheviks born in Russian Armenia, as most of the Armenian refugees who had fled from the Ottoman Empire were "aloof" or "hostile" to Bolshevism.

[11] Encouraged by the Red Army invasion of Azerbaijan in late April 1920, the Armenian Bolsheviks headed by Avis Nurijanyan[12] staged a revolt in May.

[9][13] The events preceding the revolt started on May 1, 1920, International Workers' Day, with the Bolsheviks demonstrating against the government of Armenia in capital Yerevan and other cities.

[3] The revolt escalated after the armored train Vardan Zoravar and its crew under Musayelyan's command joined the Bolshevik rebels who had formed a revolutionary committee (Armkom) and proclaimed Armenia a Soviet state in Gyrumri (Alexandopol) on May 10.

According to a study of Armenian school textbooks "the tone of the account remains fairly restrained and neutral, a certain interpretation of the events is not imposed on the students."

[25] During a 2010 anti-government rally, Armenia's first president and opposition leader Levon Ter-Petrosyan stated:[35] Some of the Dashnak leaders retrospectively confessed that had they handed the power to the Bolsheviks in May, 1920, Armenia would have not lost the regions of Kars, Ardahan, Surmalu and Nakhichevan, and in that case the solution of the Karabagh issue could have also been different.

Yet, instead of doing that, they remorselessly slaughtered the leaders of the May Uprising and threw hundreds of the participant in prisons, unwisely triggering Russia's wrath and hostility, to put things mildly, and imposing a bitter price for it on our homeland.