“They suddenly printed that men were to go out with pitchforks, and to remember that those who went out poor in the morning might go home rich at night.” This was written in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed 140 years ago. The novel is about how the extremist youth tries to bring down the deteriorated, rotten tsarist regime. Decades later, those plans were implemented, but the regime established by the “extremists” was not better than the tsarist one, to put it mildly.
I admit that the word “revolution,” which I have often seen on the internet recently, makes me fear. Naturally, the phenomenon itself, which means confrontation, chaos, redistribution of property, have always frightened me. Regardless of what revolution it is – bourgeois, democratic, proletarian or peasant – it means disruption of normal life, regardless of how hard and difficult that life is.
I can’t understand, for example, what bourgeois-democratic revolution means in the 21st century. As far as I can understand, it means a transition from one form of production, property to another – from feudal one to capitalist one. Is there such a problem in today’s Armenia? Perhaps, one can say figuratively that rudiments of feudalism have been maintained in our country – it manifests itself, for example, in the fact that the population of the given region addresses its oligarch with words “dear prince.” However, from merely scientific perspective, it seems to me that all of our oligarchs are bourgeois who have become such by merging with the corrupt government. If one group of bourgeois bargains with another group of bourgeois about political leverage, it doesn’t necessarily mean that those groups wish to live by rules other than the existing ones.
Thus, it seems to me that the bourgeois revolution is not on the agenda of either Armenia or any other modern country. And in order to find the national agenda of Armenia, we should think and try to exchange ideas. This is our main obstacle – those who are supposed to do that, regardless of whether they are officially “registered” in any party or not, appear as “representatives of a team,” its spokespersons and not as thinking individuals; that is why they speak with ready-made clichés and slogans.
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“And the most important force of all — the cement that holds everything together — is their being ashamed of having an opinion of their own. That is a force! And whose work is it, whose precious achievement is it, that not one idea of their own is left in their heads!” This is from the same novel.
ARAMABRAHAMYAN
