Being under the Soviet rule , the name of the city was changed in 1924 to Leninakan after the deceased Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin . The city suffered an earthquake in 1926 , when many of its significant buildings were destroyed including the Greek church of Saint George . Leninakan became a major industrial centre in the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic and its second-largest city , after the capital Yerevan . The city suffered major damage during the 1988 Armenian earthquake , which devastated many parts of the country . The earthquake occurred along a known thrust fault with a length of . Its strike was parallel to the Caucasus range and dipped to the north-northeast . Bruce Bolt , a seismologist and a professor of earth and planetary science at the University of California , Berkeley , walked the fault scarp in 1992 and found that the vertical displacement measured along most of the length with the southwest end reaching
1988 Armenian earthquake
1988 Armenian earthquake
Gyumri