Vladimir Medinsky, the newly-appointed Russian Minister of Culture, applied to NTV, a Russian TV channel, “advising” not to show the movie about the Great Patriotic War, which, according to the minister, distorts the history, specifically, it shows what was going on in Stalin’s Gulag in the first months of that war. First of all, one should admit that such a move of the minister testifies to some transparency of the government activities – in Armenia, they would have hardly employed the “genre” of public advice, they would have just called and forbidden. However, on the other hand, the fact that the minister gives a formally private TV company such a piece of advice, certainly, shows that the given official (who, by the way, is 10 years younger than I) is guided by the Soviet stereotypes. So there is or at least, there should be an official doctrine of the history, by which all citizens and organizations, regardless of the form of property, should be guided.
I am sure that in Armenia, there are many supporters of this approach. The main elements of the Russians’ historical self-perception are the really stunning victory over Nazi Germany and the image of the Soviet greatness, whereas among us, Armenians, along with those two stereotypes, there are also our national “axes” in our world-view – we were the first to adopt Christianity, we won a moral victory on Avarayr and underwent a genocide committed by the Turks. This “doctrine” devised by Soviet Armenian intellectuals in the 1960s-1970s aspires after enjoying the status of an official one and seeking for some other “axes” beyond those – certainly, not denying the three above-mentioned historical facts – is perceived as something like a treachery of the nation.
Whereas adopting such an official “ideology” or talking about its necessity causes two negative consequences at the same time. First, those ideas obviously cannot unite today’s society. Not having real “pillars,” people refer to the conspiracy theory at every turn. In our case, in particular, it results in a situation where we are inclined to believe political propagandists, where they frighten us with Masons, homosexuals, Mormons and others who ostensibly destroy the foundations of the nation.
Second, not having a real system of values and seeing the gap between the “official doctrine” and the everyday life, the society cannot oppose the arbitrariness of the “matter-settling” bandits in any way. Roughly speaking, you cannot urge not to kill people in restaurants, since we are an old Christian nation. Because we adopted Christianity as a state religion so early that the event has been forgotten a little bit.
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ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
